The 2000s started out poorly for San Diego sports, but like a long fly ball at Petco, the decade picked up steam before finally falling short of our lofty expectations
John R. McCutchen / Union-Tribune
Petco Park, seen here from the top floor of The Mark condominiums last April,
in 2004 after years of legal and financial wrangling.
in 2004 after years of legal and financial wrangling.
The decade began with Tiger Woods, in the midst of a record streak of six straight PGA tournament victories, playing two golf events in San Diego County just weeks apart. And failing to win either of them. Not a good omen.
By the end of 2000, legendary breeder and horse owner Allen Paulson would die. Padres outfielder Al Martin would be involved in a domestic violence incident with his wife – only for her to learn he was legally married to a second woman. And BALCO founder Victor Conte would secretly begin mailing blood and urine samples from “Barry B.” to an independent sports drug-testing facility in Mission Valley to see if his doping concoctions were detectable (they were not).
The Chargers? 1-15. The Padres? Ten games under .500. San Diego State football? 3-8. SDSU men’s basketball? 5-23.
About the only good thing about the year was that the rest of the decade had one direction to go, and it would. The year 2000 was largely forgettable in San Diego sports; the 2000s, though, were not.
“We are better off from a sports standpoint today than we’ve ever been,” says Ky Snyder, who began the decade as the president of the San Diego International Sports Council and ends it as the University of San Diego’s athletic director. “The foundation is there for continued success. But that doesn’t mean there still isn’t stuff to get done. There is.”
And that’s sort of the lingering vibe, the bittersweet aftertaste, of the 2000s in San Diego sports. Good but not great. Maybe a B, or a B+. Nothing flashy but nothing your parents will get too upset about when the report card arrives in the mail.
Or think of the decade like a deep fly ball at Petco Park, rising majestically into the summer night, drawing the crowd to its feet … and then reaching the swirling wind and moist marine layer and falling harmlessly into the outfielder’s glove on the warning track. The 2000s followed the same arc, starting inauspiciously, picking up some serious momentum and then never living up to expectations. But, hey, at least it got you on your feet.
Bad things were still happening in 2003, when Chargers General Manager John Butler and legendary Chargers coach Sid Gillman both died; when the San Diego Spirit and new women’s pro soccer league, the WUSA, suddenly folded; when SDSU Athletic Director Rick Bay resigned; when the Chargers parted with iconic linebacker Junior Seau, tied for the worst record in the NFL at 4-12 and sued the city to end its lease at Qualcomm Stadium; when there was a NASCAR-like crash involving five horses at Del Mar.
The turning point, undoubtedly, was 2004.
The Chargers went from four wins to 12, and the Padres from 64 to 87. Reggie Bush and Alex Smith, former teammates at Helix High, were finalists in the Heisman Trophy balloting. USDHS alum Phil Mickelson broke his majors hex by winning at The Masters, University City High alum Felix Sanchez won the gold medal in 400-meter hurdles at the Athens Olympics, and San Diego High alum Meb Keflezighi was the surprise silver medalist in the marathon.
The biggest story of 2004, and arguably the decade, was the opening of Petco Park in downtown San Diego after years of legal and financial wrangling. It provided a theme for the 2000s, an era of building in San Diego sports – and, as Snyder puts it, “the feeling and promise it brought.”
USD opened a new basketball arena and had its football stadium expanded by the WUSA. SDSU opened an aquatics complex. Del Mar got a synthetic track and a roof on its horse show arena. High schools across the region had bumpy, dusty football “fields” replaced by shimmering expanses of artificial turf. Torrey Pines South golf course got a major face-lift.
“The great thing is that I think we’ve shaken that sense of mediocrity in San Diego sports that used to be so prevalent here,” Padres outfielder Dave Roberts, who grew up in San Diego, said in 2005. “Things have gotten a lot better. … The whole atmosphere is different.”
Or was it?
The next year, 2006, began promising enough – with Shaun White’s gold at the Winter Olympics, with another Master’s title for Mickelson, with another trip to the NCAA Tournament by Steve Fisher and his SDSU basketball team, with the finals of the inaugural World Baseball Classic at Petco Park.
