All Eyes on Mistri’s Men Now

Yes, there is life after football at Cal State Fullerton, and it begins with a bouncing ball of a soccer coach named Al Mistri.

Remember how the football fetishists wailed at the gates of Titan Stadium last fall?

Oh, what have we done, throwing away $10 million on a 10,000-seat white elephant?

Whatever shall we do now to pass the autumn months without our weekly fix of 48-7 pastings?

It was a most harrowing mystery, but that was before Mistri.

With a wink and a grin, and 18 pairs of feet that haven’t failed him in the playoffs, Mistri has allayed all fears and answered all queries. For those who wanted a winning team in Titan Stadium, Mistri has provided. For those who dreamed of championship runs in December, Mistri has delivered that, too.

Friday afternoon in Davidson, N.C., Mistri and his unknown soldiers will meet South Carolina in the semifinal round of the NCAA soccer playoffs. Win that one and it’s onto Sunday’s final against either Princeton or Virginia, the sport’s two-time defending champion.

That final four again: Virginia, Princeton, South Carolina and . . . Cal State Fullerton.

Why, collegiate scholars and athletes mention those schools in the same breath all the time.

“We’re like the movie ‘Hoosiers,’ ” says Mistri. “The small little school that could.”

“We’re ‘That other L.A. team,’ ” says assistant coach Bob Ammann. “ ‘UCLA Rejects.’ ‘Cal State Disneyland.’ ‘The California Boys.’ I think I’ve heard them all.

“Funny thing is, those people are all watching us now.”

Three weeks ago, Fullerton beat Fresno State in the first round of the soccer playoffs and the result stunned many. This is because many did not realize Fullerton had a soccer team.

Tell Mistri about it. For 13 years, he has been a forgotten man on his own campus, thrown his annual $7,500 and told, “OK, stay out of the way, stay out of trouble and report back to us at the end of the season. This is a football school, remember?”

Mistri and former Fullerton football Coach Gene Murphy are old friends, dating back to 1981, when Murphy was moonlighting as the school’s interim athletic director and had to fill a soccer coaching vacancy. Mistri was Murphy’s one and only hire and Mistri says he still has “the contract I signed, for $4,500. When my wife saw it she said, ‘That probably won’t even pay for gas, Al.’ And she was right.”

But Mistri chafed as he scheduled year-round clinics to keep his players in shoes while the football program gobbled the bulk of the budget pie.

“So much money was pumped into a program during ‘83, ‘84, ’85 that proved it wasn’t able to survive,” Mistri says unflinchingly. “Hey, I deal in the truth, and nothing is as brutal as a fact. But that program was kept alive on a respirator at the expense of some other programs that could have made a name for Fullerton.”

Not to mention any names or anything, but . . .

“Look at my record,” Mistri says, pointing to a current mark of 139-104-20, including this season’s 16-6.

“My teams have been 13-6 or thereabouts at the end of most years. But is Fullerton looked upon as ‘a soccer school’? No. Part of the reason is that we hadn’t done much in the playoffs, but the way things are structured, you don’t go to the playoffs based on your record you have. It depends more on the kind of ‘pedigree’ you have . . .

“Last year, we were 12-6, had a better record than Stanford, but they were selected and we weren’t because they’re ‘Stanford’ and we’re ‘Cal State Fullerton.’ But if we had gotten the chance, we might have done as well as we have this year.”

Mistri is making his point from a room not far away from Murphy’s old office, in what used to be called the Titan Football House. Today, it is the Titan Futbol House. To the survivors go the spoils.

The soccer team’s postseason run has been pure Titan Overachievement, combining the greatest hits of Bobby Dye, Augie Garrido and Judi Garman. Doing it the hard way is the Titan way, so Mistri’s men reached the final four by winning three games on the road--at Fresno, at the University of San Diego and at USF, in a driving rainstorm.

Then, the Titans were forced to wait another 24 hours before boarding a flight from San Francisco to Palm Springs, then busing from Palm Springs to Fullerton. The game was played Saturday night and most players didn’t get home until 1:30 Monday morning.

“I don’t believe any of the other three teams left in the tournament could have done what we have done,” Mistri says.

And the Titans have done it with what Mistri calls “players UCLA didn’t want. We always get the second pick. I’ll be honest with you--six or seven of my guys were very disappointed UCLA turned them down.”

Goalkeeper Mike Ammann is one of them. Ammann didn’t have the grades to qualify for UCLA and, four years ago, looked at Fullerton as “a scrappy team that won a few games but really didn’t have the talent to go far. They weren’t respected.”

But it was the best option on board, so Ammann enlisted. Now, Ammann has a goals-against average of 0.90, is two victories away from a national championship and has a professional contract waiting for him.

“Of the team I have today,” Mistri says, “only three of 18 told me to my face, ‘I want to be a Titan.’ The others are here by necessity, but once they got here, they all made the most of it.”

Mistri doubts the Fullerton will ever eclipse UCLA as Southern California’s soccer school of renown, but that is something he is prepared to live with.

“My strategy a few years back,” Mistri says, “was to be like Avis. Be the best No. 2 you can be.”

But suppose Cal State Fullerton is the best soccer team in Davidson this weekend.

What then?

“If I was Hertz,” Mistri says, round face beaming again, “I’d be very nervous.”