He Became Student of the Game : Football: White couldn’t play in ’89 because of Prop. 48. In the end, it helped the athlete, who didn’t say he had dyslexia.

As locker nameplates go, it isn’t much. There’s his jersey number, 4 , and then his last name, White . That’s it. Simple. To the point.

Yet, the first time Russell White saw it above the Cal football locker-- his --he almost broke down and wept. Almost.

“It hurt,” he said. “It was touching and I felt like crying. But I’m not going to cry.”

Tears, it seems, don’t come easily for White. If they did, he would have filled buckets by now.

No doubt a drop would have spilled each time someone snickered at his failed and much-publicized attempts at the Scholastic Aptitude Test--the dreaded SAT. White could score touchdowns, an amazing 94 of them while at Crespi High, but give him a No. 2 pencil and a test booklet and he couldn’t score much more than than the 200 points the SAT awards for correctly filling in your name.

Of course, White never told anyone he suffered from dyslexia. SAT? Try TAS.

Think of the tears he might have shed had he known what he was doing to his two favorite people, his mother and grandmother. White brought them joy, but he also brought them heartaches with his laziness and stubbornness, with being, well, a teen-ager.

There’s more. Over the summer, he talked to his father for the first time in 13 years. Roosevelt White left when Russell was 6.

“Are you proud of me?” Russell asked.

The answer was enough to cause an upper lip to quiver. Except Russell’s.

And this was the summer he made peace with his famous and occasionally notorious uncle, Charles White, who won a Heisman Trophy and everlasting fame at USC. Somewhere along the line, though, he lost a nephew. Until now.

A tear of joy from Russell? Never.

But hardest of all was a 1989 spent in academic purgatory, a year when White proved the SATs, his critics and his Van Nuys homeboys wrong. A year when he couldn’t play a down of football for Cal, couldn’t walk past Memorial Stadium without feeling isolated and empty.

Those days are over now. Russell White is whole again. He knew it the moment he saw that nameplate.

LETTER SWEATER HERO

Crespi High is an all-boys Catholic prep school in Encino, enrollment about 500 students. When White arrived there in 1985, he was the only black student. His cousin, former UCLA star Kermit Alexander, had helped arrange his admittance, all with the enthusiastic approval of Russell’s mother, Helen, who wanted, as mothers do, the best for her son.

It was a curious merger of student and school. White didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be at public school, where his friends were.

And Crespi officials weren’t quite sure what they had gotten themselves into. This is a school from which 98% of the graduates go on to college, about 75% of those to four-year universities. The average SAT score is 150-200 points higher than the national average.

And then there was White, who wasn’t exactly a National Merit Scholar candidate.

“What a lot of people fail to realize about Russell is that he entered Crespi significantly behind the majority of kids on an academic level,” said Bill Redell, Crespi’s former football coach. “Crespi recognized that.”

Joel Wilker, a history teacher at the time, was assigned to oversee the academic progress of various Crespi freshmen, among them White. Their first meeting had all the sizzle of an afternoon nap.

Wilker: “So, you’re Russell White.”

White: “Hi.”

White, against his will, was put into an environment as foreign as Paris. He was polite, shy, conscientious and scared.

“I knew I was going to have to work with him, work to get some words out of him,” said Wilker, now a vice principal at Crespi.

One thing was sure: There would be no need for an athletic adviser. White pretty much had that subject covered.

“It was like a man playing with boys,” Wilker said.

The first time Redell saw White touch a football was at a freshman scrimmage between Crespi and Thousand Oaks High. As defenders zeroed in, White snatched a bouncing punt and ran 85 yards for a touchdown. Redell, a former coach in the United States Football League, turned to an assistant and said, “Hey, this guy is going to bring us a (CIF Southern Section) Big Five championship one of these days.”

The legend of White grew each week. Crespi freshman games, once sparsely attended, began to attract bigger crowds. Word got out: Crespi had a player like no one else.

“Russell White was way ahead of his time,” Redell said. “He’s the finest high school player I’ve ever seen. And I said that before he played a (varsity) game at Crespi.”

Of course, all of this worried Helen White. When her son was 7 and playing in a clinic league, she saw him field a punt much the same way he fielded the punt against Thousand Oaks that day. With would-be tacklers only a few feet away, he grabbed the ball and “ran through them like a pinball,” Helen White said. “It made me wonder. It scared me. How does he have that instinct?”

In his first varsity game, he rushed for 150 yards and two touchdowns . . . in four carries. Another touchdown, a 75-yard run, was nullified by a clipping penalty. Coincidentally, it was Redell’s son, Bill Jr., the team’s center, who clipped on the play.

