A Better Way : Steve Jennings Was Wrong When He Believed His Future Was in the NBA, and Now He Tries to Keep Others From Making the Same Mistake

On some windless summer nights in South Los Angeles, Steve Jennings stands beside the asphalt basketball courts at South Park.

He is not waiting to play, although there was a time when that was practically all he did. Now, he lingers on the sidelines, transfixed by the games of neighborhood buddies who play, hoping to escape, for a while, the hardships of poverty.

When the last shot ricochets off the wooden backboard, the playground becomes a chorus of chatter. Eventually, someone points toward Jennings and mentions that he once played against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The teen-age players turn, scrutinize Jennings, who is 44 but looks a good 15 years younger, and pepper him with questions.

Instead of waxing nostalgic, Jennings, 6 feet 1 and slight, responds: “How are your grades? Are you going to class? Are you 6 feet 9 with extraordinary speed?”

The youngsters get a dose of reality when all they want is a yarn or two about Abdul-Jabbar, then known as UCLA’s Lew Alcindor.

Jennings is not swayed. Although he once shared a court with Alcindor and other college stars, today they are worlds apart. Since leaving USC in 1969 without a degree or an NBA future, Jennings has been snared by the traps of Los Angeles’ roughest districts.

Jennings never made it out of the neighborhood. Twenty-two years later, he still is on the streets, hustling in pool halls or peddling T-shirts at sporting events. He still is striving for a piece of the good life he vividly remembers as a high-scoring starting guard at USC from 1967-69.

In many ways, Jennings embodies the despair and disillusionment of his South-Central Los Angeles community, whose emotional response to the Rodney G. King verdict triggered an avalanche of violence across the Southland last week.

A year ago, he said: “If things don’t change, this city is going to burn.”

Jennings watched the hellish two days of last week from the front window of his house. It was a different view than he had during the 1965 Watts riots, when he was on the streets getting a first-hand look of National Guard troops and violence.

Then, he was full of life. He was a year removed from Los Angeles High, where he had been Southern League player of the year. He was enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College, where he would lead the Metropolitan Conference in scoring his freshman season before transferring to USC.

Time changes a person.

When violence struck Los Angeles this time, Jennings said he could sense the displacement that might have triggered the outcry. He has not worked in years and lives with his mother, who suffers from a rare arthritic disease. His savings are depleted, and he is searching for a job, any job, but preferably something in sales.

“Something I enjoy,” he said. “It’s not about money. I had money. It didn’t make me happy.”

In the aftermath of the recent crisis, a small voice from deep inside said it was time to make a difference. Perhaps without realizing it, Jennings has been helping all along by talking to the youths at the playgrounds.

Jennings sees himself in their starry-eyed faces. He, too, once believed he was on the fast track to NBA stardom.

“He was one of the best JC guards I’d ever seen,” said Jerry Tarkanian, then Cal State Long Beach’s coach.

TRAVELING THE EASY STREETS

How he fell to such depths when the road looked so promising two decades ago is difficult to determine. Jennings is wont to blame “the system,” but no one can say for certain where it went wrong.

Although his mother, Matilda Billinger, emphasized education, Jennings never worried about academics. As long as his scoring average was high, he said, the system shuffled him through. At Valley College, for instance, he passed a first-year Spanish course without attending class.

“Everybody knew me and was doing everything to help me, which was wrong,” he said.

When it was time to take the final, he could not answer any questions. Out of embarrassment, Jennings waited for most of the students to leave before turning in the blank sheet. His instructor took him to another room.

“He said, ‘I heard you are going to USC?’ ” Jennings said. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, what grade do you need?’ I said, ‘B.’ ”

He got a B.

Jennings cannot recall the instructor’s name, but said he came to expect such favoritism in school until he entered USC. He almost flunked out his first semester.

“I thought I was somebody important,” he said. “I thought they would make sure that I would at least get the grades to be eligible that first semester.”

Then-coach Bob Boyd, in his first season, took Jennings aside and told him he would not return unless there was dramatic improvement with his grades. Jennings got the message. He registered himself the next semester, went to class and remained eligible. After three years he was about a year short of a business degree.

“He is a bright guy,” said Jim Hefner, a former Trojan assistant who recruited Jennings. “He could do pretty much what he wanted. He was that capable.”

TAKING A WRONG TURN

Hefner saw a world of potential, but Jennings saw only the NBA. As one of the Trojans’ best shooters, nobody could tell him otherwise, even though--Boyd says now--Jennings probably didn’t have the physical ability to play in the NBA.

Not even a severely sprained ankle suffered during a practice in his junior year persuaded Jennings to consider the alternatives. Ron Taylor, a 7-foot-1, 260-pound center, tripped and fell back on Jennings, who subsequently recovered and played well the rest of his college career. But he lost an edge. It may have been his NBA edge.

Jennings, one of the Trojans’ leading scorers, was drafted by the Phoenix Suns in the eighth round but

was cut.

Jennings said it was then he realized the importance of a degree.

He also wanted to complete his education because it meant so much to his mother, a retired bank employee

who earned a high school diploma by taking her young son to classes with her at Dorsey High after they had moved here from Ft. Wayne, Ind. Jennings has not seen his father since he was 3.

