Hall of Fame: Glen Griffith (Newport Harbor)

Richard Dunn

Some basketball players are shooters, some can post up and some

simply clean up whatever’s left underneath.

That’s where former Newport Harbor High standout Glen Griffith earned

most his points.

“I got to pick up the garbage and put it back in. I got to be pretty

good at tipping it back in,” said Griffith, a star 6-foot-4 1/2 center on

Coach Ralph Reed’s Sunset League co-championship team in 1951, which

finished 15-3 for the second time in three seasons.

Griffith was an All-Sunset League left end in football and champion

hurdler in track and field, but basketball was his best sport.

After Newport Harbor, Griffith played two years at Orange Coast

College under former basketball coach Miles Eaton and merited second-team

All-Eastern Conference honors as a sophomore in 1953.

Griffith played briefly at San Jose State and once came up against the

University of San Francisco’s Bill Russell, but his collegiate career

never really panned out. Griffith found himself “at odds with some of the

guys on the team,” he said. “It seemed they were all in the same

fraternity. I did play some good games before I finally quit.”

While at Newport Harbor, however, Griffith was a three-sport standout.

He was often the track team’s leading point man with victories in the

120-yard high hurdles and 180 low hurdles, and usually a second or third

in the high jump, in which his personal best was 5-10 3/4.

“That 180 yards got to be a long ways, especially when you throw in a

jump,” Griffith said, referring to an event that no longer exists.

Griffith, whose best 120 hurdle time was 15.2, also competed in track

at OCC, where he once held the school record in 120 high hurdles.

Newport Harbor won back-to-back Sunset League track titles in 1949 and

‘50, but Griffith injured his knee in the spring of ’51 and could not

fully recover in time for the league championships.

“If I hadn’t injured my (left) knee, we would’ve gotten a third

(title) in a row,” Griffith said.

In football, Griffith was a first-team All-Sunset League end in the

fall of ’50 under Coach Al Irwin. The Sailors finished 6-3 that season,

winning their final four games, including victories over Santa Ana, 19-2,

and Anaheim, 35-13.

“I remember Newport Harbor and Santa Ana used to be pretty big rivals,

and when we played Santa Ana (in ‘50), I seemed to really be up for that

game,” he said. “I made a lot of good tackles and caught a touchdown

pass, in which somebody got a picture of it ... there were two or three

guys around me and they had their arms all around, and I don’t know why

they let me catch it. The ball just slipped in there.”

After the game, Griffith posed for an impromptu photograph with his

brother, who was five years younger, and Sailors quarterback Dick Jones.

“That was a real happy game,” Griffith said of the Santa Ana triumph,

which ignited the four-game, season-ending winning streak.

Griffith, the latest honoree in the Daily Pilot Sports Hall of Fame,

retired from the Santa Ana Fire Department in 1989 after 25 years of

service, which included earning the rank of captain.

Griffith lives in Wildomar with his wife of 47 years, Ingeborg. They

have two children and two grandchildren.

“We met when I was going to OCC,” Griffith said of his German-born

wife. “I was coming out of German class and she was coming out of French

class.”

Of Newport Harbor, Griffith added: “It was really a privilege to go to

Newport Harbor in those days. It was a nice school.”