That was the same sophomore season that Redell and Crespi won 13 games and a Big Five championship. White gained an almost unthinkable 2,339 yards and scored 31 touchdowns.

“You couldn’t stop us,” White said. “We’d tell you where we were going to run the ball and you couldn’t stop us.”

At year’s end, Redell spoke with Ollie Wilson, a Cal assistant coach. The subject: White.

“Ollie, you better keep an eye on this guy,” Redell said. “He’s going to be something special.”

The next year, White gained 2,270 yards and scored 38 touchdowns as Crespi went 10-2-1. Every football recruiter in the country knew who White was. One high school scouting service boldly projected White as its national prep player of 1988, the next season.

Other scouting experts ventured a reasonable guess: White would eventually follow in his uncle’s footsteps and attend USC. Notre Dame and Washington were possibilities. Cal was a longshot.

Wilson knew different. He knew that Helen White wanted her son to get the best education possible, which is why Cal was still on the short list at the beginning of Russell’s senior season. In fact, in the spring of 1988, Wilson told his fellow Cal coaches, “I think we’re going to have a good shot at Russell White.”

The responses bordered on laughter.

White’s final season at Crespi was a disappointment, if you can describe 1,389 yards and 25 touchdowns as such. Two days before Crespi’s first game, White sprained his ankle so severely that he couldn’t put on his shoe.

By kickoff, the swelling subsided enough that team doctors gave White permission to play.

“But he wasn’t the same,” Redell said. “That was obvious. I don’t feel the ankle recovered the entire season.”

Despite the so-called off year, White finished his high school career with 5,998 yards, a state record. And it could have been more. Much more.

“If I had let him go, he would have doubled all of it,” Redell said.

It wouldn’t have mattered. White needed to double his SAT scores, not his rushing stats.

THE SECRET

“The SAT is a big deal, but you don’t want to let it scare you. Sometimes students get so nervous about doing well that they freeze up on the test and murder their scores. The best thing to do is to think of the SAT as a game.” --From the Princeton Review edition of Cracking the System A game? Whenever White took the SAT--and he took it at least four times--he did so with America looking over his shoulder. A White SAT watch had been established as the February football signing date approached in 1989. Reporters and recruiters wanted to know only one thing: Would he or wouldn’t he get the 700-point minimum required by the NCAA for academic eligibility?

More accurately, they should have asked, could he or couldn’t he?

Few people knew at the time that White suffers from dyslexia, which is an impairment of the ability to read. White, a C-student, was fine in a classroom or homework situation, where he could reread the material until it began to take shape in his mind. But place a stopwatch at his head and White struggled on tests, especially the pressure-packed SAT.

“At that time, I could sit there and read something to you and basically not know what I just read,” White said. “It was very hard. I didn’t really have control over it as much as I do now. I would read something. And read it again. And read it again. And still not understand what it was.”

Nines looked like P’s. Threes looked like E’s. D’s looked like B’s. And so on and so forth. After a while, White became frustrated and impatient while taking the three-hour test. He would read a paragraph or equation over and over, but still not comprehend its full meaning. As the minute hand did laps around the clock, he started guessing at answers. Each test was a disaster in itself.

“I honestly believe he didn’t realize how being dyslexic was really affecting (his test taking),” Helen White said. “The anxiety builds up. But as it is, I think he did OK, considering he was put on a time limit.”

Helen White considered petitioning SAT officials for an untimed test. According to SAT guidelines, a student suffering from dyslexia is eligible for a choice of Plan A, which is the test administered over a 4 1/2-hour limit; or Plan B, which allows 12 hours for the test to be completed.

“But what if I put him in that situation and it doesn’t pan out?” she said. “I don’t think I could ever forgive myself.”

So White flunked the three-hour tests. In retrospect, it may have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME

On Feb. 7, 1989, White announced that he would attend Cal.

“When he said ‘Cal,’ you could drop a pin and hear it,” said his mother, who was sitting next to him at the press conference.

Only about five days earlier, White was bound for USC. Never mind that the school said it wouldn’t accept White as a Proposition 48 player. To become eligible at USC, White would have to continue taking the SAT until he passed, or attend a junior college and earn an associate-of-arts degree.

“I was already wrapped up, sealed and delivered,” he said. “I was going to keep on trying to take (the SAT).”

But then White said he received a call from a USC assistant coach. The coach--White won’t say who it was--said he needed to know White’s decision immediately “because we got another guy coming in.”

