Carved From Stone : Granada Hills’ Emelio Credits Samoan Blood for His Toughness

Splotches of blood were all over the white practice pants of Faio Emelio, leaving the Granada Hills High standout looking like a walking finger-painting. In fact, crimson practically dripped from a nasty nick on his right thumb.

Red badge of courage? A football battle wound worthy of a purple heart? Nothing quite that colorful.

“Did it grating cheese,” Emelio said with a grin. “I was making enchiladas. Guess they had a little extra in there this time.”

To be sure, color of all sorts drips from this guy, from the elaborate tattoo on his right bicep to the dents and dings on his shins. OK, so Emelio was selected the Northwest Valley Conference defensive player of the year. But there’s more to the senior defensive end-fullback than meets the eye.

And at 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, that’s saying something.

Emelio and his best friend, Alberto Vasquez Jr., were cruising down the San Diego Freeway in Emelio’s battered Volkswagen when the whole day hit the skids. The pair, however, didn’t.

The brakes failed as the car sped down an exit ramp. Time for decisive action.

“It was Flintstone time,” Emelio said. “We opened the doors, put out our legs and s c reeeeeech .”

Emelio, to be truthful, looks a little like Fred Flintstone. He’s a burly, dark-haired guy, as are many of Samoan descent, with a definite eye for the slapstick.

Of course, in the field, he can slap and stick with anybody.

“He’s without a doubt the best blocking fullback we’ve ever had,” co-Coach Tom Harp said. “Our success on the ground is a result of him opening up holes for Tremain Foriest and Raheem Kyle.”

Just about everybody is impressed with Emelio but Emelio. There may be a simple explanation. It takes quite a bit to turn the head of a Samoan, he says.

Take Emelio’s father, for instance. He is a typically strict and regimented Samoan dad. Football is cake, comparatively. If anybody has ever wondered why so many Samoan players are turning up at major colleges and in the professional ranks, just ask any kid raised in a Samoan household.

“Samoan people get really offended when you (mess) up,” Emelio said, laughing. “This is the way Samoan people think: You’re outside riding your bike when you fall off and skin your knee. You go in the house and your dad kicks your . . . for skinning your knee.

“You’re in the garage, nailing something down and you slam a nail into your hand. You go in the house and your dad kicks your . . . for slamming a nail through your hand.

“That’s the way it is in a Samoan family. When you eat dinner at the table, your shoulders are up around your ears, all tensed up, waiting for someone to come up from behind and whack you in the head.”

Emelio, no meathead, makes it a point not to mess up. His dad, a 6-foot, 250-pound chunk of granite actually named Amazon River Emelio, is not a guy anybody would want to cross. Sometimes, though, Emelio blows it, and blows come flying his way.

“My dad is huge; he used to have calves that would put Arnold Schwarzenegger to shame,” said Emelio, one of five children. “He’d go to the beach, take off his shirt and all the women would go, ‘Ohhhhh.’

“He caught me drinking straight out of the milk carton one time. Bam . He knocked me into the refrigerator. He made me drink that whole gallon of milk, and man, it was full, about an inch from the top.”

In case the point has been missed, Emelio (pronounced em-uh-LEE-oh) says that Samoan men tend to be a macho bunch who revel in physical contact. Some Samoans have a pain threshold that hasn’t been defined, he said. Samoans are just plain tough and like to prove it.

“It’s scary,” Emelio said. “They are physical enough to scare you, and some like to do just that. The thing is, a lot of gang-bangers join gangs because they’re scared.

“I think most Samoans join gangs because they like to kick people’s . . . “

Indeed, to many of his Samoan brethren, Emelio is a wimp despite his football accomplishments. Perhaps this is because Emelio, born in Van Nuys, isn’t full-blooded. His mother is a Caucasian from Sulphur, Okla.

Consequently, Emelio has dubbed himself a “Sam-okie.” He is routinely singled out by other Samoans because he isn’t full-blooded, though he has no complaints. In fact, far from it.

“For some reason, all Samoan people like to mess with me,” he said. “They go, You don’t look Samoan, you look Mexican. They love doing that.”

He does indulge in many of the Samoan trappings. Last summer, Emelio took a nine-hour flight to Pago Pago, Western Samoa, to visit relatives, many of whom are island royalty, he said. While he was there, he paid a man $40 to pound a very detailed Samoan tattoo into his right arm.

The tattoo is called a taulima , which means “band” in Samoan. It circles his right bicep and was punched into place with a shark’s tooth.

“It’s kind of the miniature version of the full-body Samoan tattoo that goes from below the knee to over the waist,” Emelio explained. “This is like the starter tattoo.”

Emelio found the tattoo artist in Western Samoa, where the best ones reside and where Emelio hopes to someday live.

“They do the full-body one in about two weeks, but it takes about five months to recover. It’s two months off your feet to begin with, then five or six more months of pure pain.

“There’s a guy in each village that does (tattooing). Usually, it’s not the guy’s business. He has another job and he kinda does this on the side.”

Emelio’s tattoo took 4 1/2 hours to hammer into place. He says it didn’t hurt. But even if it did, he probably wouldn’t admit it.

“Naw, he’d never admit that,” said Vasquez, a catcher on the Grant High baseball team and Emelio’s best friend since grammar school. “He likes to tell the story, though, about how there were chunks of skin flying here and there.”

