"Nomah! Nomah!"

The image of the Red Sox' All-Star shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra, was more than 300 feet away from the Boston accent-laden kids in late September, but it did the trick nonetheless. Just seeing the outline of their hero walk through the exit of the batting cages underneath the Fenway Park center field bleachers was reason enough to jam themselves, shoulder to shoulder, against the back of the home team's dugout.

"I really wasn't like this," says Garciaparra, pointing to his admirers after arriving in the safe haven known as the Boston bench. "I never had a favorite player or anything. I was never big on autographs. It just wasn't a big deal for me."

But for hundreds of thousands of baseball fans, Nomar - his given name is Anthony but he has always been referred to by the inverse of his father's name, Ramon - is a big deal.

The majority of the time,

	Garciaparra enjoys reminiscing about his high school days at St. John Bosco High in Calif.

Garciaparra is the player with a rocket for a right arm, the one who signs countless autographs while playing the role of Major League Baseball superstar. It's a label he has earned thanks to three All-Star appearances and two A.L. batting titles (he won it in '99 with a .357 average and this year with a .372 average) in just four years as a full-time big leaguer.

Then, out of nowhere, the clean-cut fledgling matinee idol from Whittier, Calif., will somehow remind himself of the 140-pound three-sport star he once was back at St. John Bosco High. The images of Mr. McMorrow up at the chalkboard during AP calculus class at the private school consisting of 1,100 students in the Los Angeles suburb of Bellflower, Calif., never seem to fade.

This much is certain: The memories of Bosco blue and gold always bring out Garciaparra's biggest smile.

"The funny thing about my high school memories is that I remember my friends as much as anything else," says Garciaparra, who graduated in 1991 with a 4.2 GPA. "When I get back together with my friends, I want to know what they're doing, but all they want is to hear stories from me. We can talk for hours about what everybody is doing, and that's what is special for me."

Who could blame Garciaparra's high school buddies for being curious? It's hard to ignore times like when he was hanging out with his friends, Derek Valenzuela and Julio Martinez, and the phone rang. "Nomar, it's for you," yelled Valenzuela. "It's Ted Williams."

Garciaparra, who played on the U.S. Olympic baseball team in 1992 during his freshman year in college, has hung out with President Bill Clinton, Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm. It's during those meetings when his days of being a 5-foot-4 high school sophomore seem so very long ago.

"My friends call me Forrest Gump because I've done so much," says Garciaparra. "I've met so many people who are their heroes."

Take note that it's always Garciaparra's friends' icons who are mentioned - never his own. That's simply because there were no posters on his walls, no baseball cards in his drawers and no sports paraphernalia littered around his bedroom when he was a youngster. It was always about what he could be, not what other people had already become.

"He was a person who was always going in the right direction because he always knew what he wanted to be," says Garciaparra's Spanish teacher at St. John Bosco, John Gonzales. "He knew he wanted to be a professional baseball player or a sports agent, but either way he wanted to be involved in sports. He was very focused."

Garciaparra's journey to greatness began in his sophomore year of high school, when he established himself as a top-notch place-kicker for the Braves' football team, a standout soccer player and, perhaps most surprisingly, an All-Star catcher.

"I was definitely small for a catcher," says Garciaparra, who grew four inches, to 5-foot-8, after his sophomore year. His diminutive size up until that point is the reason he wears No. 5 today, since it was one of the few numbers that fit on the back of his undersized uniform. "The equipment was bigger than I was. My kneepads were actually wider than my legs, so I constantly had to keep tightening them up. But it was a position the team needed me to play and I enjoyed it."

As positive an experience as his first year on the varsity baseball team was, Garciaparra's stint on the soccer team (a winter sport in California) left an even larger impression on the Southern California scholastic sports landscape. As a striker, he managed to hold his own against the likes of future Major League Soccer star and former Mission Viejo High standout Joe-Max Moore, en route to earning Sierra League All-Star status in each of his final three seasons.

"To tell you the truth, I thought soccer was his best sport," says St. John Bosco athletic director Jack Hasterd of Garciaparra, who scored a career-high 17 goals his junior year. "Now he tells me that baseball was always his aim."

By the time Garciaparra's final days of high school approached, he had already left a legacy at St. John Bosco that would stand the test of time. In his senior year, Garciaparra, the cousin of legendary Guadalajaran goalkeeper Arturo Ledesma, had kicked a 47-yard field goal (and a 60-yarder in practice) for the football team, garnered All-State honors in soccer and even hit a career-high four home runs on the baseball diamond. Now came the big decision: What next?

"I cost myself a chance at a lot of the big baseball schools in California because they didn't have football," remembers Garciaparra, who turned down the Milwaukee Brewers' signing offer after they selected him in the fifth round of the 1991 June Amateur Draft. "One of my conditions was that I wanted to kick for someone."

He eventually decided upon a school on the other side of the country. Georgia Tech became the final stop for Ramon and Sylvia Garciaparra's oldest child - Monique (17), Michael (16) and Yvette (14) are all now in high school - before professional baseball stardom. But the transition from three-sport god to one-sport wonder wasn't exactly silky-smooth.

"I didn't know how to focus on one sport when I went to college," says Garciaparra, who never did play for Tech's football team, but got to travel with the Jackets for trips to North Carolina and N.C. State as a backup kicker in his junior year. "Once I did focus, I got even better."

Today, Garciaparra is among Major League Baseball's brightest stars. When children come to Fenway Park, he is the player they want to see, to touch, to receive even the slightest acknowledgement from. For his on-the-field accomplishments, Garciaparra is - whether he understands it or not - a hero of epic proportions.

"Nomah! Nomah! Nomah!"

The thumping on the top of the Red Sox' dugout grows louder and louder with each Boston-accented pronunciation of his name. Finally, Garciaparra rises from the bench to appease his fans by signing some pre-game autographs.

"(When I was a kid) I just liked sitting in the stands before a game, watching the players field ground balls and seeing how they prepared for the game," he says. "I didn't have any heroes. The game itself was my hero."