Said White: “Go ahead and give (the scholarship) to him because I don’t have an answer for you right now.”

The next morning the assistant coach called again.

“Russ, we’ve still got that scholarship waiting for you,” he said sweetly.

“It’s too late now,” White said. “All you had to do was wait.”

So White chose Cal, a school that treats academics with reverence and football with casual indifference. Coach Bruce Snyder got the news from White, then walked into a meeting room where his assistants were assembled.

“Russell just called,” he said, looking directly at Wilson, milking the moment. “Congratulations.”

Wilson just grinned. He now says, as professionally as possible, that USC erred when it pressed for an early commitment from White.

“That’s not doing your homework,” he said. “In my mind, the way to approach Russell was not to pressure him.”

Helen White is less diplomatic.

“I really believe if USC hadn’t called him at school and given him an ultimatum, he would have been there now,” she said. “They know they let (a high) caliber of running back slip right through their hands.”

Maybe it was destiny. Remember that clinic league White played in? The team’s name was the North Valley Golden Bears.

Snyder’s decision to offer White a scholarship and the admissions office’s decision to accept a Prop. 48 student caused a spirited debate on the Cal campus. If nothing else, Cal’s faculty and students are passionate in their beliefs. In White’s case, the Cal administration was accused by critics of compromising academic standards. Others said it was about time exceptions were made.

Snyder wasn’t sure about White’s intentions until the latter stages of recruiting. During one conversation, he asked if White was committed to earning a degree from Cal. White said yes. Snyder asked if White planned to use Cal only for football. White said no.

“After that, I had no reservations,” Snyder said.

On the day White called and said he was coming to Cal, an athletic department official approached Snyder.

“Well, this is your lucky day,” the official said.

Snyder shook his head.

“No,” he said. “This is Russell’s lucky day.”

THE LONGEST YEAR IN HIS LIFE

For the first time since he was 7, White didn’t spend a fall playing football. NCAA rules prohibited White from receiving a playbook, attending team meetings or practices that weren’t open to the public, participating in workouts or team conditioning programs, even standing on the sidelines during games.

By design, White was just another Cal freshman trying to make the adjustment from somebody to nobody.

“And I’ve got the telephone bills to prove it,” Helen White said.

White said he thought Cal was going to be easy. He figured he’d concentrate on school, football and “social development”--girls--and not necessarily in that order. He arrived on the Berkeley campus thinking he was owed something, a mistake if there ever was one.

“I thought I could go around saying, ‘I’m the best in California as far as high school football is concerned,’ and there’s not one person who can say anything about it, because it’s true. But, I mean, you can’t do that.”

Now he knows. Last year, he spent his first semester at Cal in a semi-funk. He sulked about his non-playing status and he struggled with his studies.

So desperate was White for the chance to run with a football again, that he accepted a friend’s invitation to play in an intramural game one night. After several long and spectacular runs, a suspicious opponent confronted White.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“White,” he answered, “Lamar White.”

Lamar is White’s middle name. But the ploy didn’t work.

“Hey, I just wanted to see if I still had the moves and the touch to do it,” White said.

White returned home for Christmas vacation only to find that he had become a neighborhood curiosity. “You still at Cal?” his friends asked.

Some of these same friends dropped out of college themselves. White knew their stories. He listened to them complain about not getting along with the coach, which was often another way of saying they flunked out.

White decided that very day he would “shut some people up.” He would return to Cal, do better in school, rethink his priorities. Corny, but true.

Of course, White had his motivation. If he failed, he said, “I knew I’d have to face my mother.”

Helen White can do that to a person.

Once back at Berkeley, White visited the academic support services department, which knew about his learning disability from earlier testing, and requested that his tutoring time be increased. From nine to five, five days a week, White studied. The results were immediate.

“There’s this crystallization,” said Jere Takahashi, director of Cal’s support services. “That’s when that light bulb goes on and they begin to make decisions about the relevance of their education.”

White’s bulb took a semester to start flickering. Once it did, his grades improved, as did his attitude. He began to read more, “even though I have to read a sentence one more time.” Malcolm X and James Baldwin have become his favorite authors. White admits it would have been a mistake to combine football and college that first year.

“I don’t think I’d be here if I’d played that first semester,” he said.

FORGIVE AND FORGET

Russell White never knew his father. Instead, he is a momma’s boy and proud of it. He says that if he marries, “I want my wife to be exactly like my mother.”

But White still wonders about his dad. He always has. So one day over the summer, White spoke on the phone with his father, who lives in Eugene, Ore. It was an awkward conversation, but it was heartfelt.

