Drug Money--Selling Out of a Generation : How Do You Keep Them in School When There’s Big Bucks on Street?

“It used to be, athletics were the way out of this environment for a young black . . . . Nowadays, why the hell worry about it? Why spend time in college for four years, to get out of college and make thirty, forty thousand dollars a year when some of these kids are making six, seven thousand dollars a week selling cocaine?”

-- WILLIE NIXON, Los Angeles Police Dept. school officer

Athletics can provide a way out of the inner city, says Reggie Morris, the basketball coach at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.

Athletic talent can lead to a college scholarship and, sometimes, to a professional sports career. Even discounting the pro career, though, a college education figures to give a young man or woman a wider choice of careers than can be found in the inner city.

This, apparently, is not attractive enough anymore.

Byron Scott, the starting Laker guard who graduated from Morningside in Inglewood in 1979, notices this too.

“I think they’re discouraged,” Scott said. “In ‘79, we looked at sports as a way out of the ghetto. You know, to make it, to buy your mother and father the things they’ve always wanted.

“I think kids today look at it pretty much the same way, but they don’t want to work at it. They want to find the quick money and sell drugs.”

The arrival of cocaine and crack, its derivative, as economic elements in the inner city has realigned values, according to administrators and coaches. From this has sprouted a new materialism, Morris said, and it transcends the discipline and dedication needed to pursue athletics. Money is the idol.

THE $1,000-A-WEEK ALTERNATIVE

Gang emblems or colors are strictly prohibited at Manual Arts High, but Reggie Morris wears colors of his own.

His sweater, a conservative gray V-neck, is adorned with various buttons, one an international circle-slash--meaning no --around block letters reading “GANGS.” A gold cross hanging from a chain is conspicuously exposed outside his collar. All are part of the Reggie Morris alternative. He wants youngsters to see him as a walking, living example that a clean life in the inner city is possible.

“I try to use myself as another example,” Morris said. “Another person who is alive today because he’s stayed away from drugs.”

Apparently, few on the Manual Arts campus subscribe to Morris’ philosophy. Flashiness is prevalent. Exotic cars are parked around the grounds.

Morris can offer himself, his City basketball titles in 1977 and ‘81, his coach-of-the-year awards, his intelligence and understanding, his time and his patience.

All of that brought just 11 of the roughly 1,200 male students at Manual Arts out for the varsity basketball team last season.

“It’s not just affecting athletics, it’s affecting education,” Morris said.

“How do you combat someone that will come up to us with literally two, three thousand dollars in their pocket, driving a Mercedes or a BMW, at 16, 17 years old?”

At Locke High in Watts, where the parking lot also was dotted with expensive-looking cars, the same holds true, according to E. C. Robinson, the football coach.

“Right now, I know of five kids who could be starting on the football team, but they’re out selling drugs,” Robinson said. “They will tell you, ‘Hey, I make just as much money as you do.’

“You see kids riding around in new cars. You’d be surprised. I know a (former player) who’s not playing now that’s got a brand new Mercedes.”

Detective supervisor Robert K. Jackson of the Los Angeles Police Dept.’s gang section said that although those gangs that are predominantly Latino have remained “traditional”--still primarily concerned with “turf” control--black gangs of South-Central Los Angeles have turned to drug trafficking as their primary activity.

“Members of those (black) gangs are selling the drugs, there’s no doubt about that,” Jackson said.

The Lakers’ Michael Cooper, who spends much of his free time speaking to youngsters, said: “If you do it the drug way you can be the boss. I think kids are falling prey to that because it is the easy way out. Or the easy way up, shall we say.”

Said Willie Nixon, LAPD officer assigned to Manual Arts: “You sit them down and you tell them about how much better off they’ll be if they have an education, and an education will cost them $15,000 a year, and the only way they’re going to get that education is through sports.

“It’s hard as hell to do that when the kid has $3,000 in his pocket.”

Ernie Carr, athletic director at Dominguez High in Compton, said: “Kids in our community are softer, more apathetic. You’d think that coming from a poorer, minority community, they’d be more motivated to change their environment.

“The process of education is not as appealing as when I was in high school 20 years ago.”

Willie West, who has won City and state championships as basketball coach at Crenshaw, agrees.

West said that lack of discipline--developed through constant exposure to drug-related money--keeps some prospective athletes away.

“They tend not to want to go through the rigors of physical workout, the discipline,” West said. “I think a lot of other guys who possibly could or would be good athletes have chosen to be sellers of various things to make money, other than staying out there and playing sports.”

Roland Houston, dean at Manual Arts for 22 years, said that in his time there, gang and drug activity had increased dramatically while sports was declining at nearly the same rate. A fundamental lack of discipline is to blame for that, Houston said.

“If there’s one basic characteristic gang members have, it’s lack of discipline,” Houston said. “If they were disciplined, they would take over the city.”

In some cases, money has brought the drug dealer prominence and a new role as the big man on campus.

“It used to be, ‘You’re going to go to college, you’re going to be somebody and you’re going to make it,’ ” Morris said. “Here’s a guy who’s 16 years old with money in his hand, who says: ‘I’ve made it! I don’t need education, I don’t need basketball.’

“It used to be, ‘I gotta make the team! I gotta make the team! I get a girlfriend if I make the team.’ I used to have to cut guys because they weren’t good enough. The days of having 80 guys try out and having problems with that are over.”

