The Drive There
It’s sometime between late afternoon and early evening, and I’m crossing the LA River, on my way to Cabrillo High School, to visit practice and interview a player I’m writing a profile of. My angle is going to be what it’s like to be one of the rare seniors on a very young team, with a new coaching staff who has big plans for the future. How it feels to be part of a rebuilding process when you won’t be there to see the building. The sun is starting to set somewhere down PCH ahead of me, and I can tell it’s going to be a special one, the kind of rare sunset we only get in Southern California, stained and streaked with pollution-painted crimsons and purples.
Sitting at a red light waiting to turn onto Santa Fe, I think about the two sportswriters who have told me that they flat out wouldn’t ever go to Cabrillo, Jordan, or Compton—or Poly, if they played their games on their own campus. It’s a silly, stupid thing to say, but I wonder how much of the city shares their views. I remember when I was in eighth grade at Hughes, and my friends and I were deciding on high schools—several friends’ parents told them they had three choices: Lakewood, Millikan, and Wilson. If they didn’t get into a magnet at any of those, their parents had a backup plan: move to Los Alamitos. The light turns green, and I turn right, weaving between construction vehicles towards the newest high school in Long Beach. I’m already a few minutes late.
Coach A.J. Luke
Coach Luke greets me warmly, and we stand and watch practice together for ten minutes—he’s mostly working out younger players, since I’m there during Cabrillo’s bye week. Luke coached my little brother at Poly a few years ago, where he was a defensive mind as well as the head of their freshman team. A Poly alum—he was a standout player on the football team—Luke worked at Poly for years, until he moved to Jordan two years ago to be defensive coordinator, and then spent last year at LBCC. This year he’s taken the helm of his own high school team for the first time, surrounded by six other ex-Poly coaches. According to him when we spoke before the season, none of them left Poly because they were disgruntled. They left because they wanted to create another positive program on the west side of the city, another safe haven for students who desperately need one. “It’s numbers,” he said. “Everybody wants to go to Poly, I understand that. But if there’s 200 people on the freshman team, not everybody’s going to get what they need from there.”
So he took over a team that had existed for fewer years than Poly has CIF championships, a team that had won fewer games in the prior three years than Poly usually wins in a season. And he started rebuilding, from the ground up. On the sideline of the Wilson/Cabrillo game the week prior, Cabrillo athletic director Rick Lamprecht told me, “The way our coaches work with these players in practice, the things they’re teaching them, the games are almost an afterthought.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean the Jaguars’ 0-9 record is easy for the coaching staff, or their players to bear. But the change in the program’s philosophy and attitude hasn’t gone unnoticed—one parent told our writer covering the Cabrillo/St. John Bosco game that if Cabrillo had been down big in a game last year, he would’ve seen helmets being thrown, blowups on the sideline, maybe a fight. This year, though, the Jaguars are the most upbeat, positive, and energetic sideline in the league, despite their record. Coach Luke has his kids believing in the future. Hell, he’s even sold my writers—everyone who covers a Jags game comes back telling me how good the Jaguars are going to be next year, or the year after. And when coach Luke tells you the same, you believe him.
Tua
Luke tells me the senior I was going to talk to isn’t at practice that day, but that he has another guy he wants me to interview instead. “He’s one of our seniors, the heart and soul of our defense. Leads the team in tackles. He’s well-loved by the administration here, works in the student store to make some extra money for his family. He’s a leader on campus as well as on the football field—they told me he broke up a fight last week.
“He’s one of the answers to the problems out here.”
Luke whistles and sends the senior, middle linebacker/fullback Leitutua “Tua” Leiataua, into the bleachers so we can talk. He lays out his story: he grew up in a bad part of north Long Beach, and started playing football young (fifth grade), because he loved the sport’s physicality, and because he saw it as a way to help get his family out of the neighborhood they were living in. “It was nothing but gangsters there,” he tells me. He says he was introduced to the game by his older brother.
Talking about football, he brightens. “I play both ways, but I prefer linebacker because I can be more aggressive,” he says. I ask his height/weight, and he smiles. “I’m 5’10”, and I weigh 192…but people think I’m 215 because I’m Polynesian.” Unlike many kids who are hoping football will help get them, and their families, out of their current living situations, Tua has a pretty well-developed backup plan, too. “I’m pursuing the culinary arts. People say it’s a weird combination, cooking and football, but they’re both hard hitting. If college football comes my way I’ll take it, but I have to have a backup plan, because I don’t want to fall back on nothing if it comes to that. If I can’t do what I do best, I’ll do what I do second best.”
But right now Tua’s not looking too far ahead. He knows how hard it can be just to maintain a sense of normality. Two years ago, before he transferred to Cabrillo, Tua was a student at Jordan High School when Sam Crichton was killed following their homecoming game (we wrote a profile on Sam’s younger brother Talia a few weeks ago). Last year, Tua’s brother was killed in a drive-by shooting. A few months ago he found out his father has prostate cancer; a few weeks ago, his family was evicted from their home, and have been staying with friends and family since then. Tua says if it weren’t for his girlfriend, he’d be in a gang right now. When I asked him about the fight he broke up, he shook his head. “Yeah. It was between a Hispanic and an African-American. It’s crazy, fighting over gangs and racial disputes. This team, we have to watch each other’s backs.”
The trouble he’s faced off the field has helped him to become a leader on it, as his coaches say he’s taken the younger linebackers under his wing, helping to teach them the position. “Going through what I’m going through with my family right now…nobody should go through that. Nobody. And I think of these guys as my family, as my brothers—I wouldn’t do anything to them that I wouldn’t to do my little brother.”
Tua doesn’t want to take credit for anything—he talks about other people a lot more than he talks about himself. He talks about his brother, his family, gives his girlfriend credit for helping get his life on track, and gives a ton of credit to Luke. “You talk about a coach being so passionate about football, and about his athletes. He puts all his personal life aside just for football, and for us. That’s how much he loves us.” Long Beach needs more coaches like Luke, Tua says, more men who can be answers in a community of questions. That’s why he’s already talked his younger brother, who’s playing flag football at Butler, into attending Cabrillo, as long as Luke is still coaching the Jags.
Tua, who’s been looked at by Arizona, UNLV, and Fresno, is proud to be a part of the rebuilding effort at Cabrillo, too, even though the best they can finish this season is 1-9 if they beat Millikan this week. Without prompting, he starts talking about next season. “If this team goes 9-1 next year,” he says, “I’ll be thrilled. And I’ll know that I’ve been a part of what they’re trying to accomplish.”
Whether they win ten games or none next season, it’s safe to say that Tua is already exactly what the coaches at Cabrillo are trying to accomplish.
The Drive Back
Heading back east down PCH, I’m thinking about odds. I’m thinking about Cabrillo’s odds of going 9-1 next season, of the odds Luke will be able to turn around a program through sheer will, of Tua’s chances of making it to a four-year school and then to the NFL, of him making enough money to buy his parents a house. I’m thinking about my little brother, and I’m thinking about Tua and wondering how we can ask young men to go through the things he’s been through and come out on the other side unscathed.
Behind me, the reds and purples have dimmed and disappeared, and the sky is dark. The sun has set somewhere in west Long Beach. But not, I hope, on AJ Luke and his Jaguars, and not on Tua.