Collier Able to Show His True Colors at Cal : Football: Former Taft star leaves gang activity behind and develops into a top-flight linebacker.

Cornell Collier is from South-Central Los Angeles, and his color is blue. He wears his color with pride and is likely to attack his enemies in red.

Well, his enemies in cardinal, actually. Forget about Crips and Bloods; Collier, at 6-feet-2, 220 pounds, has made his gang the Bears. That’s the California Bears, and it’s the cardinal of Stanford and USC that he’s learning to loathe.

Collier stayed on the periphery of gang activity as a teen-ager. He graduated from Taft High and now plays linebacker for Cal. Although he has not always discouraged such perceptions, he bristles at portrayals of his Adams Street neighborhood as an urban battleground.

“I didn’t like that at all,” Collier said of newspaper accounts that portrayed his journey to Cal as an escape from gang and drug mayhem in L. A. “Because it made my friends seem like they were criminals and hoods, and they weren’t. Many of them are relatively smart but didn’t have anyone there for them. . . . You’ve got gang-banging, but you’ve got that in the Valley also. It’s what you see in a neighborhood. I see it as any American neighborhood.”

The South-Central area isn’t exactly “Our Town,” but one San Francisco writer went so far as to call it an “antisocial milieu.”

“Cornell Collier rattled off names of friends killed by Los Angeles gangs,” another newspaper article began.

“I guess there were seven guys that got it,” Collier said in the story. “After a while you just get used to it.”

It’s all true, but it’s also true that Collier grew up in an impeccable little home located in the back yard of his great-grandparents’ house on a relatively quiet street of working-class family homes.

Stereotypes crumble around Collier. Despite taking honors classes at Taft, he had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test three times to exceed the Proposition 48 requirement of 700. Yet, in his freshman year at Cal, he compiled the highest grade-point average among his class of scholarship football players.

Collier’s neighborhood contains the same contradictions and seems more a slice of life from the caring, communal, if sometimes violent, world of “Do the Right Thing” than the urban lunacy of “Colors.”

Therefore, Cal Coach Bruce Snyder suggested to Collier that he soften his portrayal of his home. Accentuate the positive in dealing with the press, Snyder told him, and talk about where you’re going instead of where you’ve been.

Collier has seen violence, but he also has known a lot of love, both at home and in the Valley. Some of his friends are in jail or dead, but he seldom talks about it.

“For me, my home neighborhood is nice people caring about each other,” Collier said. “I know a lot of gang members, and I get along with everyone. Plus, I play football, and they know it. I could walk anywhere and be all right.”

Adams Street is relatively gang-free, but the Bloods and Crips rule the streets around Collier’s home.

“I’m my own man,” he said. “I do what I want.”

Still, Deloris Brown, Collier’s mother, worries when her son returns home. She fears not only the gangs but also the police. When Collier was a high school senior, Brown said, he was accosted and handcuffed by police as a robbery suspect. Fortunately, the victim quickly exonerated Collier.

After a firsthand crash course in urban neighborhood law, Collier experienced an epiphany when he read Clarence Darrow’s “Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail,” at Berkeley.

“That was one of the best short stories I’d ever read because it’s about how society views laws and how the people in jail are the victims,” said Collier, a junior with two years of eligibility remaining. “It makes you think.”

Numerous universities recruited Collier, but he chose Cal (3-6 overall, 1-5 in Pacific 10 Conference play) for its academic opportunities.

“I take as many courses as I can,” said Collier, who has decided to major in the political economy of industrial societies after initially leaning toward rhetoric.

Brown said that she originally didn’t want her son to attend Cal “because I really thought Cornell was going to be goofing off, but Cornell proved me wrong.”

Brown wanted Collier to attend San Diego State. “I figured if anything should go wrong, if Cornell should goof off at San Diego State, he could catch up, but he could not at Berkeley.”

Collier has eschewed traditional jock courses and still managed to stay off academic probation. He is taking European history, microeconomics, statistics and political economics.

“I know there are some base scores and GPAs that are real important,” Snyder said of Cal’s admissions process. “But what we look at are work habits, attention to detail and ambition, and I think those are great indicators of success. . . . The thing I was so impressed with was that Corny got up so early in the morning and took the bus to the Valley and played sports and still did as well as he did.”

The most valuable defensive player of the Sunset League his senior year, Collier also started at tailback and gained 630 yards.

“He was definitely a defensive player,” said Tom Stevenson, who coached Collier at Taft. “He was not a finesse runner. He’s what we call a head-snapper. There’s a different sound when he hits someone. It’s not a powder-puff; it’s a shotgun.”

Although he also played basketball, Collier wasn’t commuting to the Valley for athletics. Identified as a gifted student in grade school, Collier started at Francis Parkman Junior High in Woodland Hills as a seventh-grader. He moved on to Taft rather than go to Manual Arts or Jefferson.

Collier, the prom king his senior year, wasn’t always master of all he surveyed at Taft. An easygoing person who nonetheless has a quick temper, Collier had an altercation with a bus driver as a junior. He was faced with losing his bus privileges when he met Sandy Collins, then the coordinator of the busing program at Taft.

“Sometimes there are some kids you just spot,” Collins said. “You know there’s something there. They’re just not achieving it.”

According to Collier, Collins “tricked” him into carrying a heavier, college-preparatory schedule.

As a sophomore, Collier also developed a friendship with Taft teammate Darren Finestone, and he spent most of his senior year with Finestone’s family rather than commute to Los Angeles.

“This way he would be able to spend a little more time on his studies,” said Terry Finestone, Darren’s father. “He just became part of the family.”

They still talk twice a week on the phone.

It’s an odd match, this Jewish family from New York and a young black man from the heart of Los Angeles, but Terry Finestone says, “Barbara and I love him,” and Collier says, “We don’t see a color. It doesn’t matter to us.”

The Finestones are Collier’s “Valley family,” and he has more “family” than most Mafia bosses.

“They were always there to keep an eye on me,” Collier said of his natural family. “My family is kind of weird because my aunts and uncles live close by and would keep an eye on us. We’re really close-knit.”

The family still keeps a close eye on Collier from the stands of Memorial Stadium. This year, they’ve had an eyeful.

After missing the second half of the game against Miami and all of the game against Wisconsin because of an injured hamstring, Collier had three sacks, five tackles for losses and a safety--Cal’s first since 1986--in a 26-21 victory over San Jose State.

“He adds an element of speed to our defense that really helps,” said Denny Creehan, the Cal outside linebacker coach.

Somewhat small for a linebacker, Collier has taken advantage of his 4.6 speed in the 40-yard dash to record 12 tackles for losses and a team-leading 5 1/2 sacks. Collier shares time with DeWayne Odom and Dan Slevin but earned a start three weeks ago against Washington when Odom was injured.

Recently, Collier dreamed he was playing for the New York Jets. Some think professional football might be more than a fantasy for Collier, although he has set his sights on law school or another type of graduate school.

“It’s not a hope or a goal,” Collier said of pro football. “I wouldn’t go to the NFL if I could get a job making just as much money. I like football, but I don’t make it my life.”

It might take the color of money to make Collier change his colors, but as a Cal graduate, he’ll always be an “Old Blue” at heart.