Unqualified success

Victoria Sun

Monday, April 17, 2000 | 11:47 a.m.

Sports were a waste of time in the eyes of Teodoro and Ventura Gaytan.

Just plain useless.

The couple wanted their two sons and three daughters to get a good education and make something of themselves. Sports never fit into their equation of success.

"They were from the old school," said Sal Gaytan, the second son. "They thought we should study and that was it."

For Sal, playing sports turned out to be a lifeline.

Gaytan, 66, played this afternoon at TPC at the Canyons in hopes of qualifying for the Las Vegas Senior Classic by TruGreen ChemLawn that starts on Friday.

This is the first time the Fountain Valley, Calif., resident has tried to earn a spot into a Senior PGA Tour tournament. And this is another way for Gaytan to continue living a normal life in spite of a childhood accident that took away his right hand.

"It's mainly for the experience of doing it," Gaytan said of why he decided to try to qualify. "I'm not in their class right now, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"I want to get a feel for how far I am or how close I am to these guys. To see what level I can play at."

He has been playing and living above many expectations for many years.

Gaytan was 7 when his life was dramatically altered.

It was Mother's Day 1941 and he was working in his uncle's meat market in La Puente, Calif.

Gaytan's job was to use a mallet to shove pieces of meat into the grinder. But when he was down to the last five or six chunks, he decided to use his hands instead of the mallet. It worked out fine the first few times before the grinder finally sucked in his right hand, leaving him only a stump.

"I had my hand in the bandage," he remembered. "They wouldn't tell me how much of my hand I had lost.

"I was trying to compare the two and I thought I had a lot more left than I did. I realized I had lost more than I thought when they took the bandage off.

"Then, you're sort of in a state of shock."

It didn't last.

Gaytan, born right-handed, immediately started using his left when he got out of the hospital.

He started playing marbles, tops, baseball and basketball again, just like he did before the accident.

"It's amazing the things we can do when we're forced to do them," he said.

Although Gaytan's spirit never diminished, he faced many challenges before being fully comfortable with himself.

"At the beginning when I got home, I had won thousands of marbles already so I started counting them with a friend," Gaytan said. "He told me to give him some of my marbles and I said no.

"So then he said that he would start calling me, 'Mano Mocha,' if I didn't. Right then and there I realized that my life was changed forever. You become a personal target because kids are cruel."

At home, his parents refused to talk about the accident and acted as if it never happened. He didn't recognize it then, but now Gaytan reasons that they were in a state of denial.

To help him get over it, sports became his therapy. He immersed himself in all the sports he loved to play as a way out.

Gaytan tells a tale of when he and his older brother, Al, would sneak away from their parents' gas station to the adjacent field to play a game of baseball with the kids in the neighborhood.

Sal and Al were supposed to be sweeping the floors and attending to the pumps. When Teodoro came back and saw them running back to the station, both boys were severely punished.

"We got whipped for playing sports," Sal said. "Every time, he'd start whipping us, but my mom would yell at him to stop.

"The whippings were worth it as long as we got to play."

Sal ended up lettering in baseball, football and basketball at Cathedral High School in Los Angeles before earning a full scholarship to play basketball for St. Mary's College in 1952.

The entire time his parents never watched a game.

"The Christian Brothers, they were my support system because my dad never saw me," Gaytan said. "They helped me tremendously and so did my coaches."

At St. Mary's, he decided to wear a prothesis because he didn't want his peers to make a big deal out of his missing hand.

It was one of the times he struggled with the issue.

"I just wanted to be like everyone else," he said. "One time I went to a mixer in college and someone came up to me and asked if I heard about this great one-handed basketball player we were supposed to have and I said 'Don't know him.' "

He was a guard at St. Mary's for year and a half, then transferred to USC and tried twice unsuccessfully to walk on to the team.

Since then he has worn the prothesis sparingly and stopped completely in 1991 when he realized he didn't need it any more.

After college, Gaytan coached high school varsity basketball at several different schools for 30 years including his alma mater and Bishop Amat. He hung up his whistle in 1982 when he was an assistant at Mater Dei High in Santa Ana, Calif.

These days, Gaytan plays golf twice a week and practices regularly with his granddaughter, Cienna.

He wields a nine handicap, swings right-handed and drives the ball an average of 220-230 yards.

"I want people not to be afraid to participate in sports," he said. "I meet a lot of people who have been embarrassed because of the way they look.

"There are no limits to what you can do if you don't set any limits for yourself."