Then bad stuff started happening again. Cyclist Floyd Landis, who trained on the backcountry roads of San Diego County, flunked a drug test and ultimately had his Tour de France title stripped. Barely a month later, Chargers linebacker Steve Foley was shot by an off-duty Coronado police officer who followed him home because he thought Foley was driving under the influence.
A month after that, another Chargers linebacker, Shawne Merriman, was suspended for failing an NFL drug test.
A few days after that, SDSU lost at home to Division I-AA Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in football.
The remainder of the decade followed a similar pattern. Some good things mixed with some not-so-good things, never fulfilling the glorious promise brought by 2004. Never quite managing to sail out of the park.
And so San Diego begins the second decade of the 21st century still saddled with the albatross of being the largest metropolitan area without a ring in a “major” pro team sport. So championship-starved are San Diegans that they fawned over 12-year-old boys from Chula Vista after they won the 2009 Little League World Series like they were conquering heroes returning home from war in a faraway land.
Another void wasn’t filled in the 2000s, either. Despite being the ninth largest city in the country, San Diego still has no NBA or NHL team.
“A championship, an NHL team and an NBA team,” says Rick Schloss, who has lived his entire life here and spent most of it working in sports media relations. “I compare us to Phoenix – they have the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball, and they’ve won championships. I look at Denver, same thing. Or St. Louis. They have football, baseball and hockey, and they’ve won championships, too.
“To make it a true sports town, we need those things. To have a true sports town, I think you need them all. And in the last decade we didn’t get any of those things.”
Schloss pauses and then starts talking about how the rugby sevens came to Petco Park, how Torrey Pines hosted golf’s 2008 U.S. Open, how the women’s pro tennis tour made an annual stop at La Costa, how Mexico’s national soccer team makes regular visits to the Q, how there’s an Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, how the region continues to crank out world-class athletes in every sport imaginable.
“But you know what?” Schloss says. “We’ve got everything else.”
Mark Zeigler: (619) 293-2205; mark.zeigler@uniontrib.com
SAN DIEGO ATHLETES OF THE DECADE
The best athletes across the 2000s who either played in San Diego or are from here.
REGGIE BUSH: A stud at all levels. He won two section prep titles at Helix High, won two collegiate titles and the Heisman Trophy at USC, and was the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft in 2006. With New Orleans, he has 32 touchdowns in four years.
TREVOR HOFFMAN: Maybe the greatest closer in baseball history, he has a major league record 591 career saves. More than half (326) came in a Padres uniform in the 2000s, and “Hell’s Bells” became the soundtrack for a city.
JIMMIE JOHNSON: The El Cajon native became the first driver in history to claim four straight NASCAR Sprint Cup championships. He was named NASCAR’s driver of the decade after amassing 47 wins, 23 poles and 180 top-10 finishes.
MEB KEFLEZIGHI: The San Diego High alum from Eritrea set the American record in the 10,000 meters in 2001, won the silver medal in the Olympic marathon in 2004 and won the 2009 New York City Marathon in a personal-best 2:09:15 at age 34.
SHANNON MacMILLAN: The San Pasqual High alum ranks among the greatest women’s soccer players of all time. In this decade, she helped launch the WUSA’s San Diego Spirit, won Olympic silver and was named U.S. Player of the Year in 2002.
PHIL MICKELSON: The USDHS alum entered the decade known as the greatest pro golfer never to win a major, and exited it with three major titles: the 2004 and ’06 Masters, and 2005 PGA. He also was runner-up four times at the U.S. Open.
FELIX SANCHEZ: The University City High alum was the planet’s most dominant track and field athlete between 2001 and 2004, winning 43 straight races in the grueling 400-meter hurdles. He also claimed two outdoor world titles and Olympic gold in 2004.
LaDAINIAN TOMLINSON: A first-round draft pick by the Chargers in 2001, here are his NFL stats in the 2000s: 12,489 rushing yards, 3,938 receiving yards, 153 touchdowns, five Pro Bowls, one MVP award. Hello, Hall of Fame.
SHAUN WHITE: “The Flying Tomato” emerged as the giant of action sports, crossing over between skateboarding and snowboarding with ridiculous ease. The Carlsbad native was a star of the 2006 Winter Olympics with his snowboard halfpipe gold.