Jennings discovered that returning to USC was costly without a scholarship. He did not have the money to continue as a regular student. He asked Boyd, his old coach, what could be done. Jennings said the coaches recommended that he apply for a job at a steel plant instead of helping him return to school.

“Steve did have an opportunity,” said Boyd, who recently resigned as Chapman University’s coach. “The question is, why (did he fail to reach his potential)? I don’t know the reason.

“What was stopping a guy from going to Cal State Long Beach and getting a part-time job?”

Jennings has another perspective. He said the system was stacked against minorities who failed to make the pros. When players were given summer jobs, black athletes were hired for menial labor.

“I was lifting 50-pound bags of chemicals out of freight trains,” he said of one summer experience. “What kind of job training was that? What was I going to learn there that would help me with my future? What kind of contacts was I going to make?

“All the white (athletes) were at law firms or movie studios.”

Not true, Hefner said.

“Most of the people we got jobs for wanted the highest-paying jobs, and those were the ones of labor,” he said.

Dana Pagett, one of Jennings’ white teammates who today coaches Rancho Santiago College, said one summer he worked as an extra at a studio, but also once dug ditches, raked leaves . . . “whatever dirty job the boss didn’t want to do.”

Hefner understands the need to blame USC, but like Boyd, said the school and coaches are not responsible.

“You can’t totally blame other people or an institution, especially since he had a chance,” Hefner said. “I really like Steve, but the injury is something that can happen.”

For a while, Jennings accepted his circumstance. He worked at the steel plant, as suggested by Boyd, until a friend helped him find work in the sales department at Mattel Toys.

“I wasn’t going to waste my life on the playgrounds,” he said. “I’d seen a lot of other guys doing that.”

He forgot he ever said that. After 1 1/2 years at Mattel, he started competing in local leagues, started spending more and more time playing. He started believing he was an NBA-caliber player. His effectiveness at Mattel diminished, and he was let go.

Jennings asked the Portland Trail Blazers for a tryout but was rejected. Just like that, he was on the street again.

This time he had a plan. Jennings found a job for about six months--long enough to get terminated, collect unemployment and shoot baskets all day. Although a year earlier he had vowed not to waste his life on the playgrounds, the neighborhood courts were his home.

Jennings began night school twice, but “if somebody called, I was gone partying or playing basketball,” he said. He was living with friends around the city, taking odd jobs to earn enough to survive. This was not the way he had planned it.

LAST CHANCE

When it seemed he was headed into an abyss, Jennings found his niche in the business world by working in market research. As at Mattel, he fell into the job and did well. The polling business needed someone to penetrate the inner-city, and Jennings loved the personal contact with his neighbors. He stayed 3 1/2 years, until the company he worked for reorganized in 1977. It was a good run, but like everything else in his life, it did not last.

With nowhere to turn, he asked USC’s Hefner for help. Hefner suggested he return to the steel plant. Jennings dreaded the place but stayed seven years.

“By then I had given up,” he said. “I would eat my three meals a day and sleep.”

He stayed with friends because he did not have to pay rent. His friends used cocaine, he said, so for the first two months he spent most of his time in his room. Eventually, he joined the partying.

“It felt great,” he said.

Soon, he became addicted, spending his salary on drugs. Then one day he saw himself in the mirror and reflected:

“I could see my ribs. I wasn’t eating. I thought I was going to die.”

He entered a rehabilitation facility. About the same time, he left the steel plant and asked Hefner for help yet again.

Jennings said he was offered maintenance jobs on campus. Right or wrong, he was disgusted. He vowed never to ask his former coach for help again.

He walked out of the office, took what little money he had saved and bought drugs from an old neighborhood chum. He was not planning to use the drugs. This time, he was going for the Mercedes-Benz and gold chains.

“My first day on the street, I made more money in an hour than I did at the other jobs,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘I don’t care about (L.A. Police Chief) Darryl Gates. I would rather be in jail or dead. I’m tired.’

“My entire family are church people. I hated it, but I had some money.”

Jennings says he would still be selling if his grandparents had not died and left him with a house and some money. No question, his past embarrasses him. But at some level there is a sense of justification.

“They don’t understand what it is like to be unemployed for years,” Jennings said of those living on Los Angeles’ wealthy side. “They don’t understand being hungry, not getting an education, what really is going on in the home.

“The only way out is to sell drugs or steal. (We) don’t have a choice. Who in their right mind really wants to sell drugs?”

Jennings ponders these experiences and wonders if he would have been better off without USC, where he fraternized with football stars such as O.J. Simpson and Tody Smith.

“I could have settled for less,” he said. “I could have gone to the post office. That wouldn’t have been so bad.”

Despite the failures, Jennings’ voice resonates with hope. He was good at sales. Perhaps he can sell the inner-city youth on a better way. Jennings talks to the youngsters at the South Park and Crenshaw High playgrounds the way no one talked to him.

“I say, ‘Hey, kid, when you get out of (high) school, run down to that RTD and get that county job,’ ” Jennings said. “Go to the post office.”

Forget professional basketball unless the talent is undeniable.

Forget the easy money to be made selling drugs.

“Just don’t forget there is a better way,” Jennings said.