Circle Route

Mike Bastianelli will make his last trip down the Coliseum tunnel Saturday when USC plays Notre Dame.

As the players’ cleats scrape and echo on their way toward the field, every hope and every disappointment of his life will walk with him.

At De La Salle High in Concord, Calif., Bastianelli was a star quarterback who never lost a game, going 39-0.

Not everyone knew the golden boy had a childhood tarnished by family problems. His mother was struggling with alcoholism, and she and Bastianelli say the father he has never met is an organized crime figure imprisoned in a minimum-security facility in Illinois.

Maybe Bastianelli will be the USC hero Saturday against Notre Dame. He almost was against Oregon. More likely, he will not. A year after being USC’s third-leading receiver, Bastianelli has only eight catches all season.

But even with 17 Trojan losses during his career--imagine, he once thought he could go undefeated in four years at USC too--Bastianelli is going to walk away a winner.

By the end of next summer, he hopes he’ll have his degree. In late spring, he and his wife of less than a year, Nicol, are expecting their first baby, a girl.

“Everything’s coming together for us,” he said. “I have a lot of expectations and thoughts. I still want to play somewhere next year. If I don’t give that a shot, I think I’d regret it. If that doesn’t work out, hey, I’m getting my degree. I’ve thought about coaching. I might even put in two years and get my master’s in education. Who knows? I want to live kind of a quiet life. Be comfortable. Be a family. That’s what I want.”

It was not what he had as a boy, when job changes and divorces took his family from Oklahoma to Phoenix to San Diego to Northern California.

“We did a lot of moving around.” Bastianelli said. “My mom was an alcoholic. She’s totally sober now, but I saw the kind of things she went through. I’ve seen her turn her life around.

“Alcoholism is such a disease, it shouldn’t be kept quiet. It’s not a secret.”

Bastianelli wanted to help, but in the end he couldn’t. Before he finished high school, he left his mother and two younger brothers and their disintegrating household and went to live with his girlfriend’s family and other friends.

“It was not until he left and went to live with his girlfriend because he couldn’t stand to be around what was going on, that I realized. It threw it in my face real hard,” said his mother, Nancy West, who has recovered during the past two years and now lives in New Mexico.

“It was horrible stuff, but Mike and I never lost the bond of love. I was what you call ‘periodic.’ You never knew what would be going on with me. I’d be fine, then I’d be gone.

“It’s hills and valleys. I’ve been in and out of a lot of treatments. I don’t know, the last time was different. I was tired of my life the way it was. Mike knows I’m with someone now [fiance Dennis Marr] who’s a sweet and decent human being. It gives Mike peace of mind. He doesn’t have to worry about me anymore.”

Bastianelli, 22, stayed close to his mother despite her difficulties.

“That she hit that point in life always depressed me,” he said. “But it made me very strong. At first it broke me down. I hated to see her so bent out of shape, not the loving, caring person she is.

“You never knew what to expect. You never knew if she’d come home. You never knew what might happen because she was drinking. It was so weird.

“Because of that, I don’t really drink. I’ve been drunk before, a couple of times, but I don’t get drunk now. I’ll drink a beer. I have a Bud Light in my refrigerator right now. But I’m man enough to know the difference. I’ve never been an alcoholic, I never will be.”

Mike took his name from his stepfather, Ron Bastianelli, who was divorced from his mother when Mike was 9 and lives in Oklahoma but remains part of Mike’s life.

His real father, he has only spoken to.

“He’s a stranger to me. Even my mom doesn’t know the whole story,” Bastianelli said. “What he did, what happened, I don’t know. I know he was involved in organized crime. I don’t know what rank or how far he got.

“The first time I heard from him was my sophomore year in high school. I was on my way to a game on a Friday night. My mom said, ‘Mike, your dad’s on the phone.’ I said, ‘Oh,’ Then she said, ‘Your real dad.’ He sounded real Italian, with an accent.”

On a visit to see teammate Quincy Woods in Chicago, Bastianelli arranged to visit his father, but plans fell through because of bus and flight schedules.

“When it didn’t work out, I started to cry. When you’re crying about someone you’ve never met in your life. . . . I tried to tell myself it was no big deal, but I was very disappointed,” he said.

His mother believes she understands her son’s emotions.

“I think it’s really made an impact as far as him getting ready to be a father himself,” she said. “He wants to be an awesome father. There’s always been a hole inside him. There’s a missing part.

“The man that I knew was very good looking, a lot like Mike. Very charming, very funny, very charismatic. The other part of him was business. Whatever his business was or wasn’t, I didn’t want to know the details.

“I got pregnant with Michael, and I left. I was just a kid. The things people were telling me started to sink in. I put two and two together, and when I realized what was going on around me, I got scared. At that time, the only thing that took over was this baby. I didn’t care about anything else.”

At De La Salle, Bastianelli’s coaches knew of his difficulties at home and did what they could to help.

“We were always aware of what his situation was and made sure he was taking care of Mike, living his own life, not getting enmeshed in what was going on outside of school,” said De La Salle Coach Bob Ladouceur, whose assistant Terry Eidson was even closer to Bastianelli.

“He was like my own son. We loved him just like that,” Ladouceur said.

“He needed someone to hold him accountable, not in a negative way. He responded well to that. It helped to be told what to do, even when we got very angry because he was not coming to school on time or skipping classes. When we got angry, he wasn’t angry or bitter, he appreciated it, because no one had told him, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ He was just kind of floating.

“We’ve had kids go both ways in that situation. Some succeed like Mike, and some have gone the other way.”

Bastianelli recognizes that.

“‘I look at everything that has happened to me, and that time shaped my life,” he said. “If it wasn’t for a lot of people, I never would have made it this far.”

It has been hard for him to feel a sense of accomplishment this season, with his role diminished. He cradled the tying touchdown pass in his arms in a close loss at Oregon, only to see a penalty call back the play.

“As soon as I stood up, I saw the whole team standing there, and I knew there was a flag. That killed me. I went and cried like a baby in the locker room after that,” Bastianelli said. “I’m a senior, and I wanted to go to the Rose Bowl. I just wanted to win that game.”

Against UCLA at the Rose Bowl on Saturday, he had another big chance, but a fourth-down pass in the fourth quarter barely eluded his grasp in the end zone.

“It’s frustrating. I know I could do so much more for the team,” he said. “I expected such big things this year.”

His disappointments began last year, when he was at the center of a controversy involving an employee in the athletic department tutoring program who was fired after the school decided he had given Bastianelli improper assistance by writing part of a paper for him. Bastianelli served a two-game NCAA suspension--including the Notre Dame game.

“I can never get that back,” he said. “I’ll never play in that new stadium. Notre Dame means that much more this year.

“It’s my last home game, my last regular-season game. This and the bowl game might be the last football games I ever play in.”

His mother will be watching from New Mexico.

“He has an ability no matter what’s going on personally, to go out on the field and he’s able to separate it. He’s always been that way,” she said. “He’s better under pressure. When Mike gets on the football field, everything else in life disappears.

“I just think about Mike. He’s a survivor. He and I both are.”

Bastianelli’s wife saw that in him early on.

“She always tells me she married me because I’m strong. That’s what she tells me,” Bastianelli said.

Said Nicol: “I believe that’s what made him strong, his whole past, his whole childhood. He’s very strong. I’ve never been pregnant, and I’m very emotionally stressed about every little thing, and he’s like, ‘Nic, it’s going to be OK. Let’s look at this. This is nothing. We’re going to get by this.’ ”

Notre Dame at USC Coliseum, 5 p.m.