Hair of Silver, Heart of Gold : Bob Perone, a ‘Rookie’ Coach at 65, Makes a Difference for Cavers

“My hero is the J.V. football coach at San Diego High School. He is coach Robert Perone. He is a very kind, athletic, caring, strong-willed, and helpful man.

“Five of the reasons I admire him is that he made something of his life. He cares about everybody on the team no matter how good or bad they perform on the field. He is also a very good football coach. He looks at things from a teen-ager’s point of view. Last but not least, he is not just a coach, he is your friend.”

“Qualities I Expect in a Hero”

--Former San Diego football player

Bob Perone is all about kids. He loves them. They love him.

It’s that simple.

Though he rarely mentions the word, he needn’t, either. Love of kids flows from Perone like sweat pouring from the bodies of the young men who play for him at San Diego High.

“He works his butt off for us,” said Jacque Jones, a senior receiver/defensive back. “If he were a coach who didn’t care about the program, I’d be a player who didn’t care about the program. Because of him, people have been busting their butts in the classroom this year, too.”

“He’s a great young man,” said Point Loma Coach Bennie Edens, 67, one of only two coaches in the county able to address Perone that way. “He’s got the kids’ interest at heart. You can’t ask for anything more from a coach.”

Perone is coaching his first season of varsity football--at age 65.

An endearing quality is Perone’s sense of purpose:

Kids are going to be adults someday. Why not give them every opportunity to be successful adults?

“In football,” Perone said, “we have a tremendous vehicle to really reach these kids. To provide a positive influence in their lives. To prepare them to be successful in life. I’d hate to see that vehicle not put to use.”

Fueled by personal tragedy, Perone has made it his mission to steer youngsters in a positive direction.

His youngest son, Kurt, a San Diego graduate-turned-San Diego football coach, a husband, a father, 24 years old, was murdered on the night of Aug. 7, 1988.

Sitting in his truck and waiting to pick up his wife, Adain, at her mother’s home in Southeast San Diego, Kurt was shot in the head three times, point-blank range. The murderer, who was under the influence of drugs, apparently mistook Kurt for a rival gang member or a narcotics agent.

The murderer was apprehended the next day. He plea-bargained the charge to second-degree murder and received a sentence of 17 years to life with the possibility of parole after seven years. According to Perone, Kurt’s killer is incarcerated in a minimum-security prison near San Luis Obispo, and Perone is eligible to attend the man’s parole hearings.

Perhaps by then, Perone will have restored the electric train set he and Kurt were working on before Kurt was killed. As it is, the trains and tracks remain on a shelf in the basement of the Mission Hills home where Bob and A.J. Perone have lived for 30 years.

“I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I can tackle that one yet,” Perone said, glancing at disordered pile of toy trains.

“I’m not just crawling up in a shell because of what happened, but it’s taken time. The scars are still there. They may never go away. He was so much a part of our lives, it still hurts not having him around and knowing he never will be.”

Like father, like son.

“My son helped me coach these kids (at San Diego),” Perone said, “but he did even more than that. He helped them with their work, their grades, their problems. He helped some of these kids get through school. After they got out of school, we helped them try to get jobs and stuff like that. We still do a lot of that.”

Things were not the same after Kurt’s death for Bob, A.J. and their other children, Stephen Perone, 40, and Roberta Tomasin, 42. On the contrary, Roberta’s youngest son, Nicholas, committed suicide shortly thereafter.

“We’ll never know why (Nicholas) did that,” A.J. said, “but he was very devastated at losing his Uncle Kurt. The two of them were pretty much raised together.”

The company of his football players and his staff at San Diego, Bob says, helped him weather those tragedies.

“My focus sort of changed after Kurt’s death,” Perone said. “I realize some of the problems are that a lot of these kids don’t have very much self-control. Out on the football field, you really see it, kids lose self-control.

“So we made that our motto, self-control.

“And maybe if this guy centered on self-control in this situation, maybe my son would not have been murdered.

“That’s the sort of thing, you might say the cross I have to bear, that has become a big part of our program.”

“He made something of his life.”

Bob Perone does not coach football to feed an ego, and at 65, he is not eyeballing the college ranks, either.

Money?

It costs Perone to coach at San Diego, something he has done since 1979.

