Gang of One : Basketball Commitment Gets Monroe’s Haymond Off Street

Shots rang out and Dimara Haymond was caught in the cross-fire. A minute earlier she had been enjoying herself at a backyard party in South-Central Los Angeles. Suddenly, she found herself in the middle of a gunfight.

“People were pulling out guns and I ran in a complete circle because I didn’t know where to go,” Haymond said. “And I was like Ahhhhhh .”

It was her first “real shootout” and a close brush with death, yet Haymond is engulfed with laughter as she recalls the memory a year later.

“Someone grabbed me and brought me into the house,” Haymond said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, you saved my life. I was about to die out there.’ ”

A harrowing experience, to be sure. But Haymond recalls it as if she were acting out a scene from her favorite movie. It’s a common theme for Haymond--shocking, heart-wrenching stories told giddily, perhaps only to make her life a little more bearable.

Whether she is sharing a story about fighting for a rebound for the Monroe High girls’ basketball team or talking about being chased by her mother in a wheelchair, she’s as animated as Robin Williams in a stand-up comedy routine.

All stories are told with the same vigor. A smile engulfs her face, her head bobs up and down as if it is keeping time to a hip-hop beat and her hands slap sporadically all around her. And Haymond--who is known to intimidate opponents with her tough demeanor and imposing physical play--chatters all the while, telling endless stories punctuated with lively shrieks and screeches.

If laughter is the best medicine for sadness, Haymond is keeping herself extremely healthy. With nearly two decades of pain to draw from, Haymond speaks from experience.

Her father is serving a life sentence without parole on charges of kidnaping. Her mother, who was shot during a robbery 16 years ago, is paralyzed and gets around in a wheelchair. Her closest friend was killed in a drive-by shooting.

And Dimara, who said she was molested several times by a family friend before her 10th birthday, is trying to shake free from the social group she now refers to as the “wrong crowd.”

“I’ve been through so much in my life,” she said. “I know who to trust and who not to trust. Who not to hang around and who to hang around.”

She is nearly 19 and trying desperately to escape the life style that claimed her best friend, Pashette. Haymond is street smart, yet smart enough to know she can’t survive on the streets. Her former friends, most of whom belong to a gang called the Ruthless Queens, now call her a “sellout.” Her teammates simply call her Dee Dee.

“If I am a sellout, so what? I’m making my grades, you know?” Haymond said. “They’re not helping me do nothing in life. They’re just people on the side of me trying to put me down.”

Haymond, a senior, sounds like someone still trying to convince herself that she doesn’t miss her other life. But, little more than a year ago, Haymond dumped her old friends and committed herself to basketball. She knew she could never be successful with both--at least that’s what Coach Bryant Ching told her.

Hanging out with her buddies--a “social club” as she prefers to call it--left little time for school and homework. In August, before her junior year, Haymond was declared academically ineligible to play basketball. The next move was Ching’s.

“I decided on my own either she was going to become a basketball gym rat, or she’s going to become a gangbanger,” Ching said. “I kinda forced the issue.”

Ching provided Haymond with a challenge, a proverbial fork in the road.

“She’s been my project ever since the 10th grade,” Ching said. “I saw someone who probably had a love of basketball, but (basketball) was interfering with home or the rest of her world. She just needed some focus.”

Fortunately, Ching was there to help adjust her viewfinder. “Luckily, it turned out the right way,” he said. “It’s like a light turned on.”

Haymond’s teammates couldn’t agree more.

“From our sophomore year to now, she’s a totally different person,” senior Michele Zamora said. “I like her now.”

Haymond missed three games last season because she was academically ineligible, but rejoined the team in late December after improving her grades. Behind Haymond’s strong inside play, Monroe advanced to the City Section 3-A Division semifinals. No Monroe girls’ team ever advanced further.

“I tell my mom every day, ‘I’m going to be somebody, you watch. I’m going to be somebody very special. My name is gonna be in the (record) books in big black print. I’m going to be the best basketball player ever,’ ” Haymond said.

A stretch of her vivid imagination perhaps, but Haymond is tearing up the competition, averaging 19.2 points and 18.6 rebounds a game and seems poised to lead her team to a City championship.

Her solid, sturdy 6-foot frame is a menace to those who challenge her underneath the basket. A hearty roar from Haymond usually accompanies a good rebound--and scares the opposition into submission.

But it’s her competitive attitude on the court that intimidates most, a presence she picked up on the streets that seems to say, “Don’t mess with me.”

