Return to the Trenches : Once a Top Recruit, Fix Resumes Career as Pierce Defender

He’s back. For those who doubt it, check the numbers. Not the tackles, the penalties: Three personal fouls against Ventura. Three more a week later against Moorpark.

Justin Fix, Pierce College’s freshman nose guard, inspires more flag-waving than a political candidate on the campaign trail.

“There’s a classic way to play hard-nosed, clean-cut football,” Fix says. “I know the hard-nosed part, but the clean part I never learned. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.”

From 1986 through 1988, when he played football for Canyon High, Fix whipped teammates into delirium with profanity, spit and the frenzied pace of his own relentless attack.

He was unconventional and uncontrollable, a man-child with a short fuse and an explosive mean streak. Ejected once from a playoff game for throwing a punch, Fix spiked his helmet so hard against the turf that it bounced above his head.

Harry Welch, Fix’s coach at Canyon, admits he was both thoroughly frustrated and completely captivated by Fix. Major-college coaches loved him. Representatives from USC, UCLA, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Georgia, Washington and Washington State hurried to recruit him.

Yet their efforts were as futile as those of opposing blockers, who were sent at Fix in waves. He simply beat back their challenge.

With his heart set on recapturing what he felt was an adolescence lost, Fix spurned college scholarship offers. After his senior season, he walked away from football, a final defiant act.

There had been so much pressure, so much training, so many rules and sacrifices. And for what? To quit when the payoff arrived? There were those who questioned Fix’s sanity.

“A number of guys would have killed for a chance like he had,” says Jason Stanley, a former teammate at Canyon who plays at Cal State Fullerton. “People were like, ‘What is this guy thinking? Is he crazy?’ ”

And so, four years after the autumn of his discontent, Fix sits on a dilapidated sofa in a coaches’ lounge at Pierce and looks back at his tumultuous past with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.

Though 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, he is not particularly imposing. He is 21 and the tuft of blond hair from his high-school days has grown past his shoulders. He sports an earring in his left ear and vindication in his heart.

“I know I did the right thing,” he says. “Definitely.”

Fix, The Times All-Valley Lineman of the Year in 1988, says he gave up school and football after his career at Canyon so that he might enjoy life. A talented musician, he wanted more time to hone his skills as a bass player. He also wanted to snow-board, ski, party hearty, lie on the beach and relax.

“Playing varsity ball for three years and spending four summers with Coach Welch, there were a lot of things in my life I needed to experience,” Fix says. “There were a lot of things I felt I missed out on, a lot of things I needed to get out of my system.”

For three years after high school, he played bass and burned the candle at both ends. He held a few odd jobs--”mostly construction,” he says--but never cut a record. He did, however, acquire a criminal record.

In August, 1989, only two months after he graduated from Canyon, Fix was arrested on suspicion of stealing audio equipment from an acquaintance. The following March, he pleaded no contest to grand theft and was sentenced to two years probation. Fix received two more years of probation after an October 1991 arrest on suspicion of public intoxication.

His arrests are the only segment of his life he won’t discuss.

“It’s behind me. What happened before doesn’t matter, it’s history,” Fix says. “I mean, what can I say? Instead of whining about it, I’d rather get on with doing what I have to do.”

For now, that means attending school and playing football, the regimen he once rejected.

Bill Norton accepted Fix without question when he knocked at the Pierce coach’s door last spring.

“That’s why we’re here,” Norton says, “to go out and screw up a little bit and get better. I don’t mean football. I mean in life. If you believe in God and life is supposed to be somewhat of a test, well, if we’re all perfect, what’s the test?

“People make mistakes. In his case, he’s here, he’s here on time, he sits in front, he seems interested, he pays attention and he goes full speed. There’s not much more I can ask.”

Fix likes Norton, perhaps because he considers him the antithesis of Welch.

Norton, Fix says, “doesn’t care if you’ve got a big, weird orange Afro or hair down to your (rear end) as long as you have the right mental outlook, you interact with the other players and you perform on the field.”

Welch’s Cowboy code of conduct was comparatively Draconian, according to Fix, who says he abhorred being treated “disrespectfully and like I was younger and therefore not as clever as the coaches.”

“The coaches play little mind games with the kids at Canyon,” he says. “It’s a big joke. It took me a long time to realize that I was playing militia ball. Instead of playing football for myself and for my teammates, I let myself get pushed in an area I didn’t want to go.”

That much was obvious. Fix quit the Canyon team three times in three years. But he always came back. “I was having a hard time doing it,” he says. “But I just couldn’t walk away from it.”

So he stayed, a sinner in the seminary, an outlaw in a band of highly disciplined Cowboys.

“If you want to play at Canyon High, you do it my way,” Welch says. “Justin accepted that, and I admired him for it.”