“I don’t think he’s ever kept the money,” said Scotty Harris, a longtime coach and athletic director at San Diego who is now retired. “He’d turn his pay into trophy money. A few times, he wouldn’t even take the checks. He’d pay for all the banquets, put names on the kids’ jerseys. It’s cost him a small fortune to be around here.”

While not nearly as wealthy as Ross Perot, Perone was one of six founders of Photic Inc., a photography lab near the Sports Arena with 140 employees and annual sales of $6 million.

“I’ve been lucky,” Perone said. “I’ve been very fortunate in my business, and it’s been very good to me. It’s allowed me to do what I can for the kids.”

Born and reared in Reading, Pa., Perone played center and linebacker before switching to quarterback and safety for Penn State at Reading in the early 1940s. He also played semipro for a team that was the forerunner to the Philadelphia Eagles.

“Those were the days of the big, tough guys who worked in the coal mines,” Perone said. “It was really insignificant, barely football at all as we now know it.”

After joining the Coast Guard in 1947--Perone’s assignment was guarding German POWs at Ft. Lewis, Wash.--Perone returned to school in Kansas City and met A.J.

“My brother set us up,” A.J. said. “He said, ‘I’ve got this guy I want you to meet,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want any blind dates.’ He didn’t particularly like me because I made fun of this car, which turned out to be his.”

They were married, Aug. 19, 1948.

A few days after Roberta was born in 1950, Perone was recalled by the Navy and sent to San Diego. After the Korean War ended, the Perones moved to Atlantic City, N.J., where Bob worked as a photographer for the Atlantic City Press and a stringer for UPI.

“The best part about that was, he got to shoot the Miss America Pageant, and I got to go with him,” A.J. said.

In 1955, the Perones moved to Mission Hills, and Bob worked as a photographer for the San Diego Union-Tribune for eight years before starting Photic.

Along the way, he coached in the Balboa Pop Warner Football program and served as its president in 1973.

Six years later, Stan Murphy, San Diego’s coach at the time, asked Perone if would coach the Cavers’ junior varsity, and Perone has been involved with the school ever since.

“It’s funny,” Perone said, “a lot of the coaches I talk to would like to be a photographer.”

“He cares about everybody on the team.”

After spending about two hours at Photic on Tuesday--”It’s running so well, I don’t really even have to be there,” he said--Perone left around noon to pick up A.J. at the beauty parlor. He drove her home, then took a guest on a tour of the house he and A.J. bought in 1955 for $10,500.

As expected, there are photographs throughout, and memories with every one of them.

There’s the Olive Tree in the Garden of Gethsemane in Israel, The Edinburgh Bridge in Scotland, Kurt at Blarney Castle in Ireland, a unique rock formation off the coast of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and, of course, portrait photographs of every family member.

Stephen Perone and his wife, Donna, are both deputy sheriffs on an Indian reservation near Julian.

“He’s always wanted to be a cowboy, and now he is,” A.J. said. “He finally has his horse.”

Roberta lives with her husband in Detroit. Kurt’s widow, Adain, remarried and in a sense stayed within the Perone family--she wed Larry Van Dusen, an assistant coach to Bob at San Diego.

“(Larry) is a great father to Stephanie (the daughter of Kurt and Adain) and a great husband to Adain,” Bob said.

Out back, there is a lap pool--Perone swims daily--and a three-story fort house Perone built for his grandchildren that is more often used by a wild fox that wanders in from the hills.

In the furnished basement are more photographs: Stephen playing football for Lincoln High, Kurt getting stuck by Lincoln’s Damon Allen, Kurt pole-vaulting for San Diego and, of course, portrait photographs of every San Diego High football team since 1964.

Said Harris, who has known Perone for more than 20 years: “He loves every kid he’s ever coached.”

“He is also a very good football coach.”

In his first year at San Diego, Perone encountered this exchange from an opposing team:

“This kid came out the ballgame, and he said, ‘Coach, I don’t know what to do. This guy is beating me every play.’ The coach turns to him and says, ‘Well, kick his ass!’

“And I thought, ‘This is coaching?’ Give me a break.”

Point Loma’s Edens, the dean of San Diego County coaches, says he probably attends more clinics than anyone except Perone. That’s because they go together.

“He does his homework,” Edens said. “There’s nobody who knows as much as he needs to know, so we, as coaches, have got to keep learning. He realizes that. He’s constantly trying to improve himself.”

