RECEIVER’S REPRIEVE : 15 Months After Serving a Prison Sentence, CSUN’s Keith Wright Resumes Football Career

Watch Keith Wright and wonder.

Sprint. Fake. Cut. Catch. Is it possible for a person to make the job of a wide receiver look any easier?

When he’s at the top of his game, Wright is a bona fide professional football prospect. The numbers indicate it, and the naked eye confirms.

Fast, fluid, and confident to the point of being strangely miscast as a Division II player, Wright should be running post patterns before tens of thousands of cheering fans at Stanford or Miami, not throwing downfield blocks in Cal State Northridge’s ground-oriented attack.

He is not there because of grades. He was academically eligible to go just about anywhere he wanted. Neither was he overlooked playing at little ol’ Podunk High. Wright played smack-dab in the middle of the big city, first at Verbum Dei, and then at Harbor College.

The truth be told, Wright has no good excuse.

At Harbor, he set a national junior college record for receiving yardage in a season. He was on the recruiting list of every major college with a fly pattern in its play book, and when he finally signed a letter of intent with his hometown favorite he announced, “I think I can be the leading receiver ever at USC.”

Those expectations came to an abrupt halt, however, on June 12, 1984, the day Keith Wright was sentenced to prison.

When he signed a letter of intent with USC in December, 1982, Wright talked of appearing in the Rose Bowl.

The Trojans had been declared ineligible for bowl games the following year because of NCAA infractions, but Wright was already boldly predicting a Pacific 10 Conference championship and a date in Pasadena on New Year’s Day, 1985.

His prophecy was right on target, except he didn’t play in the game. He watched it on television from the Green Valley Conservation Camp, a minimum-security prison near Sacramento.

On April 16, 1984, a jury found Wright guilty of robbing a San Pedro fast-food restaurant where he once had worked. Almost $1,100 was taken in the holdup and an employee was hit over the head with a pellet gun.

Wright testified that the charges were the result of a conspiracy between a restaurant employee whose former girlfriend he had dated and a man living across the street from the restaurant who was hired within two weeks of Wright’s conviction.

It was not Wright’s first appearance in court. He had been convicted four times since age 12 on charges ranging from petty theft to forgery.

He was placed in a state diversion program once, and put on probation the other three times.

Sitting on a bench outside the Northridge locker room on a humid day, Wright, 23, seemed perfectly comfortable talking about his past. He does not, however, relish the opportunity to discuss the time he spent behind bars. He says simply that it forced him to grow up.

He maintains his innocence in connection with the 1983 robbery that sent him to prison but expresses no bitterness. That, he said, is in the past.

“Outside of your job assignment--and eating and sleeping--there’s plenty of time to think,” Wright said. “I did a lot of that.”

That’s it. He says no miraculous turnaround took place inside his cell.

“I had a lot bottled up inside of me for about a year,” Wright said. “I wasn’t able to say, ‘Let’s go forward,’ without looking back. I was very bitter then and it wasn’t until I got over that that I could concentrate on what was in front of me.”

Asked to speak specifically about lessons he learned in prison, Wright said, “I’d really prefer not to talk about it at all--to anyone. It’s over. It’s in the past. It’s best for me to deal with it that way.”

The biggest fear he had, Wright said, was becoming like many of the men he met behind prison walls.

“There were a lot of guys who did nothing but talk about what they could have done or should have been doing,” Wright said. “I didn’t want to be one of those people. That scared me more than anything.”

Some of his problems, he said, can be attributed to the environment in Compton, the city in which he grew up. “I was from a rough neighborhood. There were pressures you receive from your peers,” he said. “I grew up in a single-parent family with two younger sisters I was asked to look out for. Hanging out with the guys was my way of rebelling.

“You just hope you grow out of it soon enough . . . before there’s no hope of getting back.”

His mother, Lorraine Wilson, said Wright was a “rough and tough” youngster whose love for football was matched only by his distaste for helping with household chores.

“He wasn’t rebellious,” she said. “He just hated chores.” Her concerns grew, however, after Keith signed with USC.

“That’s when he got the big head,” she said. “He wasn’t the Keith that I knew. I’d try and talk to him, but I don’t think he really heard me.”

Wright became academically ineligible after his first semester at USC and never played for the football team. “I had tunnel vision,” he said. “I was a guy who just wanted to play football. School I could live without.”

Two years in a jail cell had a dramatic effect on his priorities.

“I would see guys playing on TV who I played in front of in junior college,” he said. “I saw SC go to the Rose Bowl. It was like, ‘I should be out there.’ But at the same time I didn’t want to think, ‘All you had to do was go to school, get your grades up.’ I didn’t want to look back and dwell on water under the bridge. I wanted to put it behind me.”

