Before & After : Things Didn’t Work Out as Expected for Former Santa Ana Stars

George Tuioti sat down to write a letter last August. His wedding was approaching and thoughts drifted back. There was a lot to remember.

Had it been seven years already? Those days with Scootie, Bobby, Robert and all the guys he had grown up with, played sports with, from the Jerome Center until they graduated from Santa Ana High School in 1988. They had been winners. More importantly, they had been friends.

Most were coming to the wedding.

Scootie Lynwood was coming. He wouldn’t miss it. He had always been their leader, their voice and, of course, their point guard. When they wanted to do something, anything, they cleared it with Scootie. He had been an author of the pact. They would always attend the weddings. Yeah, Scootie would be there.

Others would not.

Bobby Joyce would be missing. Man, no one played basketball like Bobby Joyce, with those long arms and that big grin. At one time, you said Adam Keefe, Don MacLean and Bobby Joyce in the same breath. Two are now in the NBA. Bobby is now a rumor. People have seen him here or there. He has done this or that.

Robert Lee, the best friend a guy ever had, also would not be there. He was the greatest running back in the world--so Tuioti thought at one time. Didn’t he outplay Glyn Milburn one night? Milburn is now in the NFL. Robert stopped running after high school, at least with the football.

“We’ve been through so much, all of us,” Tuioti said. “There was never a nickel between us. We ate at each other’s houses. We slept at the houses. I had to let Robert know I still loved him.”

Tuioti, who provides security at a juvenile halfway house, wrote to Lee, who is serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery at Ironwood State Penitentiary in Blythe. The Himalaya-like crevice that separated their lives didn’t matter. They were still best friends. The memories were there. Good memories.

They didn’t lose a football or basketball game as freshmen in 1984-85. They won a Southern Section football championship as sophomores, reached a second title game as juniors and the semifinals as seniors. In basketball, they won three Century League titles and reached the section semifinals as seniors.

On graduation day, they huddled under a tree, crying.

“This is it, this is it,” Lynwood kept repeating.

Joyce stopped him and said, “No, we’ll never be apart.”

Athletics would take them far, that had always been the plan. But they would stay together. That, too, was the plan.

Tuioti finished the letter. . . . If you were here, Robert, you’d be my best man . . .

Tuioti got married that week. But there were gaps in the wedding party. No Robert. No Bobby.

Jerome Center All-Americans

It’s rough at Jerome Center.

The first time Rick Bentley took that fifth-grade basketball team there, he also took the police. The court was cleared for two hours while his youth team practiced. The routine lasted for a week and the message got through. For two hours each day, the Sixers had the court in the older residential area, north of Santa Ana Valley High.

It made the Sixers special.

Lynwood, Lee and Willie Lane were the first to join. They had been in diapers together. Then Lynwood brought in Joyce, a lanky kid who spoke Spanish. Tuioti and the others followed. They were the Bills when they played football in the fall. They were the Sixers the rest of the year.

“There were guys I knew who had been in and out of jail,” Tuioti said. “They would just hang out on the street and the cops would hassle them. They always told me, ‘You got the sports and you got the grades. This is not for you.’ They pushed us all away.”

Tuioti would walk to Lee’s house, then they would pick up Lynwood, then Joyce and the others. Gang turf changed with each block--Bloods, Crips, F-Troop. But no one shot at them, no one even hassled them. Sometimes they would run, but not out of fear. It was training.

Even before high school, they were local legends. They did not lose a football game from the sixth grade through junior high. The Sixers went 180-2 during that time. They swore they would go to the same high school.

“You heard these kids were coming,” said Century basketball Coach Greg Coombs, then at Santa Ana. “When they were freshmen, we would walk into gyms and people would be talking about this freshman class at Santa Ana.”

As freshmen, they were 10-0 in football and won their first basketball game, 128-37, and didn’t come close to losing all season. It was heady stuff.

Said former Santa Ana assistant Greg Katz: “We always told them, ‘Don’t be a Jerome Center All-American.’ ”

The Long Fall

Dale Jordan, who works at Valley Liquor in Santa Ana, has known Lee for years. As kids, Lee, Lynwood and Lane would come into the store to buy candy. So Jordan knew the face that night in 1992. He just didn’t recognize the man.

Lee stumbled in, shot in the leg and side.