Edens and Perone go back to the late 1960s when Stephen Perone played for Edens at Point Loma before transferring to Lincoln.

“He’s got all the qualities to be a successful head coach,” Edens said. “He deserves a lot of credit for the job he’s doing and the job he’s already done there. He has re-established football at San Diego High, and that was not an easy thing to do.”

San Diego, once a powerhouse program, hasn’t won a playoff game since the week before tying Escondido, 21-21, for the 1969 championship. Of course, before last year’s 24-6 loss to El Capitan, the Cavers hadn’t been to the playoffs since ’69.

They are 4-3 this season with games remaining against Crawford (4-3), Serra (2-5) and Madison (2-5). A 6-4 mark virtually would assure a playoff spot.

Perone had been a JV coach until Art Anderson made him the varsity offensive coordinator last season.

“He was the one who kept this program going,” Harris said. “He was our liaison to the junior high kids from Roosevelt and Memorial. I don’t know what we would have done without him.”

Said Hines, now San Diego’s athletic director who gave Perone his shot as the varsity coach: “Bob has been the one constant in this program for the last 14 years. We’re trying to establish some stability in the program, and he’s been here every year. He’s committed to San Diego High School. Maybe we could have eliminated some of that (earlier) instability if we had hired him a long time ago.”

Said Perone: “I’m not doing much of anything other coaches don’t do.”

“He looks at things from a teen-ager’s point of view.”

“He’ll get upset about things, and he’ll let you know it,” said Rodney Jones, a senior quarterback, who transferred to San Diego from Morse. “But he’s calm about it. I like that about him.

“He might raise his voice to get his point across, but he never screams. Everybody respects him.”

Of everything, Perone is most proud of his players’ grade-point averages and the work his staff has done in helping those players.

When grades came out Friday, only one player was ruled ineligible for having a GPA under 2.0 on a four-point scale, a marked improvement over past years, according to Perone.

“Honest to God, I never thought it would be like this, but it’s like winning another ballgame,” Perone said. “To see those kids with good GPAs, good solid kids, it’s exciting.

“The secret is really staying after them on a daily basis. . . . And I attribute that to the excellent cooperation between our staff, the counselors and the teachers. They’ve done a super job with that. We know right away when a kid has a problem.

“We say, ‘Hey, want to play Friday, make up that test, assignment or whatever it is.’ And I tell you it works. Just telling a kid, ‘If you don’t have a GPA, you don’t play,’ (that) does not motivate a kid in the least. That’s after-the-fact thinking. For them to think ahead three or four months is ludicrous. They don’t. It’s been a commitment of ours to address any potential problems as they arise, not somewhere down the road.”

More than winning or losing, Perone focuses his attention on what goes on in his players’ lives. Are they doing OK in the classroom, at home, in the community?

“I’m sure he knows all the parents, what church they belong to, what size shoe they wear,” Harris said. “He keeps good records. He’s very organized, but more than that, he just flat cares.”

Said Perone: “I’ve never had any aspirations about winning championships. That’s not what we’re about.

“That thought can come later on, after you attain the first goal of respectability. You know, it’s fine to make goals, but don’t bury your head in the sand and make impossible tasks for yourself that you know you can’t accomplish overnight. It’s like building a business. It’s like what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a millionaire. I mean, come on. That’s fine, but let’s put the first goals first.

“It would be nice to be in the playoffs and play in the stadium in a championship some day, but that’s not our immediate goal. Our immediate goal is to be a respectable football team, give the kids a positive experience and the rest will come. The rest will come.

“He is not just a coach, he is your friend.”

For years, Edens has tried to get Perone to accept a job assisting him at Point Loma.

“Let me tell you something about Bennie,” Perone said. “One year I accepted.

“And he said, ‘OK. But I will not accept you here until you go to Scotty first, and tell him (you’re leaving San Diego).’ And I did, and Scotty talked me out of it. That’s the kind of guy Bennie is. He knew I could never leave Scotty and San Diego.

“That’s probably going to be one of my only regrets that Bennie and I didn’t coach together. He’s such a good friend.

Said Harris: “We’re lucky to have him, in this city, in this country. He’s helped an awful lot of kids. If I had a kid who was having some problems, I’d call Bob first.”

Edens: “He’s good for kids, and that’s what we need more of.”