George Swade chuckles at the memory of Wright in a Harbor Seahawks uniform, leaping in the air, defenders draped over him, arms outstretched, catching yet another pass.

“They double-teamed him and two-and-a-half teamed him and we still threw Keith the ball,” said Swade, who was the Harbor coach. “I had some good receivers at Harbor, guys who played in the pros, but he did more for us than any of them.”

Wright’s statistics--76 catches for 1,770 yards his sophomore season--were startling enough, but even more striking was the apparent ease with which those numbers were compiled. Whatever the gain, there was little strain. Or so it seemed.

“He’s smoooth, “ said Northridge Coach Bob Burt, a man who perhaps has yet to see the 6-1, 180-pound junior at his best.

Oh, but he will, Wright promises. And soon.

It has been only 15 months since Wright was released from prison on parole after serving half of a four-year sentence.

It has been five years since his record-setting season at Harbor.

But the feeling--a state Wright decribes as if it were a religious experience--is starting to return.

“There was a time,” he said, “when I had the confidence that I could do whatever I wanted to do on the football field. It’s like catching the ball becomes an extra sense and everything you touch turns to gold.

“It is very hard to explain. People will say, ‘How did you do that?’ And you have no explanation. Done what? It’s just second nature. You’ve done it so . . . many . . . times.”

That feeling was absent when Northridge opened summer practice less than two months ago. “Football is not like riding a bike,” Wright said. “There are certain things you have to work on every day. I was away from the game for a while.”

The techniques he yearned to polish have returned more quickly since his first reception in a game--a 41-yard pass from reserve quarterback Sherdrick Bonner in the second half of Northridge’s 45-0 victory over San Francisco State a month ago.

“I felt like a guy playing in his first game,” Wright said. “Then, when I caught that ball, the feeling was so familiar, so reassuring. I don’t even remember catching the ball, or how I landed or where anyone was.

“When you see the ball coming and you prepare to make the catch you don’t say, ‘OK, it’s above the waist, so thumbs down--you don’t go through the technicalities. It’s just natural. It rolls to you. That’s the way it should be. I’m not there yet, but I feel it coming. Every practice, every game, things are coming back to me.”

Wright’s options were limited when he left prison in June, 1986. He had exhausted his Division I eligibility with five years of inactivity. From the time athletes enroll in college full time, they have five years to complete four years of eligibility.

He had been able to stay in shape by running and lifting weights, but the faculties for playing wide receiver partially had rusted away.

Wright considered going to Mississippi Valley State, a predominantly black Division II school noted for its passing game. Jerry Rice of the 49ers went there and Wright had intended to do likewise until Ken Lesure, a former teammate of his at Harbor who plays outside linebacker for Northridge, talked him into calling Burt.

Wright explained his situation to Burt, who responded with a recruiting pitch in stark contrast to the ones he had heard while at Harbor.

“He told me what was expected of me and that he didn’t care what had happened in the past as long as I did the right things here,” Wright said. “That was all I needed to hear.”

Said Burt: “He was a walk-on who wanted a chance. The only things I looked at were his transcripts and AA degree. I didn’t talk to anyone about what type of player he was because it didn’t make a difference. If he came out and did a good job, great, and if he didn’t, he was given the chance he asked for.”

Wright is making the most of the opportunity. His performances have not yet paralleled those at Harbor, but when frustrated he thinks about how lucky he is to be playing at all.

“I know what it’s like to be out of the game when you really want to play,” he said. “That in itself is a great driving force.” On the field, and in the classroom.

Wright, an economics major, said getting a degree is his primary concern, although he hasn’t ruled out a professional football career.

“I wasn’t whole before,” he said. “The athlete was always there, but everything else was nonexistent. I was growing physically, but mentally my growth was stunted.”

This is the kind of talk that has made Wilson proud of her son again.

“What he went through I wouldn’t wish on anybody,” she said. “But he’s a better person because of it. I always believed he was innocent so that’s probably why I can say that. I’m just happy that he learned a lesson and didn’t die in the process.”

In Northridge’s game against Cal Lutheran last week, Wright had two catches, one for a 37-yard touchdown. Against Cal State Hayward the week before, he had four catches, two for touchdowns covering 29 and 30 yards.

In four games he has nine catches--five for touchdowns.

Against Cal Lutheran, he played against double coverage and still managed to make a leaping catch between defenders at the goal line. Against Hayward, Wright twice had defenders doing pirouettes as touchdown passes floated past them and into his hands.

“I’m starting to feel much more comfortable,” he said.

But there is still improvement to be made.

“Right now, grading myself as far as me playing to my ability is hard for me to do,” he said. “If the coaches say it was a good job, then, OK, it was a good job. But if they say, ‘Hey, that was really great,’ then I say, ‘Come on, man, that wasn’t great,’ because I know what I’m capable of doing and I haven’t done anything great out here. Yet.”