THE RIVALRY: Saturday at the Coliseum, 12:30 p.m. : The Don Patrol : Not Even Big Rivalry Can Break Bond Between Former Dorsey Teammates Abdul-Jabbar, Johnson

After deciding to attend USC, Keyshawn Johnson broke down and cried.

But he let those tears flow only in front of the one person whose life has been intertwined with his since they began to show they were something special with a football in their hands, Karim Abdul-Jabbar.

The pair have been, at various times, teammates at Dorsey High, roommates, cross-town rivals, fellow long shots in the Heisman Trophy competition and, always, best friends and confidantes.

If Abdul-Jabbar’s sprained right ankle is sufficiently healed, they will be the centerpieces in Saturday’s UCLA-USC game at the Coliseum, Abdul-Jabbar as the Bruin tailback and Johnson as the Trojans’ leading receiver.

But nothing figures to shatter the bond between them, a bond so vividly demonstrated on the day Johnson wept.

“I think a lot of things hit Keyshawn at once that day,” said Ava Shah, mother of Abdul-Jabbar and one of many Dorsey High people Johnson still leans on for the support, advice and help that have brought him through a troubled youth. “At that time, the emotion all caught up with him. I think he had a sense of stepping into the legitimate world, of going from one life to another.”

Johnson’s story, she says, can’t be told without anchoring it to Dorsey, where Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar played on the 1990 team.

“When Keyshawn came to Dorsey for his senior year, it was the perfect school at just the right time in his life,” she said. “He’d had kind of a knock-around life to that point. . . . [At] Dorsey, there were a lot of people who embraced him, who helped get him pointed in the right direction.”

Johnson’s theme song in those days was “DDP,” a traditional pregame, locker-room chant. At varying times, it has stood for Dorsey Don Pride or Dorsey Don Posse.

To Johnson, DDP is more than just a high school kid’s chant. DDP is Ava Shah. It’s Abdul-Jabbar, Chris Miller, Johnson’s cousin and a teammate at both Dorsey and USC; Dorsey Coach Paul Knox and assistant Darryl Holmes, and the 30 or so Dorsey players who have gone on to play major college football during Knox’s decade at the high school. Not to mention the seven from Dorsey who have reached the NFL.

But at the center of it all is the relationship between Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar, who until a recent name change was Sharmon Shah. They met while Abdul-Jabbar was still at Audubon Junior High.

“He hung out then with the Pop Warner football crowd,” Johnson said. “I was more into a street group of guys, who were into sports too.”

They met again in the summer of 1990, when Johnson was heading for Dorsey, his fourth and final stop on a troubled journey during which he had been at two other high schools and in a juvenile detention facility for nine months.

As Johnson remembers it, their first conversation didn’t leave Abdul-Jabbar with a great impression.

“The summer before my only season at Dorsey, we were working out and he broke his hand,” Johnson said. “Part of a bone popped through his skin.

“I’d never seen anything like it. I didn’t know you could get hurt that bad playing football. I looked at it and said something dumb, like, ‘Does that hurt?’ ”

But once Abdul-Jabbar saw what Johnson could do on a football field, he was impressed.

So was Knox, Johnson’s coach.

“He made a leaping catch in the end zone against Granada Hills in his first game for us,” Knox said. “He did exactly what he’s doing now--outjumped a bunch of short guys in the end zone.

“I had exactly one problem with him. Early in that season, he missed a practice and we dropped him to the second team. It got his attention, and we never had another problem with him.”

Knox never had a problem with Abdul-Jabbar. And UCLA Coach Terry Donahue says Abdul-Jabbar, who has already set a school single-season rushing record with 1,419 yards, is not only his best player on game days, but on practice days as well. No argument from Knox, who recalls Abdul-Jabbar as a model in practice.

But that 1990 Dorsey squad had so much talent that Abdul-Jabbar began the season as the second-string tailback behind Lamont Warren, who went on to play at Colorado and is now with the Indianapolis Colts. Abdul-Jabbar made it into the starting lineup only after Warren was injured early in the season.

