Stewart Fitting In With the Sailors

Maybe it was the day her son, Andre Stewart, called back to San Jose and found out that his best friend, a friend so close that Andre still refers to him as a cousin, was locked up in juvenile hall, another victim of the streets, of the trouble with drugs and gangs that Sonja William saw too much of.

William thinks that might have been the day when she was sure that no matter how hard things might be for Andre in Newport Beach, no matter how out of place her black son might feel at Newport Harbor High, home to children of millionaires, a place where 75.5% of the student body is Caucasian and 0.9% is African American--”Point nine percent . . . that’s pretty much Andre and his sister,” William says--Andre was going to be better off in Orange County than San Jose.

Andre Stewart, soft-spoken and with a sweet smile, is the tough-as-nails, 5-foot-9, 165-pound senior tailback for Newport Harbor High’s football team.

The Sailors will play Irvine tonight at Orange Coast College in the Southern Section Division VI championship game.

In three playoff games Stewart has carried the ball 88 times and gained 696 yards. That’s an average of 7.9 yards a carry, his coach, Jeff Brinkley, proudly points out. For the season, Stewart has gained 2,249 yards in 326 carries and has scored 25 touchdowns.

In other words, Stewart has had a fabulous final high school campaign. It has been a little unexpected. Stewart struggled last year. He was troubled by an ankle injury and an injured attitude.

“His mind wasn’t right,” William says. “But I could tell a big change this summer. He told me, ‘Mom, I’m a new person. I want my senior year to be great.’ Andre worked real hard. If there was a workout scheduled at 9 a.m., Andre was there at 8:30. He put his heart into this and it has paid off.”

As William talks on the telephone, there is laughter in the background. Lots of it. There is TV noise and roughhouse noise. It is the noise of a happy family.

William was 18 years old when Andre was born. Andre’s father, Tim Stewart, and Sonja struggled, young parents unsure of how to advance in the world. For much of his early life, Andre lived with his father and his grandmother in south San Jose.

“There was lots of family around,” William says, “but there was trouble in the neighborhood too. It could be a very tough place. No matter how much you teach your children right and wrong, what happens on the street, you can’t always stop.”

When Andre was in sixth grade, William moved to Orange County. Her younger brother, Bryan Moore, had moved south to attend Vanguard University. When Moore finished college, William asked him when he was moving home to San Jose, “He told me, ‘Sonja, this is home.’ ”

About the time Andre, who was still living in San Jose with his father and grandmother, hit eighth grade, William says, “He began to get into a little trouble. Not big things, but I was worried for him. I decided he should come down here and be with me.”

William had gotten herself an office job and a safe, middle-class life, she felt. “At first his father didn’t want to let him go,” William says, “but in his heart he knew there was trouble in San Jose.”

And at first Andre didn’t want to move. He had friends, he had his family, he was at that awkward teenage time in life. Now he was sent into another world, a world where some of his classmates had their own BMWs, wore the best of fashions and took exotic vacations. He was entering a high school where no one looked or talked like him.

“It was hard at first,” Stewart says. He is leaning on the wall of the football weight room, speaking softly. Stewart is economical with words. He is not shy, exactly, but he is not a chatterbox either. “I didn’t know how it would be in this school,” he says. “But I found out that if you were nice, people were nice back.” Quite simply, Stewart says, “If I walked up to people and introduced myself, they would talk to me.”

“Sometimes I would feel badly,” William says. “Andre would come home and say, ‘Mom, I feel dumb. All these other kids, they hardly study at all and they get an A. I study as hard as I can and I fail.’ I’d just tell him that he wasn’t dumb and to just keep working hard.”

Football was also a big help, William says. “Having the team was a big help. Football made it easier to be accepted.”

A year ago, she married Dariel William. Besides Andre, she has a 14-year-old daughter, Karen, who is a freshman at Newport Harbor. Dariel has a 15-year-old son, Lamar, and a 14-year-old daughter, Janique.

Andre says that sometimes it is hard not to want the fancy cars and clothes that many of his classmates take for granted.

A little bit of envy, his mother says, is much better than being part of the street scene back in San Jose.

Because Stewart has had such a productive senior season, Brinkley thinks Stewart might become an NCAA Division I player. It is something Stewart would love to have happen, though he knows there might be a stop, first, at a community college. “My grades aren’t always the best,” he says.

William says that though her son would like to compete in track in the spring, he might just have to skip sports for a semester and concentrate on school. She laughs when told that Andre hopes for a special graduation present--a BMW. “From us?” William says. “I don’t think so.”

With another big game tonight, though, Stewart will have something all his classmates will envy.

A championship ring.