Clavijo Looking to Even the Score : MSL: Ex-Socker would like to knock his old mates out of the playoffs.

ST. LOUIS —  One final debt remains from the tumultuous summer of 1988, when the Sockers flirted with folding and Ron Fowler bailed them out of bankruptcy proceedings.

Former Socker Fernando Clavijo hopes to pay back that one himself.

Clavijo, who now toils for the St. Louis Storm, wants to repay the Sockers for the way they tossed him aside that summer. And what better way to do so than to force the regular-season champions to take a quick exit from the postseason?

The Storm currently trails the Sockers, 2-1, in the Major Soccer League Western Division finals. Game 4 is tonight (5:35 p.m. PDT) at The Arena.

Bitterness from the offseason of 1988 still lingers somewhere within Clavijo.

“There’s no question about that,” Clavijo said Wednesday. “You always want to feel you have a place on your home team. I always felt San Diego was my home, really, and I gave up a lot of money to sign a long-term guaranteed contract there. When the team went into bankruptcy, I thought everything was all right with my contract.”

In fact, Clavijo sought assurances from the club that he would remain on the roster despite the bankruptcy proceedings.

A day after receiving such assurances, however, Clavijo picked up the newspaper and found the Sockers had released him. He was unemployed.

“The last thing I heard was that my contract was in court,” Clavijo said. “It leaves some bitterness when you find out you don’t have a job through the newspapers.”

Clavijo wasn’t the only one upset. So was Coach Ron Newman and so too were the San Diego fans.

“You know,” Clavijo recalled, “the most beautiful fans a team can have are in San Diego. We won a lot of championships in San Diego and a lot of players won trophies. But my best year in soccer was one year (1986-87) when we had a lot of big shots, a lot of star players like Branko Segota, Kevin Crow and Juli Veee. I was voted as favorite player by the fans. I was really touched. I felt I was giving my part to the team.”

Clavijo, like Wes Wade, this season’s fans’ favorite player, is one of those rare performers who seems able to bypass first through fourth gears and go directly into overdrive.

Of course, when Wade does that, he often leaves the ball behind. But Clavijo is another matter altogether.

He was the spearhead for the Sockers’ No-Goal Patrol, the four-man unit that killed penalties for the Sockers in the mid 1980s.

The Sockers still have one of the toughest penalty-killing units in the league, but no one has used the term No-Goal Patrol since Clavijo left.

Even when Clavijo was around, that name was something of a misnomer.

“We stopped other teams from getting goals,” Clavijo remembered, “but we also scored a lot of short-handed goals.”

The Sockers scored 11 shorthanded goals in 1985-86, still a league record. Clavijo contributed five, the third most scored by an MSL player in a season. Also, his total of 15 career shorthanded goals is second all-time to Baltimore’s Tim Wittman (16).

Not bad for a defender.

Clavijo hustled for the Sockers, enough to make up for a lack of scoring statistics in a league that employs the Don Coryell philosophy of defense.

So necessary was Clavijo on a team of goal-scorers, which included Segota, Veee, Hugo Perez, Zoran Karic, Paul Dougherty and Waad Hirmez, that Newman, before he left for his annual holiday in his native England, insisted that Clavijo be brought back for 1988-89.

“When I left for England that summer,” Newman remembered, “I thought it was all settled that Fernando would be back. But when I returned, even my position was not certain.”

So Clavijo was gone.

He would have to leave the Sockers, but he would not have to leave his home. He signed with the Los Angeles Lazers for 1988-89 and commuted to practices and games.

Yet he was still bitter. Just how bitter became apparent in February 1989 during a game at the Forum between Clavijo’s old chums and his new mates.

Clavijo scored an early goal in that one. In his zeal, he ran past the Sockers’ bench and made one of those gestures made famous by former Padre President Chub Feeney.

No one really noticed the antic, though, and the game went on.

It went into overtime, in fact, and Clavijo scored the game-winner.

After he clinched the victory, Clavijo again paraded by the Sockers’ bench and showed up his former teammates and coach.

This time, Newman noticed.

When asked if he remembered that particular game, Newman replied, “You mean the one where Fernando hit me?”

Newman remembered all right. He remembered the altercation that ensued and that Clavijo told reporters later that night in the locker room that Newman was a racist and that Newman spit on him and baited him into hitting him with an open palm to the cheek.

“Such terrible lies,” Newman said.

Clavijo, too, remembers, although he would like to forget.

Now it’s time to show up that father figure and Clavijo seems to have raised the level of his game for the playoffs.