When do kids develop the role models and attitudes toward sports that they carry with them into high school and beyond?

Coaches say it’s in junior high school. And in Los Angeles junior highs, sports programs have become virtually nonexistent. Also in L.A. junior highs, gangs recruit.

BUILDING BLOCKS AND COCAINE ROCKS

“Gangs used to not be so bad in the junior high schools,” Robinson said. “But now, by the 10th grade, it’s too late.”

Det. Jackson agreed. “By the time they get to high school, they’ve been inundated by gang activity,” he said. “Their attitude is ‘What’s in if for me?’ ”

The Lakers’ Scott said that kids choose gangs or athletics between the ages of 14 and 16.

“A lot of kids in the community got involved because they thought it was something cool,” Scott said. “But in a lot of gangs in L.A., there’s no way out. The only way out is death. That’s the way it goes.”

Ed Woody, former Jordan football coach, agreed, partially.

“Many of the kids are in gangs when they’re in junior high school so you really have to redirect their thought,” he said.

He also said, however, that in some cases such redirection was possible, noting that he has had numerous athletes who were gang members when they got to Jordan, then dropped out of the gangs to participate in sports.

“They really haven’t been to high school, where they have sports,” Woody said. “You have to redirect the energy they have, into sports.”

Jeff Engilman, former football coach at Manual Arts and now in charge of security there, said that such cases were not common. “By the time we get them, sometimes they’re so influenced, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Morris said he used to approach possible athletes, who looked as if they might be gang members, about playing basketball, but no more.

“If I see the guy who is 6-7, with the hat, with the dress, with the (gang) look, he’s not going to want to conform,” Morris said.

Because of gang exposure at such early ages, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) programs, co-sponsored by the police department and the school district, are presented in each of the district’s intermediate and elementary schools.

Heavy gang exposure is also why Morris gives his “There Must Be Alternatives” assemblies to student groups of all ages.

Promoting sports as an alternative to gang membership and drugs apparently must be done at an early age, or the imprinting of the junior high school years is likely to override whatever “positive brainwashing” can later be achieved.

THE OTHER 15 HOURS

“He should have been home in bed; it was way past his bed time.”

--Crenshaw basketball Coach Willie West, on Troy Batiste, shooting victim and basketball player.

Troy Batiste, a guard on Crenshaw High’s 1986 state championship basketball team, was shot in the leg by three carloads of gang members in front of a fast-food restaurant last July. Police later explained the shooting as an apparent case of mistaken identity. But it occurred at 3:15 in the morning.

School people--teachers, administrators, coaches--can only influence students during school time, nine hours a day at most, including time on the athletic field.

What happens after that, and during vacation time, is, in the words of Engilman, “totally out of our control.”

And that is a huge part of the problem.

“If I could keep them for 20 hours a day, I would,” said Morris, who added that there’s never enough “positive brainwashing” to offset the bad influences of the environment.

“I’ve known a kid that’s in prison right now that could have been a top-notch player,” Engilman said. “This kid was 6-5, 245. He could not stay out of the gangs. I would talk to him and talk to him, and everything at school would look OK, and he would straighten up for two weeks. Then back again.

“See, while they’re here, I can control them, I can watch them. I have absolutely no control over what happens when they walk out of here.”

In the ideal situation, parental influence takes over when kids leave school for the day. Unfortunately in the inner city, there is no parental influence in many cases.

“That’s the problem--they have no parental support whatsoever,” Engilman said. “You deal with some of the parents and it’s just ridiculous.

“Some of (the students) don’t even have parents. Some of them live with their grandparents. That route is shut out right there.”

Still, educators keep trying because there are times when “it does work,” Engilman said.

Locke’s Robinson said: “In this particular area, a lot of kids have only one parent, and a lot of times it’s the mother. At night, she can’t control those two kids and the two little kids at home.

“I talk to all my kids’ parents at least once a week. I let them know about the books and their grades, or I feel like they’re beginning to hang with the wrong crowd. If I didn’t call the parents once a week now (in the spring), we wouldn’t have a team in September.

“Once you call all the parents, they see where you are concerned. For good or bad, they’ll get on that kid.”

An allegedly gang-related shooting that wounded a track and field athlete and another student March 2 on the Cerritos Valley Christian campus was the result of an off-campus confrontation between students and gang members at a pizza parlor.

“It was very much an eye-opener,” said Todd Holstege, Valley Christian track and field coach. “We had some very good chapels at school about this, and how we, as Christians, should act out in society to try and work against these kind of things.

“Especially off campus, when we (coaches) are not around. We were thinking we were protected from the outside world realities. So I think it kind of burst our bubble and made us realize where we are and what is happening (around us).”

The duel of influences, as it were, makes it difficult for a student to develop a balanced life style, West said.

“Because of where they live, more or less the kid has to be a type of schizophrenic--he’s got to live one life at school and live another life when he gets home,” West said.

“He has to be one person at school, and then he has to switch back. And a lot of kids quit playing because they just can’t deal with that. It’s tough.

“It takes a very strong person to break away from that. I’ve heard coaches tell kids living that kind of life that they don’t know if they’ll see them the next day or not.”

Morris hopes the energy of his message, at least, will carry over into the other 15 hours.

“In these assemblies, I’m saying ‘I don’t know you but I care about you,’ ” Morris said. “I can keep them for eight hours a day, positive brainwashing for eight hours.

“But once they get out on the streets, man, society’s a mother .”