CANDICE WIGGINS: The daughter of former Padres infielder Alan Wiggins and a two-sport star at La Jolla Country Day, Wiggins became Stanford’s all-time leading scorer in basketball and was the third overall pick in the 2008 WNBA draft.
By the end of 2000, legendary breeder and horse owner Allen Paulson would die. Padres outfielder Al Martin would be involved in a domestic violence incident with his wife – only for her to learn he was legally married to a second woman. And BALCO founder Victor Conte would secretly begin mailing blood and urine samples from “Barry B.” to an independent sports drug-testing facility in Mission Valley to see if his doping concoctions were detectable (they were not).
The Chargers? 1-15. The Padres? Ten games under .500. San Diego State football? 3-8. SDSU men’s basketball? 5-23.
About the only good thing about the year was that the rest of the decade had one direction to go, and it would. The year 2000 was largely forgettable in San Diego sports; the 2000s, though, were not.
“We are better off from a sports standpoint today than we’ve ever been,” says Ky Snyder, who began the decade as the president of the San Diego International Sports Council and ends it as the University of San Diego’s athletic director. “The foundation is there for continued success. But that doesn’t mean there still isn’t stuff to get done. There is.”
And that’s sort of the lingering vibe, the bittersweet aftertaste, of the 2000s in San Diego sports. Good but not great. Maybe a B, or a B+. Nothing flashy but nothing your parents will get too upset about when the report card arrives in the mail.
Or think of the decade like a deep fly ball at Petco Park, rising majestically into the summer night, drawing the crowd to its feet … and then reaching the swirling wind and moist marine layer and falling harmlessly into the outfielder’s glove on the warning track. The 2000s followed the same arc, starting inauspiciously, picking up some serious momentum and then never living up to expectations. But, hey, at least it got you on your feet.
Bad things were still happening in 2003, when Chargers General Manager John Butler and legendary Chargers coach Sid Gillman both died; when the San Diego Spirit and new women’s pro soccer league, the WUSA, suddenly folded; when SDSU Athletic Director Rick Bay resigned; when the Chargers parted with iconic linebacker Junior Seau, tied for the worst record in the NFL at 4-12 and sued the city to end its lease at Qualcomm Stadium; when there was a NASCAR-like crash involving five horses at Del Mar.
The turning point, undoubtedly, was 2004.
The Chargers went from four wins to 12, and the Padres from 64 to 87. Reggie Bush and Alex Smith, former teammates at Helix High, were finalists in the Heisman Trophy balloting. USDHS alum Phil Mickelson broke his majors hex by winning at The Masters, University City High alum Felix Sanchez won the gold medal in 400-meter hurdles at the Athens Olympics, and San Diego High alum Meb Keflezighi was the surprise silver medalist in the marathon.
The biggest story of 2004, and arguably the decade, was the opening of Petco Park in downtown San Diego after years of legal and financial wrangling. It provided a theme for the 2000s, an era of building in San Diego sports – and, as Snyder puts it, “the feeling and promise it brought.”
USD opened a new basketball arena and had its football stadium expanded by the WUSA. SDSU opened an aquatics complex. Del Mar got a synthetic track and a roof on its horse show arena. High schools across the region had bumpy, dusty football “fields” replaced by shimmering expanses of artificial turf. Torrey Pines South golf course got a major face-lift.
“The great thing is that I think we’ve shaken that sense of mediocrity in San Diego sports that used to be so prevalent here,” Padres outfielder Dave Roberts, who grew up in San Diego, said in 2005. “Things have gotten a lot better. … The whole atmosphere is different.”
Or was it?
The next year, 2006, began promising enough – with Shaun White’s gold at the Winter Olympics, with another Master’s title for Mickelson, with another trip to the NCAA Tournament by Steve Fisher and his SDSU basketball team, with the finals of the inaugural World Baseball Classic at Petco Park.
Then bad stuff started happening again. Cyclist Floyd Landis, who trained on the backcountry roads of San Diego County, flunked a drug test and ultimately had his Tour de France title stripped. Barely a month later, Chargers linebacker Steve Foley was shot by an off-duty Coronado police officer who followed him home because he thought Foley was driving under the influence.
