Pigskin Pride

Jumpy and itching for a confrontation, dozens of police officers stashed their guns and strolled confidently across East Los Angeles College on a recent weekend. There was no need for firepower. The rules of hand-to-hand combat would apply.

These were the 60 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Centurions, a tackle football team made up of men from throughout the department.

For 20 years, the Centurions have battled rival police and fire departments throughout the West. They do it to raise money for charity, as a way to stay in shape and for a sheer love of the sport.

But unseen in the combat are other, deeper reasons that underscore the need for emotional release in a job that piles withering stress atop everyday life’s burdens. On the street, past generations of officers could take out their frustrations about missed promotions, divorces or close calls with less accountability. Today’s officers, subject to tighter disciplinary standards and a mission to be agents of goodwill in the communities they patrol, play by different rules. And so, to blow off steam, some of them play football.

They’re cops like defensive back Keith Wiggins, a 27-year-old vice officer who wonders why all the men in his family die young. And tight end Jeff Stewart, 33, a patrol officer in the violent Ramparts division whose ex-wife left and took his four sons with her to Utah. And running back Howard Jackson, a 26-year-old Hollenbeck division gang cop whose partner was gunned down before his eyes shortly before midnight New Year’s Day.

“The Centurions,” Wiggins said earnestly, “are my family.”

At East L.A. College two weekends ago, in the midst of a daylong downpour, the Centurions prepared to take out their frustrations against the archrival L.A. Heat, a team composed of L.A. city and county firefighters.

The LAPD was 0-4 lifetime against the firefighters, going back to a legendary 20-0 shutout in 1927 before a packed Coliseum. There were only a few soaked, die-hard fans this time, barely equaling the number of players.

Before the game, Det. Ed Lindsey, a feisty 30-year veteran and the Centurions’ manager, looked encouragingly at the clouds.

“A great day for a game,” he said. “We love the mud.” Evidently. Three of the Centurions’ four wins in this undefeated season had come in the rain. They’d beaten the Wasco State Prison guards in Bakersfield and law enforcement teams in Fort Worth, Orange and San Diego counties.

The winner of this “911 Bowl,” as the police-fire game is called, would be awarded a trophy and a chance to move on to the national championships next month in Washington, D.C.

The game brings out the best and worst in both teams. The firefighters, not ashamed to remind the police of their history of defeats, once distributed T-shirts with pictures of a doughnut emblazoned on the front. This time, the LAPD countered by blaring the theme from the TV show “Cops” over the loudspeakers: “Bad Boys, Bad Boys. What you gonna do? What you gonna do when we come for you?” The soaked Centurion cheerleading team, composed of female officers, danced, kicked and shouted for their team.

The two teams’ distinct personalities were shaped, in part, by the fact that firefighting is often a more collaborative profession than policing. The police, bigger in size and strength, prefer to overcome opponents like a battering ram. The smaller, quicker firefighters rely on teamwork.

“We are used to working in groups of four and 10,” said Heat coach Ron Harmon, 36, who was a back-up quarterback at Palisades High School. “When we go to a fire, each of us has an assigned position and duty: Someone cuts the doors open, someone removes the bars of the window or plugs a hole in the roof. The same rules apply in football.”

It also hasn’t hurt that the Heat has four former professional players. The closest most Centurions have ever come to the NFL was the day New York Jets wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson showed up at an early-season practice on the football field near Dorsey High School, his alma mater, only to quip: “It’s no wonder the LAPD can’t catch anybody.”

Jeff Stewart, the Centurions’ tight end, remembers the mental and physical strain of juggling work and football during those early practices. Once he and a teammate were on their way to a workout, half-dressed in their football uniforms, when they were forced to make a detour to arrest a suspected car thief. The suspect was shocked, and Stewart was teased by his fellow officers.

“I was wearing my police shirt over my white tight pants and football shoes,” he said. “They said I looked like a ballerina. . . . The job always comes first.”

