Amateur Athletes

The Amateur Athletic Foundation honored five Southern California coaches and one athlete in awards announced at a luncheon commemorating National Girls and Women in Sports day. The coaches honored were: Sharron Backus, UCLA softball; Joan Bonvicini, Cal State Long Beach basketball; Judi Garman, Cal State Fullerton softball; Carol Plunkett, San Diego State tennis, and Darlene May, Cal Poly Pomona basketball.

Ann Curtis, who emerged as one of the country's greatest female swimmers in the 1940s and won two gold medals and one silver medal in freestyle events at the 1948 Olympics, has died. She was 86. Curtis died June 26 at her home in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, from complications ofAlzheimer's disease, said her daughter Carrie Cuneo. A San Francisco native who was trained by famed swimming coach Charlie Sava, Curtis set a record by winning 34 national Amateur Athletic Union championships during her career from 1943 to 1948.

Sitting in the stands during the preliminaries of a swim meet, punching away at his laptop computer, George Weston looks very much like a zealous parent plotting his child's rise to Olympic glory. Weston, however, isn't computing split times, figuring factors of improvement or crunching any numbers. He's creating a resume for an athlete who's preparing to face life in a business suit instead of Speedos.

Of all the harebrained ideas?. Picture this, a competition between L.A. and New York, featuring each city's best amateur athletes in basketball, soccer, football. "The People's Games" is what they're calling it. Tryouts start Sunday, at a playground near you. Of course, a competition between New York and Los Angeles is a fine idea. We trump that big dump in so many ways, why not start keeping score? Besides, anything that'll get sports fans off the couch and onto the court is a good thing.

In 1980, members of the U.S. Water Polo team were on their way to Hungary to play in the Tunsgrum Cup--a prestigious tournament that was to serve as a pre-Olympic warm up--when they heard that they really didn't have to bother. President Jimmy Carter, bolstered by Congress, had made up his mind. After weeks of posturing, Carter decided that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made U.S. participation in the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow untenable.

Behind windows covered over with adhesive tape, the world's last great amateur basketball team takes shape. In 1992, the United States is expected to send grown-up National Basketball Assn. professionals to the Olympics, and an era will be over. Remember young Bill Russell in Melbourne? The "greatest team ever" with The Big O and Jerry West in Rome? Spencer Haywood of Trinidad (Colo.) Junior College bailing out the United States in Mexico City when the big names stayed home?

It was scary. Angola was leading the Dream Team, 2-1. And later, coming from behind, they tied us, 5-5. Hey, it's fun watching the Dreamers slam-dunk the world. But it's not sport. While this shabby exhibition was on the tube, we could have been watching competitive sports. For the amateur athletes, it's guts. For the Dream Team, it's a lark. BERT EIFER Woodland Hills

When Matt Biondi decided last month, while on tour in Berlin with the U.S. water polo team, that he wasn't quite as enthralled with the sport as he once was and that he was ready to return to competitive swimming, no one was happier to hear the news than Tom Jager, his once and future nemesis. Sure, Biondi beat Jager for the coveted first gold medal ever in the 50-meter freestyle at the Olympics in Seoul, and he took Jager's world record from him in the process.

As she sat in the darkened dining room of her well-appointed home, in an upper middle-class neighborhood of Toluca Lake, Marjorie Chin gave in to her memories, which, lately, have caused her nothing but pain. She watched her daughter, Tiffany, glide effortlessly across the ice on the big-screen television, the elegant images from years past captured forever by a home video camera. Every so often, Marjorie's husband, Ed, came into the room to change the cassette. But not to watch.

Toshi Sasa has a lot in common with many of the players in the independent Golden Baseball League, one of the lowest rungs in the minors. He played at a small college and was overlooked by big league organizations in the draft. And now, even as his youth fades at age 26, he has just enough optimism and hope to hang on to the dream that one day a major league team might give him a chance. But there is one major difference that separates Sasa from his Fullerton Flyers teammates.

THE poor television ratings for the XX Olympic Winter Games in Turin ["Olympics' New Reality," by Scott Collins, Feb. 28] can be explained in a few ways: Perhaps viewers grew tired of occasional event coverage interspersed by long commercial breaks and "up close and personal" melodrama. Alternatively, the coverage may not have been democratic enough for the average American consumer. Next time, NBC and the Olympic committee should follow the lead of shows like "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" and bring in untrained, amateur athletes and let them crash, burn and cry their hearts out. Imagine all those great personal stories beamed from hospital beds.

The Amateur Athletic Foundation will honor five women today who were standout performers in sports that only recently have become open to female athletes on a large scale. Weightlifter Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton, boxers Lucia Rijker and Lili Rodriguez, boxing referee Gwen Adair and wrestler Shannon Williams Yancey will be saluted by the foundation as part of its annual celebration of National Girls and Women in Sports Day.

Oh, sure, it was lovely seeing Cathy Freeman's winged run into fluttering hearts worldwide, her 400-meter flight to Olympic gold. A triumph of spirit, a symbol for the Aboriginal people. But when I watched her race this week in Sydney, hard as I tried to focus on what the Olympic Games are really about, my mind kept veering to the trite ponderings of the casual athlete that I am: What's up with that hooded unitard?

Trying to revisit every notable sporting event or pay tribute to every deserving athlete from the Valley and Ventura County region over the last 100 years would fill volumes. In that respect, this exercise falls grossly short. But it would be inconceivable, as the century comes to a close, not to remember some of the memorable sports moments that enriched the region, that gave it essence and tradition.

"Boomeritis" isn't a formal medical condition, but Dr. Nicholas A. DiNubile has seen enough boomers with exercise injuries to want to call it something. "There is a mini-explosion of these injuries," said DiNubile, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. "Even though we are a sedentary country, there is one segment that the message [about exercise] has hit, and it's the baby boomers," DiNubile said.

THE poor television ratings for the XX Olympic Winter Games in Turin ["Olympics' New Reality," by Scott Collins, Feb. 28] can be explained in a few ways: Perhaps viewers grew tired of occasional event coverage interspersed by long commercial breaks and "up close and personal" melodrama. Alternatively, the coverage may not have been democratic enough for the average American consumer. Next time, NBC and the Olympic committee should follow the lead of shows like "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" and bring in untrained, amateur athletes and let them crash, burn and cry their hearts out. Imagine all those great personal stories beamed from hospital beds.

Most people have heard horror stories of children barely out of diapers being pushed onto the ice by overbearing coaches and desperate parents seeking Olympic gold. Julie Gidlow once fit that stereotype, rising to skate at dawn, practicing her camel spins and double lutzes while classmates did the "moonwalk" at school dances. So at the ripe old age of 18 (practically elderly in the professional skating world), Gidlow quit the rink. "I went to college," she said.

Players in the Southern California Golf Assn. amateur championship face an interesting challenge on the 6,534-yard, par-70 Lakeside Country Club course in Toluca Lake. There are only two par-five holes, both on the front nine. There are eight par fours and a par three on the back nine. Lakeside has hosted the SCGA three other times. George Von Elm won the last of his three championships there in 1927, Smiley Quick won the 1940 event and John W.