Friday nights were Fix’s salvation. In games, he was allowed to vent his frustrations with a fury that awed teammates.

“He’d be trying to break a guy’s arm just because of something he said at a party the week before,” says Scott Kraeger, who played end, only a few yards to the side of Fix on the Canyon defensive line. “He’d just go nuts.”

Adds Stanley, now an inside linebacker at Cal State Fullerton: “He just ripped people’s heads off. He didn’t care. Teams double- and triple-teamed him. It didn’t matter. Nobody could handle him.”

Including Welch.

Fix came to Canyon from Agua Dulce, a rural community of 900 at the eastern end of the Santa Clarita Valley. Kraeger says people who knew Fix growing up described him as “just a normal kid.”

But the metamorphosis was quick.

“He had short hair and was a die-hard, clean-cut guy,” says Kraeger, a senior who attends Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “Then, his senior year, I think he just got tired of the attention. He got sick of people telling him what he was supposed to do and why he was supposed to do it.”

Then he simply stopped listening.

Fix predicts he would have performed poorly had he accepted a football scholarship. “I would have been going into something 50 or 60 percent and that’s not a way you should approach anything,” he says.

At home and at Canyon, Fix’s excuse was a tough sell. His mother, Susan, a single parent, said she “went ballistic” at the thought of her son turning his broad-shouldered back on a free education.

“After four years of rigorous training and everything involved, when he said, ‘No, Mom. I’m not going to do this,’ I wasn’t OK with it,” Susan Fix says. “We went around and around before he finally convinced me he was doing the right thing.”

Canyon players thought he was foolish. Fix says other friends supported his decision to “be true to myself.”

“A lot of people resented me, even some of my buddies, because they worked so hard and weren’t getting the chance I got,” Fix says. “I respect that. I understand. Believe me, I wish I could have given my chance to somebody who worked harder than I did and wanted it. I wish I could have given all those guys the opportunity I had.”

Now, several years removed, at least one of those former teammates looks back with a measure of understanding.

“It is kind of a brutal program,” Kraeger says, referring to the demands at Canyon. “I think Harry Welch can drive some athletes to the point that they stop their careers. By the time they’ve been through four years at Canyon, they’re burnt out.”

Only recently, Fix has rekindled the flame.

“I never had a problem with football,” Fix says. “I had a problem with all the things I wasn’t doing because of football.”

That he plays before hundreds at Pierce rather than before thousands at a four-year school doesn’t seem to faze him. Neither does the chaos that ensues with each snap of the ball.

“You have so many people coming at you, the center, the two guards, the running backs, and they all want a piece of you,” Fix says. “I don’t know what happens at that point, but when everything goes in motion it’s like I become Frankenstein. I’m just looking to punish someone, so if you’re there, I’m going to hit you.”

Fix, Norton says, “is not bigger than anybody and not stronger than very many. He’s as good as he is because he goes into another world when he’s out on the football field.”

And so, concessions are made. Recalls Norton: “Against Ventura, when we came out after halftime, I said (to the team), ‘I want you to play as hard as you can and I want everybody to be under control. Except Fix. Fix, you can still be a little out of control . . . But just a little.’ ”

Norton, like Welch before him, has had to be patient.

“If you try to control a guy like him you could end up gagging him and then he’s not going to be any good,” Norton says. “If you want a stud, sometimes you have to put up with a little over-aggressiveness.”

At times, Pierce’s offensive linemen have been far less understanding. Norton has learned to restrict half-speed technique drills in an attempt to maintain peace on the practice field.

“We don’t let Fix play against our offense unless it’s live because, he goes full bore whatever the tempo is supposed to be and our linemen get mad,” Norton says. “He’s not a half-speed guy. He doesn’t believe in the sister act.”

Only now even his teammates are capable of returning the punishment.

Fix recalls receiving an unofficial welcome back to football during one of his first practices at Pierce when lines were drawn between the offense and defense and players were instructed to step up for a one-on-one confrontation.

When Anthony Florence, the Brahmas’ hard-charging sophomore fullback, stood in against Fix there was a faint ring of familiarity. The players had squared off years before, when Fix was at Canyon and Florence was a top ballcarrier for the Cowboys’ Golden League rival, Palmdale.

“Here he comes and I come at him and, boom! I lay my hat and I’m like, ‘Oh, I rocked him!’ ” Fix says, laughing. “Then I’m on my knees and there he is, still moving his feet. I’m like, ‘Damn!’ I grabbed at him and he just ran right by me.

“I’m like, ‘Well, there’s a difference.’ ”

Music remains Fix’s first love. But football, he says, “is something dear to me now that wasn’t before.”

“You need to be a well-rounded person, which is why I’m back in school,” he says. “When you build a house, you start with the foundation. Finding yourself and knowing who you are is as important as anything in life. Once you find out, you perform.”