“I just wanted to know if he was aware of what I was doing,” White said. “He’s my father and I wanted to know if he knew of my accomplishments over the years.”

He knew.

“When I found out you were going to Berkeley I thought you must be serious,” Roosevelt White said proudly that day.

Said Russell White: “The only way to be.”

The talk ended a few minutes later with father and son promising to chat again. After all, White has so many questions to ask.

“I would like to know him,” he said. “I think it would be good for me to know a person that I don’t know, but someone I still have to call ‘father’ or ‘dad.’ I never knew why my father would leave me. But as I grow up, get a little wiser, he might have had his reasons why. My mom and him just didn’t get along. It’s their two lives. I couldn’t hold that against him. What him and my mother went through is between them.

“But one of these days I’m going to ask him what were his reasons (for leaving),” he said. “I think I have a right to know. But I’m not going to be mad at him or anything.”

As it turns out, White did more than just reestablish contact with his father. He also met with his famous and sometimes infamous uncle, Charles, who won a Heisman at USC and an NFL rushing title with the Rams. In between, he also became addicted to drugs, a condition that Charles White has been overcoming only during the last four years.

The two were never close, though you wouldn’t have known it by the press clippings. Hardly a story was written that didn’t include, “Russell White, nephew of Charles White . . . “

“Every article you saw about Russell, here comes Charles’ name right behind it,” Helen White said. “I don’t want people to start looking at Russell as being like Charles. In actuality, he’s better. He was a negative role model for Russell.”

Maybe so, but in the summer of 1989, the two Whites met at last.

“I always thought he was upset at me because I didn’t go to Southern Cal,” Russell said. “But when we talked, he said, ‘I’m glad you didn’t go to USC because everybody would want you to be just like me.’

“That was touching.”

THE NEW AND IMPROVED WHITE

Dick Arbuckle, who coaches Cal’s receivers and special teams, pressed the play button on the VCR in his tiny office. Cal’s game against mighty Miami, the second game of the season, appeared on the screen.

“Watch this,” he said.

Miami kicks off. White catches the ball near the goal line, darts right, follows several crushing blocks, accelerates to midfield, cuts left, bounces off a shoulder tackle and then glides into the end zone, having returned the kick 99 yards for a touchdown.

Arbuckle played it again, this time from another view.

“Look at that,” he said, as a Miami defender fades from view. “He had the angle on Russ.”

In one of his first workouts last spring, a somewhat out-of-shape White ran the 40-yard dash in 4.38 seconds. Wilson, who was one of the timers, looked at his stopwatch in disbelief.

“Run it again,” he said.

White did. This time he crossed the line in 4.42 seconds. It would have been faster, White said later, but he was out of shape.

White never looks as if he’s running fast. There is no wasted movement, no exaggerated motions. His legs move, he’s gone.

Snyder, who is careful not to place unfair expectations on White, said his star recruit’s running style resembles that of Tony Dorsett or even Eric Dickerson.

“He’s smooth,” Snyder said. “The non-wasted motion can create an illusion.”

A 40-yard dash is one thing. A full-speed contact scrimmage is quite another. When White returned to action this fall, it was as if he had forgotten how to play.

“It’s still weird,” he said. “When I was out there practicing, I felt like I was stumbling all around the place. I was getting hit by college players. I remember thinking, ‘This is not what I did at Crespi. This is something different.’ ”

The sensation didn’t last long. Already this season, White, who backs up Anthony Wallace, leads Cal in scoring with four touchdowns. He gained 78 yards against Wisconsin in the season opener, ran the 99-yard kickoff against Miami and added 66 yards against Washington State last Saturday.

Against the Hurricanes in Cal’s home opener, White stood on the sideline, waiting for his chance to play. When he got in, a cheer was heard from the student section.

“Russ-ell! Russ-ell!” the fans chanted.

White smiled. A few moments later, freshman offensive guard Andy Gonzalez nudged White in the ribs and said, “Hey, Russ, your public awaits.”

White is doing what he can. A nagging thigh injury has limited his practice time.

“I’m almost there,” he said after the game at Washington State. “But it’s up to me.”

It always has been. His teachers said so. His coaches said so. His mother and grandmother said so.

At last, though, Russell White, the phenom who might have finally grown up, said so.

WHITE’S RUSHING STATISTICS AT CRESPI

Year Class Yards TDs 1986 Sophomore 2,339 31 1987 Junior 2,270 38 1988 Senior 1,389 25 Career 5,998* 94*

* State career records.