A FATHER’S SONSHINE

The son lines up and throws his body into the stranger, clattering through the night, up and down the football field, but all he can wonder is, Where is he? Where is he?

The son is sitting on the sideline with six minutes to play in the first half when he finally shows up, walking through the bleachers with a bulky video camera and boxes of candy, loud and lost and impossible to miss.

The son is with teammates, deep in the strategy of a two-point lead, sweat dripping, the homecoming crowd stomping, the coach gesturing.

The son turns to his father and waves.

*

The father sits in the small living room above the angry streets, spinning the tape on the VCR he recently fixed for $75, and all he can wonder is, Where is he, Where is he?

The father spins past one distant play, then another, then he appears, No. 79 in black, starting left tackle for the Azusa Pacific Cougars.

The father watches him block--is that what they call it, blocking?--even though he watched it in person only hours ago.

The father watches until around midnight, when he pops out the tape and lays it on a coffee table directly in front of the television set.

The next morning, he will put in the tape and watch his son again.

*

Not long ago, Fouad Mikhail realized something very interesting about giving up your life for your children.

You gain another life.

Only, one that makes sense.

“Your children run through your veins,” he says. “Your children are what make you strong.”

Fouad Mikhail is the father, a slight, hobbled man who works six days a week at $5 an hour pumping gas at the corner of Olympic and Atlantic.

Karim Mikhail is the son, a large, thick man working afternoons and Saturday nights as a standout tackle for the playoff-hopeful Azusa Pacific University football team.

Their old life was Cairo, Egypt, two nice homes, a wealthy professional family.

Their new life is an East Los Angeles tenement, and American football.

Their story is a quiet one shared by many immigrant families throughout Los Angeles--a story of finding acceptance and ultimately salvation through sports.

In return, in an environment where the word “family” is often tossed around as casually as dirty socks, they remind us of its true weight.

Fouad and his wife sold everything and moved here six years ago so their two children could escape what the parents felt was Muslim persecution of their Christian beliefs.

They had never heard of football. They were satisfied to figure out cockroaches that inhabited their apartment.

A year later they still had not heard of the sport when Karim attended a Montebello High “football” tryout because he thought it was soccer.

“I saw a big helmet, little balls, I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “But they saw that I was big, so they asked me to come back the next day.”

Five seasons later, Mikhail is 6 feet 4, 290 pounds, one of the leaders of an Azusa Pacific team with a rare chance to qualify for the NAIA playoffs.

And his father is the team’s most interesting cheerleader.

Fouad walks through the stands during games distributing candy and cookies while using his broken English to exhort everyone to believe.

He cheers for his son in Arabic, even though he often has no idea what he is cheering.

He runs to the field afterward to congratulate Karim’s coach, Vic Shealy, even though he doesn’t quite know what Shealy does.

During the week he hosts dinners for the team’s huge linemen at his family’s tiny apartment, even though there is barely room for them.

“His father does the oddest things,” center Robert Purcell said. “But they are like, the cutest things.”

Things that should be routine, but have become rare.

“You look at them sometimes, and you think about missing your Dad, and you get a little upset for a second,” said guard Jon Puente, whose parents separated when he was a senior in high school.

Fouad has learned, there is something else very interesting about giving up your life for your children.

Others wonder why they didn’t think of it first.

Azusa fans openly stared after Saturday night’s victory over Whittier when Fouad and wife Rawya met their son in the end zone and smothered him with kisses.

His jersey was dirt-stained and wet, his hugs left both of them sprinkled with grass.

“When they don’t get here on time, I worry about them,” Karim said.

“Ah, but we are here,” Fouad said. “We are always here.”

*

Karim Mikhail’s young wife Jinnifer had an eye-popping introduction to her new father-in-law’s mission.

Soon after their marriage, Fouad began phoning their house at 7 a.m. every day to make certain Karim was awake and preparing for school.

“I’m like, ‘Babe, we do have an alarm clock,’ ” she recalled. “Karim said, ‘You don’t understand.’ ”

Fouad also phones every night, sometimes twice a night if Karim is studying for a big test.

He not only phones Karim, but also his coaches and teachers, thanking them for watching over his son.

If he had any knowledge of football, he could be the parent from hell.

It didn’t take Coach Shealy long to realize he is something far different.

In Shealy’s 14 years in the business, Fouad was the first parent of a player to invite him to dinner.

Shealy was so stunned, he accepted, bringing his wife and three small children into their two-bedroom place.

“What happened during dinner was, essentially, Fouad said he was handing his son over to my care,” Shealy said. “It was very touching.”

Karim, 15 when his parents moved to this country, has been touched as well.

“There is not one word, not two words, not one sentence, to express my gratitude to my father for what he has done,” he said.

He was old enough to know of his family’s riches in Egypt, smart enough to understand their difficulties here, thankful that football has given him a place.

“When we left there we had everything,” he said. “We landed in Los Angeles, and it seemed like we had nothing.”

Fouad said they moved because he was afraid his children would not reach their potential in a Muslim-dominated country.

“It seemed my children would not have the chances that I had, or the freedom,” he said.

Once they arrived, while the children gained their “freedom,” the adults lost theirs.

Rawya had difficult finding work because of the language barrier. Fouad was given a job by a relative at the gas station. They moved near there because he does not know how to drive.

He works there still, despite being robbed at gunpoint and run down by motorists who would not pay.

He walks slowly because of circulation problems caused by diabetes, so sometimes Karim will come over between classes and help him tend the pumps.

It is this lifestyle--a 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift daily--that Karim feared he might adopt.

Until he discovered football.

With few friends and no niche because he spoke mostly Arabic, Karim was an easy target for the recruitment directors of nearby gangs.

Then he attended what he thought was high school soccer practice, and somebody told him to dress in pads, and somebody else pointed him at a ball carrier.

“My first games, I didn’t know any of the rules, just that I was supposed to get the man with the ball,” he said. “I get him my first couple of times, everybody cheered, and that was it.”

By the time he was a hulking senior all-star, several colleges were interested, but Fouad picked Azusa Pacific because of its Christian philosophy and proximity.

Yes, his father picked his college. Karim shrugged.

“You have to understand, my father gave me his life, there is nothing I can do to repay him,” he said. “He knows what school is best, it must be best.”

Karim’s sister Manal, 17, is captain of the Montebello High cheerleading squad and will probably attend Azusa Pacific next year.

“That is when we will move, to be closer to them,” Fouad said. “I will work, wherever. McDonald’s? That is fine.”

By then, Karim will be preparing for . . . something other than the NFL. Although there is a chance he could be a prospect with more experience, Karim says this is not about the NFL.

“This is about getting a degree, getting a good job, showing my parents that they did not come here in vain,” he said.

Sometimes the pressure is so great that he walks outside his apartment to a nearby curb at midnight, where he sits in the dark and thinks.

“There is not a question of whether we will make it,” he said, referring to him and his wife. “We have to make it.”

The flip side of this pressure, though, is that he won’t have to do it alone.

Fouad put down his camera the other night, took a break from straining to film Karim’s game over the crowd, and shook his head.

“I am with Karim now, I am with him when he has his own children, I am with him until I die,” he said. “Something inside you just does not go away.”

Down on the field, No. 79 in black plows another gold jersey into the grass, one man with the strength of two.