SUPER BOWL XXIX / SAN DIEGO CHARGERS vs. SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS : El Camino Royalty : 49ers’ Derrick Deese Took the Junior College Route to Get to the Super Bowl--and He Loved It

They went by names of T-Lou. Los. T-C. Hardware. Big Skinny.

They came from places like Detroit. Samoa. The Marine Corps. A trailer park. A state penitentiary.

They gathered in a cluster of buildings off Crenshaw Boulevard in Torrance to learn about football.

They slept together, fought gang members together, starved together.

They wore lava-lava skirts to games, held parking-lot potlucks afterward, shared money and silly dreams.

Two years later, when they parted ways, they had learned a little about football and a lot about everything else.

Today, they will gather in front of their television sets to remember those years, to celebrate the hidden triumphs of junior college football, to toast a friend.

The JC was El Camino College.

The friend is Derrick Deese, starting right guard for the San Francisco 49ers.

Big Skinny.

When asked about a game between his 49ers and the San Diego Chargers that will be watched by millions, all he wanted to talk about was the 1988-89 seasons at a commuter school with an enrollment of 20,000 but an average football attendance of 2,000.

“Everything I have in my career, I owe to El Camino,” he said. “Never will I feel that way about football again.”

Unrecruited from Culver City High, undrafted from USC, unwanted by 49er Coach George Seifert last fall, Deese said he has used what he learned at El Camino to endure.

“The school was my last resort,” he said. “It taught me how to survive the hard times.”

When Ralph Tamm went down with an arch injury in the 49ers’ season opener against the Raiders, Deese was ready. Today, after starting every game since Week 2 and being pronounced as the team’s best pass blocker, he will take the Joe Robbie Stadium field against the Chargers and wonder.

Are the buddies from El Camino watching?

What about the two guys who spent the entire season sleeping on his mother’s floor? How about the guys who agreed to cut their names into their hair to be part of the team?

And that team bus driver who doubled as a porno star, what about him? And what happened to the teammate whose dad painted the stadium in his spare time?

One thing is certain. One of the identical twin brothers who played linebacker, the one whose 3-year-old son was monitored by the cheerleaders during practice, he’ll be watching.

And not believing.

“I don’t think it has sunk in, not until I actually see him on the field will I believe it,” Carlos Carter said.

“One day,” Deese said, “maybe even I’ll believe it.”

*

They are the invisible miracle workers. Of 103 community colleges in California, 14 play football in the Los Angeles-area Mission Conference. The schools often get lost among factories and shopping outlets.

They are promoted as steppingstones from high school to a four-year college. But in the football world the equation is simpler.

Junior colleges quite often lead from nowhere to somewhere.

“They are often a turning point in a kid’s life,” said Gene Engle, offensive line coach for El Camino. “We get players who don’t play in high school, who skip their senior year, who have poor academics, who are undersized, who are flat-out overlooked.”

Flat-out overlooked describes Deese, whose mother was forced to pay a recruiting service to include him in a recruiting handout after his senior year in high school.

Deese claims he wasn’t promoted by Culver City coaches who are no longer coaching there. It didn’t help that his team didn’t win a game in his senior year.

He was disillusioned enough to prepare to take an entrance exam for the police academy when Engle showed up one day and made him a promise.

“If you come to El Camino, in two years you can go anywhere you want,” he said.

There would be no scholarship. No dorms. No meals. Two-hour bus rides.

“But for Derrick, it was perfect,” said his mother, Ollie Shell, who raised her son alone while working in accounting departments for various banks, insurance companies and law firms.

Deese was known in high school for his fights during practice. He had never been away from his mother. He was only 17. He was growing into a 6-foot-3, 270-pound body that was more mature than his mind.

“He just wasn’t ready to leave home,” his mother said.

At El Camino, he quickly discovered a new home.

The Warriors had just won a mythical national championship with many second-year players. Deese was part of a new group.