“He was dripping blood and I said, ‘Robert, what happened?’ ” Jordan said. “He didn’t say a word. He grabbed three half-gallons of liquor off the shelf and walked out.”

Jordan said the police were waiting outside, but Lee struggled and yelled that he didn’t want to go to the hospital.

“He was flying,” Jordan said. “It’s pretty sad. He had everything going for him.”

Lee’s fall was epic, and tragic.

It was hard to find a better high school running back. He gained 4,401 yards in three seasons, still the sixth-best total in Orange County history. As a sophomore, he gained 602 yards in four playoff games, including 231 in a 31-21 victory over Mission Viejo in the Southern Section title game.

When he didn’t have football, the problems began.

When Lee was in the seventh grade, his father died. The Sixers’ basketball team showed up at the funeral, in uniform. He had his friends. Yet they weren’t enough.

No one recruited Lee his senior year. They came to see Tuioti.

“On every recruiting trip I had, I asked them about Robert,” Tuioti said. “I tried to hustle Nebraska. I told them I will not go unless Robert goes.”

Lee tried to play at Orange Coast College, but quit after three days. The spiral began.

Lee ordered pizza on March 6, 1992, then refused to pay. The delivery man knocked on the door and Lee came out with a knife. Lee was convicted of two counts of second degree armed robbery and received a five-year suspended sentence. He was picked up for probation violations twice and tested positive for cocaine twice.

Lee spent three months in the Orange County jail. Two days after his release, his sister called the probation office and said Lee was smoking crack cocaine at home, according to probation department reports. Lee was picked up, but refused to submit to testing.

His probation was revoked and he is now at Ironwood State Prison in Blythe. The State Corrections Department is not allowing inmates to be interviewed while it reviews the policy.

“I asked him about the drugs one time and he blew up at me,” Lane said. “That wasn’t like him. I was his friend. You have to have a strong mind to get out.”

I Have To Help

Tuioti played linebacker with viciousness and quarterback with finesse. In basketball, he was a power forward. He came from a stable home, with two parents, and had good grades.

There was no doubt about it, Tuioti was a recruiter’s dream. He signed with USC. Then high school ended.

First, he failed to make the required score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Then, he tore knee ligaments before the Orange County All-Star game.

He went to San Diego State and sat out a year. A doctor examined the knee and told Tuioti to not play football again.

“They told me I could clean up tables and stuff,” Tuioti said. “I wasn’t going to embarrass my family by taking a free ride like that. If I was going to do janitor work, I might as well get paid to be a janitor, earn it like my father.”

Tuioti went to Rancho Santiago, and played football and then went New Mexico State, where he was an All-Big West defensive end. He received a degree in criminal justice and came home to Santa Ana.

“I knew a lot of people who were getting in trouble,” Tuioti said. “I saw kids in high school who were just like myself, getting into the gang situation. The heroes kids have aren’t the local high school star, like when I was growing up. Their heroes are Reebok, Nike and a Raiders jacket. I had to help.”

Tuioti applied for a job with the Orange County probation office, then the county went bankrupt. He now works for a company contracted to run security at a center that houses juveniles who are about to be released from custody.

In the afternoons, Tuioti is an assistant coach for Foothill.

“My dad worked two jobs to support us,” he said. “He told me to do what I had to do on the field and he would take care of the bills. I was lucky.”

Can I Have Cheese With Mine?

The 39-cent hamburger stand was the place to be. Lynwood would demand the group’s money, all of it, and order the hamburgers. Each guy got the same, whether he chipped in 39 cents or $5. That was just the way it was and always had been.

He led. Others followed.

“We used to call Scootie our cumulus cloud,” Katz said. “If he was up, we were going to have a great practice. If he was down, get out the umbrellas.”

His father left when he was 5. His mother split without a word when he was in high school. Moody? Coaches were lucky he had “up” days.

If there is a blueprint for failure, Lynwood held the patent. Bad neighborhood, no parents, a teen father.

Yet, this spring he will receive his associate arts degree from Rancho Santiago. He has applied at USC, Southern Methodist, Howard and Long Beach State and intends to study business administration.

“I was always going to succeed,” Lynwood said. “No matter what I did or what came up. It was never a question.”

Lynwood had help from an eclectic group.

