Cage Star Traded Guns for Gym : Slashed Face Shocked El Camino’s Kevin Mixon Into Life of Basketball

Instead of spending time in a gym shooting balls through a hoop and practicing dribbling, El Camino guard Kevin Mixon spent most of his youth vandalizing the streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

Mixon, 20, didn’t participate in youth basketball leagues as did a lot of his counterparts because he was preoccupied with gang fights, robbing neighborhood phone booths, breaking into warehouses and occasionally getting picked up by the police.

“I was involved with gangs since I was in elementary school,” said Mixon, who comes from a family of seven brothers and sisters. “I saw a lot of violence. It was cool to rob and stuff because the big guys did it. But I realized that the older you got, more guns were around and we got more destructive.

“I mean, we’d shoot dogs just for fun, just because we were bored and we had to do something. Or we’d go and beat up on guys in our street. It was crazy. I knew I wanted to get out for a long time, but it wasn’t that easy. You couldn’t just jump out of it. I think athletics was my personal savior.”

Mixon’s finale in the world of ghetto gangs came the day he received the thick pink scar beneath his left eye, clearly not the result of an elbow in the face while playing hoops. He got that during an altercation with a rival gang called The Bloods when he was in the ninth grade at Carver Junior High.

“That was it,” Mixon said. “That knife just came too close to my eye. I knew I had to get out. And you know those friends from when I was growing up, about 15 of them, most of them are in jail. A lot of them sell drugs.”

With the help of mother Flossie, Mixon took a different route. Now he scores points, lots of points. The 6-3 guard leads the No. 5-ranked Warriors (21-7, 6-2), who have clinched a tie for first place in the South Coast Conference, with a 19-point average. Next year he’ll play at the University of Oregon.

Mixon’s mother prefers to bury his past but says basketball has played a big role in his reform.

“He was just in with the wrong group,” she said hesitantly. “Now he plays ball all the time and it’s great. It’s kept him out of trouble.”

Violence is definitely a thing of the past for Mixon. He’s not the fist-clenching, screaming type who gets fired up even in the most intense of games. He’s a quiet, self-motivated guy who plays consistently and who can shoot the ball through the hoop from just about anywhere on the court.

“His shot is perfect,” said El Camino forward Zlatco Josic. “He’s got an automatic jump shot. When we need a shot real bad, we know he can get it because he’s a deadeye from the outside.”

El Camino Coach Ron McClurkin says that although Mixon has carried the team in scoring, his real strength is that he’s a complete player.

“People talk about his three-point shots,” McClurkin said, “but the key to Kevin is defense. Sure, he could go for 30 (points) in every game, but he shuts down the best guards in the league. The guys he covers never get their average when they play us.”

Mixon, whose nickname is “Top Gun,” considers scoring his specialty. He’s scored a minimum of 30 points in four games this season. He started the season with 30 against league rival Cerritos in the Fullerton Tournament and hit 38 against Rio Hondo at the Pasadena Tournament, which included 10 for 10 from three-point range. On Wednesday he scored a game-high 30 in El Camino’s 91-75 victory over Long Beach.

“Now I play at ease,” Mixon said. “I don’t feel any pressure. I know when to shoot, I know when to dribble, and I have confidence. I really have confidence.”

Confidence was lacking in Mixon’s freshman season. He started with strong performances that earned him a starting spot, but later faltered.

“He had about 10 good games,” said McClurkin, who was Paul Landreaux’s assistant at the time. “He scored about 35 in the 10th game and the next night they shut him down. There was a big change after that. He lost confidence and never got it back.”

Mixon says he was like a robot who wasn’t sure what the duties of an off-guard were since he hadn’t play the position in high school.

“I was known for, ‘When the pressure comes on, you can’t count on Kevin,’ ” he said. “I know that my friends and coaches were disappointed in me. I let them down, and I took that to heart. That’s why I dedicated this season to myself.”

Mixon redshirted last season for academic reasons and it benefited his game. He came back stronger, with assurance and a lethal outside shot that was perfected by spending hours in the gym shooting 200 to 300 balls from the perimeter.

His coach at Jefferson High, Wendell Greer, introduced him to the shooting marathons. After two mediocre seasons at Taft High, Mixon transferred to Jefferson so that he could play for Greer. The two met while Mixon attended summer school at Jefferson before his senior year.

During that time they spent about three hours a day working on shooting drills, then Mixon would shoot for two more hours on his own.

The work payed off. As a senior at Jefferson, he averaged 17 points a game, was the team most valuable player and an all-league selection. The Democrats won the PAC-6 League title and made it to the semifinal of the City 3-A tournament.

“Kevin is a very hard worker,” said Greer, who coaches at Hollywood High now. “He’s also a hard player. In high school he didn’t have a lot of skill, but he got a lot out of what he had. He had a lot of self-motivation and he became a great player.” Now he’s the Warriors’ personal savior.