“When I go on the court, it’s like this is my domain, this is my house and I’m gonna play the way I want to play,” she said. “And no one is gonna hurt me because I’m gonna hurt them--but not in a physical way, but by winning.”

Perhaps by necessity, Haymond is tough. And it shows.

“I’ve had guys run into her in the hallway and bounce off her--and that’s not a figure of speech,” Ching said. “She’s just so strong.”

Not to mention strong-minded.

She can’t recall ever seeing her mother walk, nor does she have any recollection of her father outside prison walls. Her parents received those life sentences before she was out of diapers. This is her reality.

She is neither proud nor ashamed of her background. Her mother tells her that the truth will set her free.

Yet Haymond has never opened up to any of the friends she has made on this season’s team. None of her teammates had known that her father is in prison or how her mother wound up in a wheelchair. They’ve never asked, so she’s never told.

Haymond seems prone to roll with life’s punches on her own. Like the time she fell out of her mother’s van and into a grocery store parking lot when she was 5.

“I looked in the rear-view mirror and Dee Dee was sitting in the middle of the street,” Shirley Haymond said. “I was almost a quarter of a mile away when I realized (she had fallen out of the van).”

There’s one subject Haymond seems unable to laugh away: her father.

She is resentful of the judicial system, saying Tyrone is serving an unjustly long sentence. He has been imprisoned for nearly 16 years and can never expect to go home. Even some murderers, Dimara insists, receive shorter sentences.

“There are people killing people and raping people, doing harmful things to people, but he didn’t kill anybody,” Haymond said. “He didn’t even hurt the guy. He just took him into his possession.”

The circumstances and physical distance from her father have taken their toll on the relationship.

“I have a relationship with my father, but it’s not like a father-daughter relationship because he’s not here to do anything for me . . . like go to my games,” she said.

Haymond visits her father in prison at Tehachapi a couple of times a year and talks to him by telephone occasionally. She has a father, but doubts the strength of their bond. She admits to feelings of bitterness.

“I hardly ever write my father in jail because I feel like he should be here with me, so I can tell him what I feel face to face instead of writing it on a piece of paper,” she said. “I can send him all my little records and (newspaper clippings), but he wasn’t there to see them (in person) so it doesn’t really matter to me.”

Her mother rarely misses one of her daughter’s games and is a source of inspiration to Dimara.

“You wouldn’t know she’s paralyzed, because she’s so cool,” Dimara said. “She does everything. She’s like a woman on wheels.”

Said Shirley Haymond: “(Dimara’s) got all the legs I ever wanted. I see myself through my kids. Their walking and running around makes me so tired.”

Haymond’s teammates never tire of her antics and playful energy. When Haymond is not in the game, the Vikings play without inspiration, teammates say.

Although she is now the team’s centerpiece, it certainly didn’t start that way. She was not popular with teammates in the beginning. Fact is, she wasn’t even liked.

She made a bad first impression nearly four years ago during a tryout for the Sepulveda Junior High girls’ team. During the tryout, Haymond drove to the basket and ran over diminutive Stacy Wong on her way to two points.

“I didn’t even say, ‘Sorry,’ ” she said. “I just walked away so maybe that left a bad impression.”

It was a scene few teammates can forget.

“I was scared of her,” said Zamora, who has played with Haymond for three years and witnessed the Sepulveda incident. “I was really intimidated by her, so I just kinda stayed away.”

Since Haymond’s transformation, Zamora and Wong are among Haymond’s biggest fans.

“Yeah, when you get to know her, she’s a softy,” teammate Florence Fujita said.

Ching, in his third season at Monroe, is hoping Haymond can win over college recruiters as well. He has been in contact with several college coaches, mostly in the Division II ranks because of her low grade-point average and incomplete curriculum. He is determined to keep her headed in the right direction.

Haymond has no reservations about the path she has chosen. Now, her best friends wear the same colors, but shoot baskets, not bullets.

And as long as she’s playing basketball, she’s committed to avoiding her “social club.”

“I don’t think I could hang around those people and play basketball because I know for a fact every time I’m around them, something happens,” Haymond said.

But what does the future hold for Haymond after this season? Will she be motivated to continue schooling when basketball season ends? Will she graduate? Will she return to the “social club” she abandoned a year ago? What will become of her when Coach Ching is no longer around to monitor--and correct--her every move?

The answers rest with Haymond. For now she is focused--and no longer running mindlessly in circles and dodging bullets.