"Gene Edwards dressed as 'The Destroyer'" from professional wrestling, says Tom Hauser, who wrestled beginning as a 103-pounder in the seventh grade for the legendary La Jolla High coach and namesake of the campus football stadium. Edwards retired in 1990 and soon after died of a heart attack.
The LJHS alumnus, who was part of the last class to go through the junior high grades and senior high on the same campus (sixth grade was not yet part of junior high), is a window into something about Edwards that no one else has mentioned in this writer's pursuit to convey some of what sports and the campus were like in the earlier years at La Jolla.
"(Edwards) coached both the football and wrestling teams, and so if you played football, you were pretty much going to be on the wrestling team as well," says the local resident, whose two daughters also graduated from La Jolla High after playing soccer and softball. "He used the other football players kind of as fodder to fill in the weight classes on the wrestling team." Houser never competed in the Holtville Rotary Tournament, which began in 1964.
"Wrestling was not yet in its heyday on campus," the former Viking wrestler/golfer said.
"We (Hauser and a group with him) built the softball field" that sits on the western edge of campus. Before that, the Vikings "played at La Jolla Elementary" and other locations, lacking a permanent home.
Tom was too small to play football for Edwards, but he did wrestle for a few years, starting in junior high. He also played golf once he got to the high school grades.
Asked if he ever saw a track athlete get hit by a baseball, since both teams shared facilities on the football field until the 1990's, Hauser couldn't really say.
Hauser attended the 100th anniversary parade for the school at a football game in 2022. He knows Rick Eveleth, who starred in baseball and basketball in the 1960's and went on to serve as a teacher and coach on campus until his retirement.
At least one of his and his wife's grandchildren attend La Jolla Country Day and play volleyball.
Hauser knows Tom House, a former major league pitcher and pitching coach who coaches athletes in biomechanics and has a connection with the LJHS baseball program. "A Tom House story is, he told my daughters whatever softball equipment they needed, he would get," he says. House delivered on his promise at no charge.
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