Johnson, on the other hand, had all sorts of jobs on that squad.

“His confidence was amazing,” Knox said. “He felt he could do anything, and he could. Even then, he talked a good game. He’d say to me, ‘Hey, you need someone to do this or that? Aw, here, I’ll do it.’ And he would. One time, it was punting.”

Holmes was an assistant at both Dorsey and West Los Angeles College when Johnson was there.

“He was a man playing boys at Dorsey,” Holmes said. “He had an extreme physical advantage over all opponents. He was a skinny kid, not close to 200 pounds then. But he was always deceptively strong. At West L.A., he was the tight end in our goal-line package. I was supposed to be the blocking coach at Dorsey, but I never taught him a thing. He always could block like an offensive lineman.”

Yet Dorsey, despite all the talent, did not win the championship in 1990, losing twice to Wilmington Banning. The second of those defeats was a season-ending 21-20 heartbreaker in the City 4-A semifinals.

“I still can’t get over it, five years later,” Holmes said. “Both those guys on the same team and we lost to Banning twice. I’m still upset about it.”

Abdul-Jabbar finally got his 4-A title the season after Johnson left Dorsey. And Abdul-Jabbar did more than his share in getting the title, rushing for 1,694 yards and a 7.8-yard average. Like Johnson before him, Abdul-Jabbar, as a senior, was available for whatever Knox needed. He was a valuable receiver, catching seven passes for 108 yards, and he threw too, completing four passes, three of them for touchdowns.

But if Holmes saw many similarities between Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar on the field, it was a very different story off the field, he said.

“The two of them were as opposite as you could find,” Holmes said. “Karim [is] a lot more unassuming, Keyshawn far more brash. With Karim, it has a lot to do with his family and his faith. Keyshawn likes to talk a good game as well as play it.”

But Johnson couldn’t talk his way into a major university, despite his athletic talent. So he went to West L.A., and, in his second year there, Abdul-Jabbar’s freshman year in Westwood, they moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Culver City.

Johnson did the cooking. And most of the talking.

“I’m a fun-loving guy, outgoing and I like to talk,” Johnson said. “He’s very reserved, serious and very organized. We’re good for each other. I’ve learned a lot from him.”

The most important thing Johnson learned from Abdul-Jabbar was how to get on the road to higher learning. Johnson was spurred to move on from West L.A. by the sight of Abdul-Jabbar, who had been a year behind him, moving ahead of him by enrolling at UCLA.

“It seemed like he knew every head coach on the face of the earth,” Ava Shah said of Johnson. “But I think it was when he saw Karim go to UCLA that he made up his mind to buckle down and stop partying.”

Shah remembers the day it really hit home. She was at West L.A. watching Johnson play, but had brought a radio with her to listen to the Bruin game at Stanford. It was a game that Abdul-Jabbar rushed for 187 yards.

When Johnson learned of Abdul-Jabbar’s yardage total, Ava Shah watched his reaction.

“I’m supposed to be at that level,” Johnson said, more to himself than to anyone else.

Ava Shah figures Johnson would not have reached his current level had it not been for Dorsey.

“Dorsey High was the perfect high school for Keyshawn at that point in his life,” she said. “He was suddenly in an environment where it was not cool not to go to college, not cool if you got in trouble. We got him turned in a positive direction. He was one of those lucky kids who decided at the right time that he’d listen to people who wanted to help him.

“So many inner-city kids, they become hardened and won’t listen.

“What Keyshawn has done . . . I’m so proud I want to hug him. It touches my heart.”

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Impact Players

Former high school teammates Karim Abdul-Jabbar and Keyshawn Johnson are making a national impression:

KARIM ABDUL-JABBAR

Rushing yards: 1,419

Pac-10 rank: 1st

NCAA rank: 8th

*

KEYSHAWN JOHNSON

Receptions: 78

Yards 1,102: yards

Pac-10 rank: 1st

NCAA rank: 5th

Note: Johnson is first in the Pac-10 in receptions and yards. The NCAA bases its rankings on yards.