Many of the officers remember playing Pop Warner football, with helmets that didn’t fit and shoulder pads that caught more air than muscle. Many stayed with it in high school, fewer in college, all realizing eventually that their future lay elsewhere.

Stewart would prefer to keep his childhood fantasies alive by watching his oldest son play Little League or his three other boys wrestle. But he sees them only about three or four times a year when they visit from Utah. Football and the team’s contributions to its major beneficiary, the Blind Childrens Center, ease the hurt by keeping him involved with kids.

For Keith Wiggins, football is a way to connect to another family outside his own. His grandfather died in his 30s; his father died of cancer in his early 50s; Alan Wiggins, his brother, a former San Diego Padres baseball player who battled drug addiction, died in 1991 of pneumonia, tuberculosis and other medical complications of AIDS. He was 32.

“I loved my brother, but we all make choices, and he made his,” Wiggins said.

He turned to his fellow officers for strength. “I associate with the guys,” he said. “I know I can turn to them. If I have a question, I know who to ask.”

That need to share grief in a traditionally macho culture holds true for Howard Jackson, who is still struggling to come to grips with the death of Officer Steve Gajda, the first Hollenbeck division officer to die in the line of duty since 1969.

Jackson was one of several officers with Gajda working on a task force to curb New Year’s Eve celebratory gunfire. The officers were at a Boyle Heights house trying to break up a loud party when Gajda was shot and killed. The 17-year-old gunman was also killed.

“We were laughing,” Jackson said. “I had told Steve that I hate working New Year’s Eve. Now I’m trying to deal with his death. I’ve been to the cemetery three times, trying to remember him. He was enthusiastic, always made you laugh.”

Younger officers often seek out the veteran team manager Lindsey, who offers fatherly experience and confidentiality.

“I’m one of those dinosaurs from the old school,” Lindsey said. “If they have personal problems, girlfriend, divorce, anything, you learn not to repeat it, no matter what it is. It won’t be shared by me.”

Sometimes, more therapeutic than talking is just playing the game.

Sharlene Johnson, a 27-year-old officer who works the prostitution enforcement detail in the 77th Street division, gets to escape the streets by dancing on the cheerleading squad--just as she did as a child growing up in Kansas. It helps her forget the bleakness of a world in which women “have lost so much to drugs--their children, their self-respect.”

Darin Upstill, the 25-year-old Centurion quarterback and Southeast division gang squad officer, discovered the game calmed his nerves.

He was leaving a crime scene when suddenly officers heard a burst of gunfire, not knowing whether they were the intended targets. “‘We ducked, but never thought about it that much after that,” he said, in part because he had a game to play. “The next day, I was on a plane heading to a game in Houston. All I could think about was beating that team.”

Upstill is tormented by the thought of his last pass in his last high school game: He threw an interception that the opposing team ran back for a touchdown.

“I have to make up for that,” he said.

Before the game against the firefighters, the LAPD officers crowded into the locker room, going over plays, stretching muscles and psyching themselves up to the combative sounds of heavy-metal music.

“To get the blood pumping,” explained Jeff Graham, a youthful-looking Ramparts officer nicknamed Opie.

It wasn’t close. By halftime, the police were up by three touchdowns. There was not a lot of love in this room. Referees broke up several fights on the field. After one helmet-to-helmet clash, a Centurion was taken out of the game with a possible concussion.

Asked if he knew his name, he said: “Batman.” The player wanted to get back into the game but couldn’t remember which half it was. The man sitting next to him, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, attending to give moral support, urged the officer to sit out the rest of the game.

Final score: LAPD, 28-0.

The players embraced in the middle of the field. The firefighters congratulated the Centurions on a job well done.

Firefighter Anthony Jefferson, a 43-year-old, 275-pound guard, led all the players in a brief moment of prayer. He reminded the players that four firefighters and one police officer had died this year in the line of duty.

“Pray for their families,” he said. “We are also happy that no one was injured here today.” Go for that national championship, he urged the police on behalf of all firefighters.

The family had suddenly grown larger.