Their coach, John Featherstone, stepped back and watched them learn. “We tell our kids, this is the last time you play for fun,” Featherstone said. “After you leave here, it is a business.”

Featherstone’s dress code allowed for thongs. Handouts from his coaching staff included a mattress for one player who complained of a sore back from sleeping on the floor at his grand- mother’s house.

Deese soon invited others who needed places to sleep to his mother and stepfather’s four-bedroom house on 123rd Street in Los Angeles.

“My husband worked nights, and every morning when he came home, he would have to step over five or seven kids laid out on the floor,” Shell said.

Others visited Deese’s house only for meals. Fifteen, on some days. Pregame meals were scheduled in her kitchen.

“At the banquet after his final season there, one of the coaches asked that everybody who had one meal at Mrs. Shell’s house stand up,” she recalled with a laugh. “Every player but about two boys stood up.”

On the field, Deese learned to play with others, to become part of a team. They went 9-1-1 that first season while having the time of their lives.

“The camaraderie there was unbelievable,” Deese said. “Knowing what I know now, even if I had an offer from USC right out of high school, I would still go to El Camino.”

They fought together against more than the likes of Riverside Community College. One evening gang members were menacingly following a team member and his girlfriend.

Unfortunately for the gang, the player was driving to a weekly postgame barbecue in the school parking lot. When the gang members pulled in behind him, they were surrounded by 30 El Camino Warriors. The gang members did not leave the parking lot on their feet.

“Things might have gotten out of hand, but that’s how we felt about each other,” Deese said.

The second season they went 10-1, losing their national championship bid in a Pony Bowl defeat to Riverside. Deese jumped offside to nullify what could have been the winning touchdown, and afterward he openly wept.

His mother approached the players as they were leaving the stadium and exhorted them to go home, saying that this was no night for partying.

A couple of hours later, she was awakened by the noise outside her front window. She peeked out to discover that the entire team had gathered on 123rd Street to console Derrick and each other.

“I yelled at my husband to get up and look at this, that he wasn’t going to believe it,” she said. “I told them to go home, and I guess they felt like this was home.”

Later, as Engle promised, Deese collected five scrapbooks full of recruiting mail. Thirty players from that 1989 team were given college scholarships, and later earned such honors as All Pacific-10, All-Southwest Conference and All-Western Athletic Conference.

“I was just talking to a buddy from El Camino, and we agreed that those are times we will take with us forever,” Carter said.

Or at least to Miami, where Deese is expected to join former Ram Fred Dryer as the only El Camino graduates in the school’s 48-year history to appear in a Super Bowl game.

If the camera catches Deese there, don’t be surprised if, while holding up his hand, he wraps a middle finger around the fourth finger and spreads his other fingers apart.

He will be making a “W,” the El Camino sign.

He will not be doing anything that reminds anyone of USC, where scouts say coaches discouraged them from drafting him because of his lack of soundness and stamina.

“USC was OK, but I was never really healthy there, I was never . . . well, it was so different from El Camino,” he said.

He was contacted by the 49ers on the second day of the 1991 draft and quickly signed with them as a free agent, but he spent the next two seasons injured and on the bench.

This fall, Seifert wanted to cut him. Bobb McKittrick, the 49er line coach, pleaded for Deese’s job, saying that he had worked harder than ever.

“I never had it easy before; I wouldn’t have known it any other way,” Deese said. “I was doing whatever it took to hang on.”

Seifert gave him one final chance. Deese not only stayed sound, he earned a place between Pro Bowl linemen Bart Oates and Harris Barton.

“Yes, frankly, he surprised me,” Seifert said.

Seifert isn’t the only one.

“Who would have thought that I would ever play for the 49ers, that somebody like John Madden would be on TV saying something about me ?” Deese said. “Right now it’s all like, ‘Wow.’ ”

Yeah, those old buddies will be watching him today. And if past off-seasons are any indication, when Deese returns home later this month, they will probably be waiting for him outside his front door, wondering what’s for dinner.