Edwards Finds a Niche Among UCLA Defenders

Donnie Edwards is the square peg that defies going into a square hole. Or a round hole. Or any hole. He just doesn’t fit.

Unless you tell him he can’t.

He’s like nobody else, and that’s the way he wants it. A psychologist might call it a defense mechanism. Fair enough. Edwards can play some defense.

He’s an outside linebacker at UCLA, charged with being at the right place at the right time. He was Saturday night at the Rose Bowl when he intercepted a fourth-quarter pass by Todd Helton that turned back Tennessee in the Bruins’ season-opening 25-23 victory. It was Edwards, playing strong safety, but they call him a linebacker.

“It’s a hybrid position,” he says.

He has had a hybrid life.

Edwards grew up south of San Diego, in National City. He doesn’t know his father and says he doesn’t want to.

“He gave me life, and I thank him for that, but I have no respect for him,” Edwards says. “I guess I’ve seen him a couple of times, but if he walked down the street, I wouldn’t know him.”

The house was full, with two brothers, six sisters and an occasional stepfather.

“He was a diamond in the rough, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, when he came to us,” says George Obnesorgen, Edwards’ coach at Chula Vista High. Beverly Edwards had decided her son should be bused the seven miles from National City to Chula Vista, where opportunity lay.

“I was poor,” Edwards says matter-of-factly. “Mom didn’t give me any money. I wanted to buy candy, get clothes and stuff, but all the little kids got everything. The older kids got what was left over.

“When I was 12, I got a paper route. Then I worked at the Pizza Hut. I bought my own clothes when I was 13, 14, my own car when I was 15, because my stepdad told me I was old enough to pay for my own stuff.”

What he really wanted, though, was a niche.

“He was kind of in and out with the gangs,” Obnesorgen says. “There just wasn’t much stability at home. His sister moved out to go to school (when Edwards was 12), and he became more or less a father figure for the home.

“He took a job to help the family, and he hung around with some kids here, but he wouldn’t tell the kids about himself. He would hide his grades, because they thought it wasn’t cool to be too smart and he had good grades. Then he would go home and there would be the kids on the street.

“He had to put on two or three different faces. I think it was only on the football field that he found a stable family life.”

Off the field, he sought a father figure of his own. His girlfriend was Joey, and Joey’s dad showed up for occasional practices.

“In my ex-girlfriend’s family, there was a lot of affection,” he says. “It’s kind of ironic that I would hug and kiss her parents and feel comfortable about it, but at the same time, I would feel uncomfortable doing it with my mom.

“My ex-girlfriend, when we broke up, it was a shock because she was the only one who knew me.”

Through various relationships with others and frequent associations with coaches, who are often cast in the role of surrogate parent, Edwards hasn’t changed. He still looks in the mirror for counsel.

“I’m independent, self-reliant,” he says. “When adversity hits, most people call Mom and Dad. I turn inward and I try to get it accomplished, instead of asking somebody else for help. That’s the way I’ve been for a long time. I’m pretty closed. . . . I don’t let a lot of people in. Not even my mom. She’s not really in. I guess, growing up independent like that, you tend not to trust people. Only my ex-girlfriend knew me.”

No one else has been allowed.

Instead, Edwards turned to accomplishments. The way out was education, and the way to education was football, but for a 200-pound linebacker, opportunities were limited.

San Diego State wanted him. So did Colorado State and most of the schools in the Western Athletic Conference. Among Pacific 10 Conference schools, only UCLA sought him.

WAC coaches pressed their bids by expounding on limitations they said would hamper him in the Pac-10. It was the wrong sales approach.

“They said, ‘You’re too small, not strong enough,’ ” Edwards says. “I used it as a motivational tool. I decided to say, ‘Watch me.’

“If you tell me I can’t do something, it’s all I need to hear. If you say, ‘Jump over that wall,’ I’m going to jump over the wall. I have so much pride that it’s coming out of my ears. If anybody else can do something, I can do it.”

After a redshirt season at UCLA, Edwards became a starter in the sixth game of his freshman season and has been ever since.

He’s a junior now and finds himself ahead of the academic game. He will get his degree in political science after the winter quarter, and plans to go to graduate school during his senior season. Law school is in his future, he says, though not the law.

“The juris doctor is power,” he says. “When you have it, you can do pretty much what you want to do.”

It’s football, and it’s education. They are clear. Everything else is pretty confusing.

It goes back to stereotypes. He defies them.

“I’m part black, part Mexican, part Cherokee Indian, so I’m all mixed up,” he says. “I never knew what my identity was, growing up. I was just Donnie, hanging out with the guys. . . ..

“I have dark skin, so most people think I’m black, but I’m not cultured black. Black members of the team have tried to teach me, but I began to think, ‘There are so many groups. Why can’t they just get together?’ ”

His faith helps, but even that is taken on his own terms. He is Rastafarian, with “Jah,” the Rastas’ term for God, on his cap bill over “Reggae,” the Rastas’ music. But some of the Rastas’ beliefs collide with his Catholic upbringing, so his worship is a hybrid. He is trying to grow the dreadlocks they embrace but says he refuses to smoke the marijuana that they believe makes them more open to God.

“My ethnicity is mixed,” he says. “My religion is mixed. It’s all mixed up, so when I hang out with people, I’m just myself. I don’t try to conform with anybody--whites, blacks, Latinos, anybody. I’m Donnie. This is how I am.”