Learning Experience : Marina’s Mietkiewicz Trying to Pass On Lessons He Got the Hard Way

Ray Mietkiewicz sat inside the police station on a March night and couldn’t quite figure it out. How did he get here?

Big man on campus, right? That was Mietkiewicz. The Marina High star athlete, the broad-shouldered fullback with 4.6 speed and the ability to soar more than 20 feet in the long jump, just like that. The party animal who would tell his mom he was going to be the designated driver, no problem, don’t worry, then down a few beers, maybe a couple of shots, and be the designated drunk driver. And get away with it. Always.

So, OK, Mietkiewicz was missing classes, lots of them. He was partying not only on weekends but also on weeknights. Some mornings he would wake up and not know how he got to where he was sleeping. But that was just funny, wasn’t it? A big joke with the guys. Hey, how’d I get here?

Instead of getting up and heading to the gym for a Sunday workout, Mietkiewicz would raise his muddled, aching head, feel the queasiness in his stomach and go back to sleep. But Mietkiewicz was a star and a man and if he missed a workout here and there, if he missed a class or two or 10 or 20, no big deal. He got to football practice. He made it to games.

But on a March night after a party, a party like all the others, Mietkiewicz, designated driver, hopped into the car with his friend, started to drive and became teen-aged impatient when someone spent too long stopped at a stop sign in front of him. So he went into the opposite lane and drove around the other car.

His luck held, in a way. There was no oncoming traffic. No one driving through the intersection. So there would be no horrific crash with shattering glass and blood and bodies. But there was a policeman. He pulled Mietkiewicz over and smelled the alcohol. That brought Mietkiewicz to the police station and to a DUI charge and conviction.

And that has brought Mietkiewicz back to Marina High on a sunny summer afternoon, to sit on some sizzling metal bleachers to talk about himself.

Mietkiewicz is talking about himself not because he is Big Man on Campus with an ego that demands he talk and you listen. He talks hoping that you will listen.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, Mietkiewicz spoke to Marina’s incoming freshman class.

Mietkiewicz, a 6-foot-1, 235-pound senior, chose to step in front of this assembly and tell these strangers about his arrest for drunk driving last spring. He talked about how he doesn’t have a driver’s license and how his dad, Ray Sr., has to drive him on dates. Mietkiewicz spoke of missing classes and falling grades, of how the college recruiters who had been so fantastically interested in him a year ago had taken a step backward, as if Mietkiewicz had the flu or bad breath or something.

Nikki Urhausen was a freshman in the audience. “I was surprised,” Urhausen says. “I wouldn’t think someone who had a problem like that would get up in front of so many people and talk about it. Especially a senior and a star football player.”

Mietkiewicz told of waking up and not knowing what had happened the night before, of making bad decisions, of not listening. He said that his future is in the balance right now, that it is up to him to convince the college recruiters that he will attend class, do the work, that he will be a good citizen and that alcohol is not the most important thing in his life.

“The thing that was neat,” Urhausen says, “is to have someone older setting an example for you. Not telling, more suggesting. After Ray told us what he had gone through, it got very quiet, almost silent. I respect someone like Ray who has admitted a problem and now he’s trying to be better.”

Always, Mietkiewicz says, alcohol was a part of his life.

“I was one of those kids,” Mietkiewicz says, “who was always sipping out of the adults’ glasses. I don’t know why. I just did.”

Mietkiewicz tells a story of so many kids. His parents were divorced when Ray was 7. His mother, Sharon Rogers, had a drinking problem too. “My mom struggled with alcohol,” Mietkiewicz says.

“Yes, I did,” Rogers says. “But I’m proud to say that I haven’t had a drink in over eight years.”

As he grew up, Ray spent time living with both parents. He says it was never easy. “My dad always wanted to be back with my mom,” Mietkiewicz says. “But it wasn’t going to happen. I have an older sister [who is 23] and she’s great, but I always wished I had an older brother I could have talked to. You know, just about stuff like drinking and stuff.”

Paul Renfrow, Marina’s athletic director and Mietkiewicz’s freshman football coach, says that because he was always big and strong, “Ray looked older and he began hanging out with older guys he shouldn’t have been around.”

