‘You’re not supposed to cheat at golf any more than you’re supposed to cheat at solitaire. In certain sports, it’s kind of inherent.’

Norrie West is a walking sports encyclopedia on the San Diego area--an athlete, sports writer, sports publicist, collector of sports memorabilia, sporting-event organizer and patron of young athletes. He put together much of the Hall of Champions. He co-founded the Junior World Golf Championships. He masterminded media coverage for three Rose Bowls and covered Maureen Connelly in a tennis tournament when she was 12. At 69, the La Mesa man would be happy to go out and play 18 holes, even by himself. He talked to Times staff writer Janny Scott at Torrey Pines Municipal Golf Course and was photographed by staff photographer Dave Gatley.

Oh, I loved sports! I was a sports nut when I was 12. I played basketball and baseball, and I won the high school tennis championship when I was a sophomore. I all of a sudden had a tremendous passion for them. Anything that had anything to do with sports I was interested in.

Golf has been a passion of mine all my life. I do feel very strongly that it’s a great game. You get out in beautiful surroundings, and it teaches you a lot of things. Like good sportsmanship. You know, sometimes in golf when the ball bounces the wrong way and goes into a hole or something, they say, “Well, that’s the rub of the green.” That means, “Well, you just had a bad break; you’ve got to accept it.”

You’re not supposed to cheat at golf any more than you’re supposed to cheat at solitaire. In certain sports, it’s kind of inherent, I think. They say, “Get away with what you can get away with.” You know, linemen in football, if they are very clever, they can hold the opponent illegally. And a lot of them do that, because that’s the way the game is played.

But I think golf is an individual sport. You know, there you are with you and your conscience. It tests your mettle a little bit, whether you’re honest with yourself.

I’m a little bit, not romantic, but idealistic, perhaps. But I think there’s a great deal of nobility in true sports. It can be professional or amateur, it doesn’t make any difference. Where the guy is really giving his all. To me, that gives me goose pimples at times.

I did this museum downtown, and I was well versed in the history of sports in San Diego. There are not too many people that know any more about it than I, because I’ve been around and followed it so closely. When we moved the Hall, we had about 700 pictures of outstanding athletes from over the years. I had to go through them and cull them out. Well, I could go through those 700 pictures, and there are very few I wouldn’t have known.

Strange, being near the ocean doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have good swimmers. We’ve never had all that many greats. But we’ve had some great golfers and at one time we had a great many outstanding tennis players, including Maureen Connelly. She grew up here. She of course developed into one of the really great all-time players. She won three Wimbledon championships, three U.S. Women’s Opens, the first one when she was 16 years old.

She had an accident. She used to ride her horse down Mission Valley here, and she collided with a truck and did something to her leg, and she never played after that. Her career ended at 19. She was queen of the world, she could have won for another five years. Who knows, she could have won eight or 10 Wimbledons.

There used to be standout individuals in almost any field. In sports, there were great giants like Bobby Jones or Bill Tilden in tennis or Jack Dempsey in boxing. But there aren’t those kinds any more.

Look at the golf tour. They’re complaining right now: There aren’t any real colorful characters left any more. . . . They have an enormous number of players, all swing the club alike, look alike, think alike. There are no real individuals there. There are a few. But an awful lot of them, they’re blond and they hit the ball eight miles. They all have the same putting stroke.

I think it’s true of everything.

I don’t know how good a public relations man I was. I made a living at it. It really wasn’t my first choice, frankly. Probably golf, professionally. No. Writing. And I went back.

When I knew I was going to retire, I got in touch with the Daily Californian in El Cajon and said I’d like to write a golf column. I thought, what did I really like to do, before I had to make a living? So I went back to it, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. I do like to write. And there’s an ego factor, you know, to be honest. They run my picture every week: West on Golf!