Nick Leyva rarely failed to amuse me. He was an agitator. A teaser, A pot-stirrer and a trash-talker. And that’s good, 99 percent of the time. You don’t want a newroom or a section that takes itself too seriously, and Nick Leyva — at least, the young one we knew — made sure we didn’t.

We hired Nick in 1989, as I recall. Maybe 1988. It was an easy decision. He had been a summer intern for us, along about 1986, and had done a nice job. Hiring someone you know is any manager’s preference.

He was a part-timer at the Orange County Register, even though he was a Cal State Fullerton grad, and he had covered lots of stuff. For us, as an intern, and in the OC, as a clerk. We could offer him the full-time job the Register wasn’t going to give him any time soon, and we could turn him loose on the preps — the critical-to-any-suburban job that came open when Vic West hit burnout and moved to a desk job.

Nick brought to The Sun something very handy: The Register’s system of record-keeping.

Before Nick, Sun high school sports history was a random, almost personal thing. The prep guy just knew, off the top of his head, how many San Bernardino County schools had won championships in this or that sport, and when various coaches had arrived. And if the current prep guy didn’t know, you called the old guy and asked … and if that failed you went to the paper archives in the library or back in the microfilm.

This system functioned, barely, when San Bernardino County had, maybe, 25 high schools in an area about the size of West Virginia. By the late 1980s, however, high schools were going up everywhere. In 10 years, all that empty space between IE cities would pretty much disappear, and we would be dealing with twice as many high schools. It grew far beyond our ability to hold the key moments in our heads.

Nick immediately organized basic resources. He created electronic files that included complete area standings in every major sport, “logs” that included every score for every football game played by every team in the county, every year. He created a dozen phone lists, one for each sport, with phone numbers for coaches and/or stat-keepers, and another for athletic directors.

I don’t believe he invented any of this. But he had witnessed its utility at the Register, and he cranked it all up, on his own volition. He showed resourcefulness and organization.

Going forward, we no longer needed to depend on our fading memories. We could just search “fblog89” and up would pop the file with every score from every game in the 1989 football season. We could pull up “bkstand90” and get the basketball standings from 1990. Etc. This was huge for a paper that was growing, serving more readers — and beginning to experience fairly rapid staff turnover.

One of the great disappointments of The Sun’s fade, in recent years, has been the abandonment of its record-keeping systems, in sports. I’m not sure anyone attempts to do this, anymore. But, if you know where to look, you can find practically every football score from 1989 into this century, and some of the phone lists might still have “nick” as their creator.

Nick Leyva did that for us.

But people tend to remember him more as a sort of goof. Well, I do. He rarely was serious. He rarely was angry. But he always had the needle out.

Some guys come from families like that. Where poking fun is a sport and, generally, a form of endearment. Nick invented nicknames. He made tart observations. He mocked convention.

We gave it back to him, too. He often was teased about liking to hang around teen athletes a bit too much. Well, that was his job, but it was a fertile field for needling. His farewell page had lots of fake quotes from this or that prep “thanking Mr. Leyva for taking such a special interest in me.”

Nick happened to be at The Sun during the heyday of its prep sports history. When the old schools hadn’t quite been watered down yet by a city’s second (or third or fourth) school, when the demographics of the area were still varied enough to support strong programs and when most communities could focus their energy on their one and only school.

Our primary coverage leagues were the Citrus Belt and San Andreas. In 1989, CBL schools Fontana and San Gorgonio of San Bernardino played for the CIF Big Five (large school) football title. That was huge.

In 1991, Rialto Eisenhower was ranked No. 1 in the nation in football for much of the year and would have won a mythical prep national title had it not lost to Santa Ana Mater Dei in the title game. Eisenhower and Fontana had a memorable Week 10 matchup of unbeatens that was moved to Saturday afternoon and regionally televised.

San Bernardino won a CIF basketball title. Local teams were competitive at the highest level. In a wide variety of sports. That had never happened before, in San Bernardino County. Usually, the Long Beach and Orange County schools dominated. But not for about 10 years there, about five of which Nick witnessed and covered.

Nick met his wife while walking to his car. Literally. Jean was a security guard who accompanied employees to their cars, late at night. (Nick was frail, but I like to think he could have handled himself, if some downtown Berdoo derelict had challenged him.) They are still married and have, I believe, three kids. Nick bought his first house, too, up in the High Desert, when you could get a real home for less than $100,000.

Along about 1993, Nick was ready to move back to the Register. He always had wanted to return there. They had a copy-editor opening. Nick had done enough work on the desk to be a viable candidate (though he never seemed to enjoy desk work, when he was with us). He had been there before, and he had gotten some intense, full-time experience at our place. So he was ready to go back, and did.

He is still there, with some curious OCR title. “Copy Editor II” or something like that.

I still think of him as a wise-cracking kid, just out of college. Just moving into his late 20s.
I doubt that’s the Nick Leyva the Register has seen for, what, 15 years now? But I bet he still is painstakingly thorough in everything he does. He probably knows the name of every major-sports coach in Orange County, and who won the South Coast League in baseball last year. I’m confident he’s the kind of guy who gets newspapers out, on time, with fewer errors than we have a right to expect.

I have the impression the Register is a fairly humorless place. That may have stifled the Nick we knew. He is remembered in San Bernardino as a funny kid. Ha-ha, not funny odd.