Newport-Mesa has lost a son who made it big in professional sports.
Cliff Livingston, Orange Coast College’s first true blue-chip athlete, died last month in Las Vegas at the age of 79. He had Parkinson’s disease and congestive heart failure.
An NFL linebacker for 13 seasons, he was a starter for the champion 1956 New York Giants. He started in the 1958 NFL championship game that’s still remembered as the Greatest Football Game Ever Played.
After eight years with the Giants, Cliff played a season with the Minnesota Vikings and then four with the Los Angeles Rams.
A defensive end for OCC’s 1949 football team, Livingston was also a decathlete and established a school record for the shot put. He was a starter for two NCAA football seasons at UCLA.
In 2004, Livingston was inducted into the California Community College Football Coaches Assn. Hall of Fame. I was privileged to be at that ceremony.
“Cliff was a great athlete,” Ray Rosso, OCC’s head football coach from 1948-55, told me then. “He was strong and aggressive, and played the game with reckless abandon.”
An outstanding athlete at Montebello High School, Livingston was awarded a full scholarship to Arizona State University. He bounced back to OCC, however.
“I didn’t like ASU; I was homesick for Southern California,” he told me in ’04. “I wanted to transfer to UCLA, but my coach in Westwood redirected me to Orange Coast to get my grades up.”
Livingston walked onto OCC’s campus in the fall of 1949. During the previous season, the Pirates had gone 3-5-1. With Livingston in the fold, things turned around. The Bucs went 8-2 and were rated 16th in the nation. Livingston ran an interception back 90 yards for a touchdown in the Thanksgiving Day game.
“I really enjoyed Coast; I was in my element,” he told me.
In ’49, OCC was isolated. It’d been part of the Santa Ana Army Air Base during World War II, and was surrounded on three sides — north, south and west — by acres of empty bean and barley fields. To the east — across Fairview Road, on what is now Costa Mesa High School and Orange County Fairgrounds property — stood empty military barracks buildings.
“I lived in an OCC dorm, and I remember regularly going over there with my buddies,” Livingston recalled. “We made a quarter-mile dirt track and raced our cars.”
