Oates Finally Given Chance to Call Signals at Long Beach

As he thunders down the practice field these days with a football tucked under his arm, Paul Oates often finds his mind wandering back to baseball. Running in football is exactly like running conditioning wind sprints in the outfield, he thinks.

Well, not exactly like it.

“The thing I always remember is that all the time I ran baseball wind sprints, no one ever tried to knock me down or take my head off,” said Oates, a former Alemany High two-sport star who spent two years in the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball organization.

“And I have to remember not to forget that,” said Oates, who is now the Cal State Long Beach quarterback and will lead his team into Saturday’s opener against Cal State Northridge. “If your mind wanders and you start running a conditioning sprint down a football field, even in a team scrimmage, that might be the last thing you remember for a while.”

As Oates left Alemany in 1983, the sporting world waited at the doorstep. College recruiters begged. He nearly accepted a scholarship that year at Long Beach. But pro baseball also begged. The Cardinals had picked him in the second round of the amateur draft, making him the 38th player chosen in the nation.

For a few days after the draft, Oates sat and thought it all over. What he wanted most was, simply, a lifetime of big bucks from professional sports. And he decided that baseball offered the quickest and least painful route to that goal.

Perhaps, he knows now, he was wrong.

He threw lightning as a pitcher, but that wasn’t good enough. For two seasons with the Cardinals’ rookie team in St. Petersburg, Fla., and their Class-A team in Savannah, Ga., Oates was introduced to five pitching coaches, each of whom prodded and berated Oates, forcing him to change his style. Throw more curves, one ordered. Throw fewer curves, the next coach demanded. Throw the changeup more often, another coach ruled. Throw the heat, the next one said.

And, after two years and a promise of nothing more than another year in Class-A ball, Oates decided that, for a change, he had something to say.

I quit.

“The whole thing just made me sick and tired of baseball,” said Oates, 24, a senior at Long Beach who is getting his first chance to start at quarterback after three seasons on the sidelines.

“In 1985 they brought me to spring training camp and I pitched real well,” he said. “I got people out. I was ready to make the next logical move, to double-A. And then they told me I’d be spending at least another year back in Savannah, and I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I decided I’d had enough. Another year in the middle of Georgia playing single-A? Sorry.”

So he returned to Southern California, his dream of making the big bucks in the big leagues having been spiked. But Route No. 2, he remembered, was still a possible way to achieve his goal. So he called Long Beach Coach Mike Sheppard, who had offered Oates a scholarship two years earlier. That deal, however, was not still on the table.

“He told me I could come out for the team, and if I made it he’d give me the scholarship,” Oates said. “I didn’t have much choice at that point, so I agreed.”

He proved to Sheppard that two years of throwing a little white ball hadn’t diminished his skill at throwing the large brown one. Sheppard handed over the scholarship and then told Oates that he had plenty of quarterbacks at the moment, thank you, and would he please redshirt for his freshman year.

Ahead of him was Doug Gaynor, a marvelous passer who ranked among the top five quarterbacks in the nation in passing yardage in 1984 and again in 1985. So Oates waited. And practiced. And got knocked around a lot. And then Gaynor graduated.

And Sheppard departed.

The new coach, Larry Reisbig--who had coached at College of the Canyons for nine years--welcomed another talented quarterback to Long Beach in 1986, Jeff Graham. Graham proceeded to pass for 2,921 yards and 20 touchdowns as a sophomore.

And suddenly, the St. Louis Cardinals didn’t look to Oates to be nearly as nasty as they had been three years earlier.

“It was frustrating at times,” Oates said. “But I don’t think of that now. Jeff finally graduated, thank God, and now it’s my turn. I wish I had started playing earlier, but this is my time and I’ll make the most out of it.”

The most, Oates reckons, is performing well enough to warrant a look by the NFL. Even though he is a muscular 205 pounds, he is only 6-feet tall, and he also knows the land of giants that is the NFL might well overlook him because of that.

“I really want a football career,” he said. “I have the mobility and the arm and the smarts. I know I do. Just not the size. Now I’ve got to show other people. If I was 6-2 or 6-3, I think I’d be guaranteed an honest shot at the NFL.

“I can understand them thinking 5-6 is short, but I’m a legitimate 6-feet. The linemen in the NFL are all 6-5 and 6-6 anyway, so I never quite understood all that stuff about needing 6-3 quarterbacks so they can see over the linemen. You don’t see over them. You see around them and between them.”

Before all that, of course, is the minor problem of leading a 49er team that has won a total of seven games in the past two seasons into a season of unknowns. The test, and Oates’ collection of game films he hopes will impress some NFL scouts, begins today.

“I’m sure I’ll be nervous, but it won’t bother me. As a matter of fact, I’m really looking forward to having that feeling and getting it over with,” he said. “I want to get all the nervousness out of the way and go about my business.”

The business, of course, is one of chasing dreams.