Being Samoan has even had its football applications. Last season, in a game against favored Carson, Emelio heard a couple of Carson offensive linemen of Samoan descent speaking the native tongue. Describing the forthcoming offensive play, to be specific. At the line of scrimmage.

“One guy was new (to the United States) and didn’t speak English real well,” Emelio said. “He couldn’t understand the plays called in the huddle. The other guy was explaining the call in Samoan and I just, well. . . . “

He just, well, leveled a few people. Granada Hills pulled off a 29-18 upset. “My Samoan isn’t that great, but I knew what they were doing,” Emelio said. “Heh, heh.”

Athletic feats of this sort are nothing to shout about in the Emelio family. Faio’s older brother, Terry, is a circus performer. A high-wire trapeze artist currently on tour in South America, to be specific.

According to Faio, Terry could soon become a household name. A scriptwriter recently followed Terry while researching an idea for a feature film. Columbia Pictures expressed interest, and reportedly asked actor Emilio Estevez if he was interested.

Alas, Emilio playing Emelio did not come to pass. Seems the actor wanted too much money, Faio said. So they are now considering Terry for the role.

“He’s built like Jean-Claude Van Damme,” Emelio said of his brother. “He’d be perfect. Someday, he might be right up there opposite Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Faio claims he has talent too. He sang in the school choir and in a barbershop quartet in junior high. A first cousin, defensive lineman Esera Tauolo of the Green Bay Packers, belted out the National Anthem before football and basketball games while attending Oregon State. Tauolo is nicknamed the “tackling tenor.”

“I could go outside right now and win the school talent show,” Faio said. “Singing comes naturally in my family.”

As easily as football, in fact, though he is considerably more nonchalant about that particular talent. Just about everybody seems impressed with Emelio’s football prowess--except Emelio himself. He is being recruited by several Pacific 10 Conference schools, has satisfied NCAA entrance requirements, and has a lengthy list of supporters.

Emelio is nonplussed. His MVP honors are no big deal.

“ Irrrrnk , I don’t know,” he said, making a sound similar to that of a penalty buzzer at a hockey game. “When I think of how many Southern Section schools there are, how many City Section schools there are, it doesn’t mean much. I’m honored, we play in a kick- . . . league.”

And he does much of the kicking himself. Granada Hills hammered San Fernando, 21-13, in a key North Valley League game last month. Emelio’s blocking paved the way for Foriest, who rushed for 138 yards in his first start.

Asked after the game how Granada Hills managed to beat the previously unbeaten Tigers with such ease, Granada Hills quarterback Jim Landress had a two-word answer: “Faio Emelio.”

San Fernando Coach Tom Hernandez, not the world’s biggest Granada Hills fan, even had a few things to say about Emelio’s performance. They were not expletives, but closer to superlatives.

“Yeah, the kid played pretty well,” Hernandez said, begrudgingly. “One of the big problems we had was him running through the holes with Foriest right behind him.”

Of course, to be named the conference’s defensive MVP, a player has to dish it out on the other side of the ball too. Emelio has pancaked many skill-position players in his three-year varsity tenure, but none more spectacularly than the hit he recently laid on Taft tailback Jerry Brown.

Brown, the area’s second-leading City Section ballcarrier, cut through the middle of the line when he was drilled from the left side by Emelio. Brown literally left his feet. Emelio didn’t.

“That was a good hit,” Emelio said, beaming at the memory. “I’ve still got the film at home. The coaches are like, ‘When are you gonna give me that film back?’

“I love watching it over and over, because there’s this lady sitting high up in the stands and you can hear her go, ‘Ooohoooh, oooohh.’

“Every play should be like that, just that clean and perfect.”

When he is playing offense--he has rushed for 308 yards as the team’s third backfield option--it’s usually hit or be hit. Defense, of course, is another story. Strangely, he has no occupational preference.

“If you’re the kind of person who says, ‘I’m a defensive kind of guy or I’m an offensive kind of guy,’ you’re not gonna be any good,” he said.

“You have to reduce it to this: I like hitting. If you say, ‘I like to hit people,’ then you can do it all.”

Compared to most high school students, Emelio just about does. Video games? Nope. Hanging out at the mall? Nah.

Emelio spends most of his spare time working on developing a spare tire. By his own admission, he is capable of ingesting prodigious amounts of food.

“I can spend $20 at McDonald’s, easy,” he said.

That gets a tad costly, though. Emelio then had a startling revelation. He heard that a guy can actually buy food in a grocery store, take it home, cook it and wolf it down at a fraction of the cost of eating out. Eureka.

So he does just that. The Galloping Gourmet he isn’t. The Galloping Glutton, perhaps. Pssssst : This real man even eats quiche.

“Eating is my hobby more than anything else,” he said. “I can cook anything. Enchiladas, tacos, pancakes, you name it, I can cook it. Quiche, I can cook it all.”

Samoan food doesn’t really ring his bell, though. He tends to lead toward Mexican fare.

“The Samoan food’s a killer,” he said. “It’s real blunt, real chalky. Like taking a bite out of a potato, there’s just no taste. Imagine eating a yam with no flavor at all, just raw.”

Emelio and Vasquez do splurge on occasion, though. On most Wednesdays, they pile in Emelio’s Volkswagen and head to a local burger joint.

They usually inhale three double cheeseburgers, two orders of french fries, a chocolate shake and a large coke. Apiece.

“They know us pretty well there,” Vasquez said.

On the football field, Emelio is known even better.