“My kindergarten teacher would pick me up every day to go to school,” Lynwood said. “I lived with Coach Bentley for a while. I lived with this lady, Della Dunning, who bought me clothes. I would mow the lawn and she let me stay for free.

“I’ve been blessed. It’s like I’ve been a car on a highway and along the way there have been lots of gas stations.”

That’s not to say there haven’t been a few pot holes.

Lynwood was kicked off the basketball team as a junior for several violations. When he returned as a senior, the team reached the semifinals.

“We knew that this was a group, that control-wise, we were going to have to sit on them,” Coombs said. “We wanted them to have the opportunity to go on if they had the talent.”

Lynwood had the talent. He was one of the top point guards in Southern California. But when his high school career ended, he didn’t want the opportunity.

He had a daughter, who now lives with her mother in Atlanta. Lynwood was determined to be involved with his child. He played one season at Fullerton College, then went to work.

“I had no ambition to be a basketball player,” Lynwood said. “I had responsibilities and those took over.”

He worked on the loading docks for a newspaper for five years and is now a delivery man for an overnight mail company. He has reconciled with his parents and tried to be a good one himself.

Said Lynwood: “I may come back after college and coach. I can’t give to the people who helped me, but I can give to someone else.”

I Got Stuff. They Need It More.

Coombs got a call two years ago from Bobby Joyce.

“He wanted to know if he could help coach,” Coombs said. “I told him to come by. He never showed up.”

Lynwood got a telephone call a year ago. It was Joyce.

“He said he needed to talk with me and it was real important,” Lynwood said. “He never came over.”

Joyce’s life has become shrouded in rumors.

“We all felt Bobby was the one who was going to make it,” Tuioti said. “He was a man as a child. If he wanted to dunk on you, he would just do it.”

Joyce, a lanky 6-7, was considered one of the top basketball recruits in the nation. He was also the flash point of their last games as a group.

Santa Ana seemed to have El Toro beat in the football semifinals in 1987. But, with seconds remaining, El Toro quarterback Bret Johnson heaved one last pass from midfield in a hard rain. Joyce went for the interception instead of just flicking the ball away. El Toro’s Adam Brass grabbed the ball from Joyce’s hands and scored. El Toro won, 13-12.

Months later, the Saints were playing MacLean’s Simi Valley team in the section basketball semifinals. Joyce and a Simi Valley player got into a fight in the third quarter and both were ejected. Without Joyce, Santa Ana lost, 76-61.

“Those will always be the two things people remember about Bobby,” Tuioti said. “It’s a shame. There was so much more to him.”

Coombs remembers Joyce getting money for his birthday as a senior. He went out and bought an expensive toy fire truck and donated it to a children’s charity.

“They were asking for $5 Christmas gifts and this truck must have cost $25-$30,” Coombs said. “I told him that was too much. He said, ‘I got stuff. They need it more.’ That’s the Bobby I want to remember.”

Joyce played a season at Riverside Community College, then transferred to Nevada Las Vegas. He sat out the 1991 season--when the Rebels won the national championship--then sat on the bench the next.

He put on weight and got married, then disappeared. Joyce left the team for personal reasons in October, 1992.

Dennis Scallman, a bus driver who has looked after Joyce for nearly 20 years, is the only old friend to have seen Joyce recently. Scallman had to bail him out.

Joyce was arrested in Las Vegas for battery with intent, battery and robbery last November. Scallman sent bail money.

It’s not the first time Scallman has come to Joyce’s aid. There was the night Joyce said someone was trying to kill him and asked Scallman to get him to the airport. Another time, he was playing basketball in Mexico and some trouble occurred. Scallman never asked, he just sent money.

“I believe Bobby was embarrassed,” Lynwood said. “How could he come back and just be Bobby? If he wasn’t Bobby the basketball player, who was he? I think he lost his identity.”

The Survivors

It has been seven years.

“People still talk about those guys,” Coombs said. “It was as talented a group of athletes as I’ve seen in one class.”

Lane works two jobs and helps with his brother’s rap career. Leo Leon is married with four kids. Donovan Mauga is a chiropractor. Sergio Rocha died of a heart attack.

Lynwood has a kid. Tuioti got married.

Those who made the wedding were survivors. Those who were missing . . .

“When I think of Robert Lee and Bobby Joyce, I’m just glad they are alive,” Lynwood said. “So many guys we knew are dead. Robert and Bobby can still make it.”