Cal’s White Gains Ground Despite Sitting Out 1st Year : Former Crespi All-American Tailback Says He’s Making Academic Strides in College, Claims High School Treated Him Too Leniently

Russell White never heard the accusation voiced, but the former high school All-American from Crespi High knew what many of his Cal classmates were thinking as he struggled through his first semester at Berkeley.

No one doubted White’s abundant skills on a football field, but many questioned his ability to carry the ball in the classroom.

“Nobody ever said anything to me but I knew what they were thinking, ‘You don’t belong here as a student,’ ” White said.

He could hardly blame them. As the leading rusher in state high school history with 5,998 yards, White never had any trouble with the record book. It was his school books that sometimes threw him for a loss. When he signed on at Cal last fall, he might have been tempted to add the initials SAT to his signature.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test proved more troublesome than any defense he faced in high school and supplanted yards rushing as his most discussed statistic. When he committed to Cal in February of 1989, he had yet to crack 700 on the test. When he enrolled at Cal that fall, he still hadn’t passed and lost his first year of eligibility under the guidelines of the NCAA’s Proposition 48. The stigma of Proposition 48 haunted and embarrassed him, White admits.

“All the questions about the SAT really bugged me,” said White, who has returned home to Van Nuys for a month. “It was like a cloud that followed me everywhere I went. Sometimes, I’d be sitting around watching TV at school and something would come on about the SAT. I would get embarrassed and feel all the eyes looking at me.”

But with his freshman year under his belt, White has come to a surprising conclusion. Entering college as a Proposition 48 student was the best thing that could have happened to him. It saved his academic career.

“At first I hated it,” he said about his academic standing. “But now I’m glad it happened. I missed football and it was painful to watch the games on those Saturday afternoons, but if I was playing my freshman year, I wouldn’t have had time for my studies. I probably would have flunked out.”

It seemed as if he was headed in that direction his first semester. He felt lost and confused, he said, ill-equipped to handle the academic load at a demanding university such as Cal. He also had lost an important form of self-expression and source of self-esteem. Previously, if he had stumbled through a rough time in the classroom, he could define himself as someone special on the athletic field.

“I didn’t have that assurance I always got from playing football,” he said. “Now, I was playing the other man’s game in the classroom, and in the first semester, I couldn’t play it at all. I started to second-guess myself and started to believe that people were right. Maybe I didn’t belong here.”

White declined to reveal his grade-point average for the first semester, saying only that it was “really bad.” The impulse to quit was tough to resist, he said, but a long talk at the semester break with his mother, Helen, helped send him back to Berkeley with a new resolve.

He enrolled in a student-tutorial program and every morning he punched in with school books in tow. From 9 to 5 each day, if he wasn’t there, he was in class.

“Russell felt the need and we saw him every day,” said Jere Takahashi, the director of Cal’s athletic study center. “Russell worked very hard and put in the effort.”

White has yet to receive his grades for the spring semester and must complete three units in summer school to regain his athletic eligibility. Still, he is confident that his grades will reflect his work habits. More important, he said, he has experienced a new sensation: academic zeal.

“For the first time in my life, I feel turned on to learning,” he said. “I feel like I’ve changed. I never used to read when I was kid. Now, anytime I have a free moment, I’m reading something. I’ve been on a high since I finished my exams because I feel like I really accomplished something. And I did it myself. Nobody handed me anything.”

That wasn’t always the case, White said, at Crespi, an all-boys parochial school in Encino that sends about 90% of its graduates to college. Many wondered how he could graduate from Crespi and still fail to score at least 700 on the SAT.

White denies that school officials conspired to give him passing grades merely to keep him eligible for football, but he faulted the faculty for an odd offense: excessive kindness.

“There was like an unspoken agreement that if I tried, and didn’t cause problems in class, I would get a C,” he said. “I don’t want to put all of the blame on Crespi because I deserve it, too. I would get a C and I wouldn’t work any harder. But I didn’t feel that I was prepared for a college like Berkeley.”

Crespi Principal Greg Gunn denies that any students receive preferential treatment and said that he was surprised by White’s complaint.

“I want to be adamant that with no student, Russell White or anyone, do teachers ‘give’ grades. Students earn their grades here,” he said.

Gunn also claimed that rather than embarrassment, Crespi officials felt only disappointment for White when he failed to meet NCAA academic requirements.

“We felt bad for Russell and bad for the school,” he said. “He’s almost a grown man and has a right to his opinion, but I think it was a positive experience for him at Crespi.”

To illustrate that point, Gunn pointed to White’s experience at Cal, which parallels his first year in high school. After a difficult freshman year at Crespi that included a failing grade in an English class, White never missed a game in his three-year varsity career because of academics.

“Maybe the bottom line,” Gunn said, “is that Crespi helped give him a sense of confidence and helped form a foundation that allowed him to go on to a four-year university like Cal and be successful.”

But for his part, White is giving away no credit. He claims that his success stems from his own hard work, an ethic he wants other high school athletes to espouse.

“I don’t want any of my friends to go through what I went through my first semester, so they should start hitting the books,” he said. “If you don’t, they’re going to take away your dream. It seems like that’s what the whole thing comes down to with sports and that’s the way it should be.”

His freshman year also has tempered his athletic goals, White said, even though he burns to erase the memory of his senior year at Crespi when he endured a disappointing season. He rushed for 1,379 yards, added 529 yards in receptions and scored 25 touchdowns, but many questioned his intensity and whispered that he lacked heart.

White disputes that claim but admits that it pains him to watch tape of himself, saying he sacrificed fundamental football values for showmanship.

“I don’t know how but I lost my love for football my senior year at Crespi,” he said. “I was just going through the motions. I wasn’t really playing. I was just showing off. I was more concerned about looking pretty. I wasn’t a football player, I was an entertainer.”

When he signed with Cal, White boasted that he wanted to win the Heisman Trophy--before his senior year. He still wants to play in a Rose Bowl game and hopes for a career in the National Football League. But if those goals elude him, White has a contingency plan.

“I definitely want to go to the Rose Bowl and play in the pros,” he said. “But if we have losing seasons at Cal and the NFL doesn’t pick me up, I’ll be in good shape with a degree from Cal. Everything balances out.

“I’m not saying I’m Mr. Perfect and I’m always going to get beautiful grades. But that stuff caught up to me on the SAT. It’s funny, they took my dream away from me for one year, but the way it worked out, I’m glad they did. Otherwise, who knows where I’d be?”