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TI: Talk about sports and the impact of sports growing up.

DM: Yeah. Gardena was a big sports town. It wasn't just because of my father. It was just a small community, and sports was really big in that -- it's just like any, a lot of little communities where sports kinda dominates. I mean, we had some really highly talented kids come out of Gardena High School and play major league sports. But, so it was always, there was always that dream, perhaps not for us quite as much. But we played, there were a lot of organized sports programs. I played a lot of basketball and baseball. I played varsity basketball, varsity baseball. And everyone was encouraged to get into sports in some ways.

TI: Now, was it common for Japanese Americans to be varsity basketball and varsity baseball?

DM: Not really. In fact, on the varsity basketball team there was one other Japanese American guy when I was playing. And we were fifteen percent of the student body, ten to fifteen percent. Baseball was a little bit more common, but you never saw maybe more than two or three Japanese Americans playing varsity. I guess in those days they, we were growing up smaller, in general, and so you didn't have as much chance. In football, same thing. There were a little bit more in football for some reason. I think that was the most popular sport, so... and you had larger teams, so there were more people that could belong to that team. In our varsity team, let's see, there were two Japanese Americans in baseball. We had about three Mexican Americans; a Chinese American played center fielder, center field. We had an African American in right field. I mean, there was just quite a mix. So there were Japanese Americans who played varsity in virtually every sport, but in general, as I recall -- and this is pretty anecdotal -- most of 'em were in, played tennis.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.