Getting the Handle on Everyday Life : Once-Contrary Tasheeri Walker Enters Mainstream in Van Nuys

Tasheeri Walker was about knee-high to the strike zone when he first started doing it.

The speedy tyke would take a swipe at the baseball, make contact and keep running until he was tagged out--or scored.

His coaches couldn’t understand it.

“He’d just take off running until they got him out,” said Ruby Johnson, a relative. “(Coaches) would say, ‘Boy, what do you expect? You have to watch where you hit the ball, watch where you’re going.’ ”

To say the latter is a recurring theme in Walker’s life would be an epic understatement. It’s not just a theme, it’s a symphonic overture.

The score has not always come out in Walker’s favor. Harmony, it seems, has sometimes been a problem.

It didn’t take long for his classmates at Van Nuys High to realize that Walker wasn’t a stereotypical student, if there is such a thing. Every night after practice, the wide receiver was picked up by an adult and taken to a forbidding place a mile or so from campus.

Yet, explaining where he goes at night is simple compared to explaining where he came from.

Until last summer, Walker had spent six often-stormy years at the Inglewood home of Ruby and Morris Johnson, his great-aunt and great-uncle.

Definitely a nice place, Walker admits. Nice people who took care of him too. But Walker had numerous run-ins with the Johnsons, who couldn’t get him to toe the disciplinary line.

Ruby Johnson said it was one of the toughest things she has ever done, but a change had to be made. Many tears were shed.

“He’s never been a bad, hostile kid,” said Ruby, whose six children are grown and have left home. “He just lacks self-discipline.”

Technically, Walker is a ward of the court. His mother surrendered custody six years ago, whereupon the Johnsons took him in.

Walker isn’t sure of his mother’s whereabouts and doesn’t try to maintain ties. She had a drug problem and no longer could take care of him, he said. His father, who remarried several years ago and started another family, died of cancer five months ago.

“It definitely hasn’t been easy for him,” Ruby Johnson said.

The Johnsons’ largess and patience evaporated earlier this year. Their home is located a few miles from Santa Monica High, where Walker attended school when he was in the mood. Too far to walk, Walker reasoned.

So he borrowed a family car. He drove it on the freeway. Down the surface streets. All without permission--or a driver’s license.

“Can you imagine?” said Ruby, 55.

Walker again was surrendered to the county, which placed him at Pride House. Ruby said the decision had to be made, no matter how difficult.

“I was afraid, so afraid for him,” she said. “Now, I’m so proud.”

Walker seemingly has turned the corner in many ways at Pride House, a county-run facility on Sepulveda Boulevard that houses approximately 25 troubled youngsters between the ages of 15 and 18.

Most of the youths placed in the facility are victims of paternal abuse or have been arrested for minor drug offenses. Walker works on kitchen detail and must meet certain responsibilities in order to be granted liberties that most teens take for granted.

“I’m learning what’s expected in life when you don’t have everything handed to you,” Walker said. “I have to work for things, everything’s not just given to me anymore.”

Walker is the only student at the facility who attends a mainstream high school, the only one playing a varsity sport.

He likely will be at Pride House until he graduates next summer and begins life on his own. By then, he hopes to have landed a part-time job and to have gained acceptance to a four-year university, where he would like to continue his football career.

“I’d like to keep playing,” Walker said. “I know I have the athletic ability.”

So it seems. Walker played football and basketball and competed in the high jump last year at Santa Monica High. He cleared 6-foot-4 at the Southern Section meet last spring.

But his athletic achievement isn’t all that startling, considering the branches on the family tree. The Johnsons’ son, Damone, is a tight end with the Rams. Several other cousins played football at major colleges.

Tonight at Gardena High, Walker and his mates will face heavily favored Carson (8-3-1) in the semifinals of the City Section 4-A Division playoffs. Van Nuys is a group of longshots led by a longer shot who wanted no part of the school to begin with. More specifically, Walker hated the notion of being banished to the Valley.

“When they first told me I was coming to the Valley, it was like, ‘No, no, no,’ ” Walker said. “The Valley? Any place but there, any other school. Just not there.”

His arrival at Van Nuys wasn’t exactly trumpeted in advance. Walker said he showed up in the school attendance office on the third day of the fall semester . . . and announced his intention to enroll at Birmingham. A Van Nuys administrator persuaded Walker to stay.

“Nobody wanted to stay with me,” first-year Coach George Engbrecht said with a laugh. “They all thought (the football team) was a sinking ship.”

Walker, a first-team All-East Valley League selection, almost missed the playoff opener against Westchester. It seems that his counselors at Pride House decided he needed some last-minute guidance.

Walker arrived at Van Nuys five minutes before the bus left for the game, Engbrecht said.

On the field, Walker (5-foot-10, 145 pounds) is difficult to control once he catches the ball. He has 19 receptions for 522 yards and eight touchdowns, second-best yardage total among area City Section receivers. Van Nuys quarterback John Peterson (1,194 yards) is the lone passer from the Valley Pac-8 Conference to have thrown for more than 1,000 yards, and Walker has accounted for almost half of it.

Although Walker isn’t particularly big, he proved to his teammates that he’s as wiry as a pipe cleaner and just as tough. At one early practice, Walker dove for a meaningless pass and landed on the long-jump track, which parallels the sideline. He suffered a shoulder separation and missed two games.

“He proved his toughness,” said Calhoun, the Van Nuys running back.

He has experienced a few tender moments, though. Last week, Walker went to the Johnson home for Thanksgiving. Much to his relief, Walker was welcomed back into the family fold.

“I wasn’t even worrying about what they were thinking,” he said. “I was just happy to see everybody, happy to be there with my family again, to reminisce.

“All my pictures were still there. It ain’t like they forgot me.”

Said Ruby: “He said that? Goodness, no, we haven’t forgotten about him.”

Truth be told, there were a few moments when the Johnsons were sure Walker had forgotten from whence he came. When Walker relocated to the Valley, it seems that he chose a new name for himself.

His given name is Ralph William Walker, but like the old family pooch he answers to just about anything and doesn’t mind being teased about it.

Cry out Ralph, Fred, Tasheeri, William or any number of others--one Van Nuys assistant calls him “Just Bob” in jest--and Walker’s head likely will turn.

“Tasheeri” is Walker’s own creation, in fact. It didn’t go over well with the relatives, who had a good hoot at his expense. They know him as Fred, a nickname that years ago was given to Walker by his mother.

“When I went home for Thanksgiving, it was the big joke,” Walker said. “Damone was like, ‘Tasheeri? What the heck is that?’ ”

It is, simply, a new beginning.

“I wanted something that people would remember, something different,” Walker said.

And so, Tasheeri it is.

“All of a sudden, this new name started showing up in the newspapers,” Ruby Johnson said. “I guess he wanted to establish his own identity.”

If not erase some of the past.