Channel Islands’ Charge Led by a True Braveheart : Football: Popular Raider defensive coordinator Tuimoloau back full bore after triple-bypass surgery in 1994.

Almost on cue, “heart” surfaces in any conversation about Aemalemalo Tuimoloau, who, in a merciful nod to brevity, is known simply as Junior Tui to his numerous friends sprinkled throughout Ventura County.

He will tell you his heart is “with those boys,” the Channel Islands High football players he has coached as a walk-on defensive coordinator since 1982.

Raider players Blane Saipaia and Mario Fajardo will tell you how the team played its heart out for Coach Tui last fall when he was confined to a hospital bed for several weeks.

His oldest daughter, 19-year-old Dolores, an Olympic hopeful in the shotput, will tell you how she could not bring herself to begin college classes because her heart was with her father as he struggled to recover. She would head for Ventura College and detour to Ventura County Medical Center instead.

However, only Tuimoloau’s middle daughter, 16-year-old Judy, actually saw his heart in action, engorged with blood, healthily pumping away after triple-bypass surgery had cleared his arteries last August.

“I want to see my father’s heart,” Judy said resolutely when the rest of the family couldn’t bear to watch a doctor delicately clean pus from the infected open incision in Tuimoloau’s chest every day for two weeks after the operation.

And there it was, the organ that symbolizes life and love, dedication and commitment. All the things Junior Tui stands for.

*

An ocean breeze takes the edge off the heat of Hell Week at Channel Islands, but Coach Tui is hot anyway, imploring linebackers to read their keys, step up and take on blockers.

“Then, make the tackle,” he shouts. “Make the tackle!”

The triple bypass is past tense. Tuimoloau, 40, holding nothing back, is coaching full bore, the same way he did in 1987 when Channel Islands advanced to a Southern Section championship game, and the same way he did in 1993, when the team did not win a single game.

Joel Gershon, the Raiders’ head coach of 21 years and an assistant for seven years before that, remembers Tuimoloau in 1970 as a stout freshman.

“Unselfish, eager to please, Junior had a heart of gold,” Gershon said.

Twenty-five years later, Gershon reminds his assistant the old ticker ain’t what it used to be.

“You can slow down,” he quietly cautions Tuimoloau after the linebackers have been pushed through a particularly exhausting drill.

*

Tuimoloau will have none of it, and at practice’s end, he delivers a passionate speech to the team on the virtues of giving one’s all, of putting out so completely that there are no regrets, win or lose.

“Coach Tui still has that fire and intensity,” said Saipaia, an All- Ventura County defensive lineman. “He’s trying to take it a little easy, but as time goes on he is the way he always was.”

Not completely. Tuimoloau never did smoke or drink, but he has sworn off the medium-rare steaks and pork chops and three-egg omelets he once consumed regularly.

“Two arteries were clogged 90% and another 75%,” Tuimoloau said. “I’ve changed my diet for good. Every day I wake up and thank God for the opportunity to be with my family and with the team.”

Tuimoloau’s wife, Aomalo, and three daughters--the youngest is Chenne, 13--fret over his eating habits, wondering if when he is with the Channel Islands coaches he cheats on the strict diet he adheres to at home.

“We still have our leader in our family,” Judy said. “He’s the one who keeps us strong, keeps us going.”

Tuimoloau’s given first name means “climbing or striving to win,” in his native Samoan. One of 12 children in a family that moved to Oxnard in 1959, Tuimoloau is also a leader in a tight Samoan community that revolves around the Mt. Zion First Samoan Assembly of God church in Oxnard.

“We just thank God for my father pulling through,” said Dolores, who will resume track and field workouts this fall at Ventura College.

In 1994 as a Channel Islands High senior, she had the nation’s second-longest throw in the shotput, 49 feet 2 inches, but she put her career on hold until her father recovered.

“I was taught family first no matter what, that was my priority,” she said. “I was looking forward to being a freshman in college but he was constantly on my mind.”

Tuimoloau had so many visitors nurses gave him a private room. Besides current and former players, coaches from neighboring schools stopped by. Westlake’s Jim Benkert, Buena’s Rick Scott, Newbury Park’s George Hurley and Rio Mesa’s George Contreras became his friends through Ventura County Coaches Assn. meetings. When the association began giving an annual award to the county’s top walk-on coach in 1992, the first recipient was Junior Tui.

*

Fellow Channel Islands coaches had more on their minds than cheering up their defensive coordinator. Tuimoloau had just begun implementing a new defensive scheme when he needed surgery.

“Everyone recognizes Junior as a tremendous personality, somebody you just feel good being around, but he brings great expertise to the football field as well,” Gershon said.

“We literally would go to his hospital bed and ask him about specifics of the defense.”

After his surgery but before his wound became infected, Tuimoloau was allowed to come home. The entire Channel Islands team visited him the day of their opener against Rio Mesa, gathering in his living room. He went over the defense, led the team in prayer, and Channel Islands went out and won, 20-7, the team’s only victory of the season.

Only a few days later he was back in the hospital, the incision reopened as doctors fought the infection.

“We prayed for him before every game,” said Fajardo, the team’s center and linebacker. “It was real shocking, seeing him with his chest open.”

The constant stream of visitors was comforting to the patient, who missed football more than he let on.

“Every day after practice, Coach Gershon came over and updated me,” Tuimoloau said. “He knew where my heart was, with those kids.”

A year later, a new season is about to begin, and Coach Tui finds himself surrounded by many of those same kids, renewed mentally and physically. He hears his wife when she says, “Take it easy,” as he leaves the house. But on the field the intensity returns in a heartbeat.

“I feel great,” he said. “When I’m with the boys, I reach the point of no return. I am back, with enthusiasm.”