By the time he was a freshman, Renfrow says, “his athletic talent was evident.” By the time he was a freshman, Mietkiewicz says, “I was into drinking and partying. I hung around with people I probably shouldn’t. But I never thought it was a problem.”

Here’s the thing: Everybody liked Ray Mietkiewicz.

“Ray’s a bright, charming guy,” Marina Principal Carol Osbrink says. “Ray understood when he did something wrong. He would be very sincere about wanting to change. Then he would go out and do the same things again.”

Renfrow agrees. “There are kids, you look them in the eye, you know they are just bad kids. They do things on purpose. That’s not Ray. I remember one incident in particular. He had gotten in trouble in the gym and the coach had thrown him out. Ray stood there and told me, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. No one’s telling me what to do.’ I said, ‘Ray, that’s fine but you’re the one standing out here in the hallway. You’re not doing a whole lot of dictating.’ And then Ray admitted that he was causing his own pain.”

Mietkiewicz’s mom says that in her head she saw her son in trouble. “But I didn’t want to admit it,” Rogers says. “I didn’t want to know what was happening.”

What was happening, Mietkiewicz says, “was a lot of drinking. First, it was just on weekends, but then it started being during the week too. I’d drink whatever guys bought. Out of the bottle. There started to be times when I didn’t know how I got home or I’d wake up in someone’s house and not know how I got there.

“By last year, I was missing class a lot and my grades were falling. I knew the college recruiters were hearing this, but I kept doing the same stuff.”

“The stuff” finally brought him to the police station in March. Rogers was crushed. “I was mad and then I was scared,” she says. “Ray had been fighting a lot of things. The divorce was hard. I was afraid he was getting depressed.”

Osbrink told Mietkiewicz that he was going to be kicked out of school. Mietkiewicz begged for another chance. “I believed him,” Osbrink says. “Because it was up to him. If he didn’t get his grades up, no football this year. Period. He knew that and he knew I meant it.”

Mietkiewicz participated in a program called “Every 15 Minutes.” Every 15 minutes, Osbrink says, is how often someone is killed by a drunk driver. Mietkiewicz was the victim in this tableau acted out at school. “I was painted up as a corpse. I saw my mom crying over me. It was painful and it was real,” Mietkiewicz says.

His driver’s license suspended for a year, Mietkiewicz took the bus to summer school. Mark Rehling, the varsity football coach, says that “Ray seems like a different person.”

Mietkiewicz talks about winning back the trust of his mother, his teachers, his coaches. He talked to the freshmen, Mietkiewicz says, “because I wish someone like me had talked to me when I was a freshman. Maybe I would have listened.”

He talks to older students too, his peers, his friends, his drinking buddies. “They don’t listen as much,” Mietkiewicz says. “They call me a hypocrite. They say I can’t tell them what to do when I did all the same stuff. They don’t want to hear how lucky I was that I didn’t hurt myself or anybody else. I don’t think they’re going to stop drinking and partying.”

As for himself, Mietkiewicz says he has stopped. He wonders why his mom worries if he’s not home by midnight, then stops and says, “I guess it will take time to win that trust back.” He wants, more than anything, to earn a football scholarship to Michigan. Mietkiewicz was born in Michigan and has always dreamed of playing in the 100,000-seat UM stadium.

The reality is that most Division I recruiters are waiting to see if Mietkiewicz, who is considered the best fullback in Orange County, gets his grade-point average up and keeps his arrest record down. Arizona and Arizona State are interested. Mietkiewicz says John Robinson, building a program at Nevada Las Vegas, has promised him a scholarship.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get a D-I offer,” Mietkiewicz says. “I know myself. I don’t think I’d have what it takes to get up and go to class every day at a junior college. I need the discipline of a D-I program. If I don’t get that, I don’t know. . . . “

“I hope Ray knows he has a lot to offer no matter what,” Renfrow says. “You can see it. The very presence of athletes, you can see them easily, pick them out of the student body, kids look up to them. If one person listens to Ray, if he only touches one person’s life, makes a difference to one person, then it was worth Ray’s effort and if he can do that, he can do anything.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com