Growing Pains : Life Wasn’t Always Easy but That Toughened USC-Bound Perryman

Wherever he goes, whatever he does, Willie Perryman seems to ooze All-American.

During his senior year at Burbank High, if he wasn’t reading stories to elementary school kids in his spare time, he was probably tending to his duties as student body president, an office he held for two terms. And with whatever time was left, Perryman served as the school’s homecoming king and prom king.

The USC-bound defensive end even looks the part of an All-American. His hulking 6-foot-4, 235-pound frame is hard to hide. “He’s the stud of our campus,” said Kendall Nohre, his girlfriend.

All of this, however, has come only after Perryman tackled more adversity in his 18 years than some people face in a lifetime.

The events came ruthlessly in rapid-fire succession--a life-threatening premature birth, two debilitating childhood illnesses, a rocky family life that saw him bounce among three different homes.

“Now I think it helped me out,” he said of his upbringing. “I don’t think about any of those things as being bad. It all helped me, so it worked out for the best.”

The one constant in Perryman’s life has been athletics. Friends persuaded Perryman to play football as a freshman at Burbank High in 1990. When his mother refused to sign release forms allowing her son to play, he forged her signature. “I played and I guess I played pretty good,” he said.

As a sophomore in 1991, he was so excited about starting in his first varsity game that he passed out on the team bus afterward. “Football was the only way out for him because his family didn’t have a whole lot of money,” Nohre said. “He knew sports was his ticket out.”

As a junior in 1992, Perryman began to attract college recruiters when he was Burbank’s most valuable player after recording 102 tackles, including 29 for losses.

Interest in him increased until he suffered torn ligaments in his right knee three weeks into his senior season. The injury sidelined him for several games, scaring away recruiters. Perryman thought his dreams of going to college were shattered.

“He cried and cried,” Nohre said. “He thought that was it. College was out of reach now. His schoolwork and everything went downhill. Nobody could tell him it was all right because things really weren’t all right. It looked like everything he worked for went down the drain.”

USC coaches, though, remained interested. “They acted like it was no big thing,” Perryman said. “I thought my life was over. They stuck with me.”

Perryman returned in late October and played the last few games, eventually being named a first-team All-American by Super Prep and Blue Chip magazines. He signed with USC in February and will play defensive end for the South team in the Shrine high school all-star football game Saturday night at Citrus College.

It’s an unlikely plot twist for Perryman, whose childhood reads like a Charles Dickens novel, but his tales were all too real. Perryman’s mother, Cynthia Fremont, gave birth to her son two months early. She was only 15.

Perryman drifted in and out of consciousness as an infant, sometimes hardly showing signs of life. “He died three times in that hospital,” Fremont said. “I never wanted to leave him.”

She kept a bedside vigil, staying at the hospital 16 to 18 hours a day for a month, praying her son would be OK.

“I was even afraid of not hearing him cry,” she said.

Perryman survived, but health problems persisted. He was born with scoliosis, a lateral curvature of the spine, and when he was 9, doctors discovered he had Osgood-Schlatter’s disease, a condition in which tendons pull way from bones when a child grows too quickly. Both conditions were eventually corrected. The same could not be said of his relationship with his father, Willie Perryman Sr., who left Fremont a year after his son was born. Though they kept in contact, Willie Jr. always felt awkward around his father.

Meanwhile, Perryman’s mother suffered in her marriage. When Willie Jr. was 7, Fremont was beaten so badly by her then-husband that she had to be hospitalized.

Fremont left town “to get back on her feet” and sent Willie Jr. to live with his father. She later returned to live with her mother in Tujunga.

This triggered a period that saw Perryman shuttle among his mother, his father and the Regopoulos family, whose son, Ricardo, was Perryman’s best friend. He stayed with the Regopouloses in Burbank on and off for five years.

“I got along with my dad, but I was afraid to talk to him because I didn’t know him that well,” Perryman said. “It was hard not having a dad around all the time.”

Perryman responded by isolating himself from family members.

“I was mad at my mom because she was kind of irresponsible and I would stay away from her,” he said. “I didn’t call my father (often) because he got married and has three daughters and I thought he loved them more than me.”

Perryman’s mother wishes he had been more open with her.

“His eyes give it all away,” Fremont said. “I’m not an open person, so I guess he got it from me.”

With his future more in focus, Perryman has begun to look to the past. He now talks with his father regularly. “Every now and then we check out a movie or he takes me out to lunch or we just talk,” Willie Sr. said. “I’ve always had a lot of love and respect for him.”

Perryman is beginning to open up more to his mother as well.

“Right now the relationship with my parents is the best it’s ever been,” he said. “It was just hard growing up because I just didn’t understand. I thought there was something wrong with me, that they didn’t love me. As I grew up, I learned that wasn’t true.”

Perryman wants to study psychology and eventually open a day-care center.

“I want to work with kids when I get out,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot in my life and . . . now I can go and learn to work better with people and understand people a little better. Hopefully, my experiences will help them.”