A month after that, another Chargers linebacker, Shawne Merriman, was suspended for failing an NFL drug test.
A few days after that, SDSU lost at home to Division I-AA Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in football.
The remainder of the decade followed a similar pattern. Some good things mixed with some not-so-good things, never fulfilling the glorious promise brought by 2004. Never quite managing to sail out of the park.
And so San Diego begins the second decade of the 21st century still saddled with the albatross of being the largest metropolitan area without a ring in a “major” pro team sport. So championship-starved are San Diegans that they fawned over 12-year-old boys from Chula Vista after they won the 2009 Little League World Series like they were conquering heroes returning home from war in a faraway land.
Another void wasn’t filled in the 2000s, either. Despite being the ninth largest city in the country, San Diego still has no NBA or NHL team.
“A championship, an NHL team and an NBA team,” says Rick Schloss, who has lived his entire life here and spent most of it working in sports media relations. “I compare us to Phoenix – they have the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball, and they’ve won championships. I look at Denver, same thing. Or St. Louis. They have football, baseball and hockey, and they’ve won championships, too.
“To make it a true sports town, we need those things. To have a true sports town, I think you need them all. And in the last decade we didn’t get any of those things.”
Schloss pauses and then starts talking about how the rugby sevens came to Petco Park, how Torrey Pines hosted golf’s 2008 U.S. Open, how the women’s pro tennis tour made an annual stop at La Costa, how Mexico’s national soccer team makes regular visits to the Q, how there’s an Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, how the region continues to crank out world-class athletes in every sport imaginable.
“But you know what?” Schloss says. “We’ve got everything else.”
Mark Zeigler: (619) 293-2205; mark.zeigler@uniontrib.com
SAN DIEGO ATHLETES OF THE DECADE
The best athletes across the 2000s who either played in San Diego or are from here.
REGGIE BUSH: A stud at all levels. He won two section prep titles at Helix High, won two collegiate titles and the Heisman Trophy at USC, and was the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft in 2006. With New Orleans, he has 32 touchdowns in four years.
TREVOR HOFFMAN: Maybe the greatest closer in baseball history, he has a major league record 591 career saves. More than half (326) came in a Padres uniform in the 2000s, and “Hell’s Bells” became the soundtrack for a city.
JIMMIE JOHNSON: The El Cajon native became the first driver in history to claim four straight NASCAR Sprint Cup championships. He was named NASCAR’s driver of the decade after amassing 47 wins, 23 poles and 180 top-10 finishes.
MEB KEFLEZIGHI: The San Diego High alum from Eritrea set the American record in the 10,000 meters in 2001, won the silver medal in the Olympic marathon in 2004 and won the 2009 New York City Marathon in a personal-best 2:09:15 at age 34.
SHANNON MacMILLAN: The San Pasqual High alum ranks among the greatest women’s soccer players of all time. In this decade, she helped launch the WUSA’s San Diego Spirit, won Olympic silver and was named U.S. Player of the Year in 2002.
PHIL MICKELSON: The USDHS alum entered the decade known as the greatest pro golfer never to win a major, and exited it with three major titles: the 2004 and ’06 Masters, and 2005 PGA. He also was runner-up four times at the U.S. Open.
FELIX SANCHEZ: The University City High alum was the planet’s most dominant track and field athlete between 2001 and 2004, winning 43 straight races in the grueling 400-meter hurdles. He also claimed two outdoor world titles and Olympic gold in 2004.
LaDAINIAN TOMLINSON: A first-round draft pick by the Chargers in 2001, here are his NFL stats in the 2000s: 12,489 rushing yards, 3,938 receiving yards, 153 touchdowns, five Pro Bowls, one MVP award. Hello, Hall of Fame.
SHAUN WHITE: “The Flying Tomato” emerged as the giant of action sports, crossing over between skateboarding and snowboarding with ridiculous ease. The Carlsbad native was a star of the 2006 Winter Olympics with his snowboard halfpipe gold.
CANDICE WIGGINS: The daughter of former Padres infielder Alan Wiggins and a two-sport star at La Jolla Country Day, Wiggins became Stanford’s all-time leading scorer in basketball and was the third overall pick in the 2008 WNBA draft.
MARK ZEIGLER
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