CASA DE PERSEVERANCE

Jose Casagran steps into the crawl space that is his locker room, wades through pieces of tape, crushed cups, the smell of confined sweat.

Upon one small red metal cage is scrawled No. 77. Stuffed inside is a pile of pads belonging to a 16-year-old lineman who two weeks earlier was shot through the head.

“Oh, man,” Casagran says. “Look at that. His stuff is still here. I’ve got to take it out. When do I take it out?”

He turns and walks back through two thick yellow metal doors covered with red and black graffiti, the crude wails of children mourning the death of teammate Steve Delgado.

We love you Steve. . . . I miss you. . . . We’ll see you soon.

“And what do I do with this?” Casagran asks. “Do I leave this here forever? Do I paint over it tomorrow? What do I do?”

The 34-year-old shrugs, shakes a balding head, pats a belly that has increased by 30 pounds in three years and walks into the chilly sunshine of another day in the life of the football coach at Roosevelt High.

Where, softly exhaling on the sidewalk, waits another player.

At every corner of a Boyle Heights journey both terrifying and triumphant, Casagran has been tugged by these sighs.

The majority of Casagran’s players behave no differently than those at any other high school. But one phoned him last summer from a youth camp after being arrested for armed robbery. Others pleaded with him in the fall after being suspended for smoking dope in the halls, or pulling fire alarms during class, or fighting neighborhood rivals while in uniform before practice.

A few came to him for advice while arguing with parents who never attended games or caring for girlfriends who had their babies.

These 48 kids expected Jose Casagran to make sense of it all. This, even though the coach often couldn’t understand it himself, fighting ulcers and sleeplessness, sometimes returning home to scream at the walls in anger.

The kids didn’t see that. They only knew that when they looked up, he was there. He led them to 10 victories, second most in the school’s 77-year history. He led Roosevelt into a City Section division championship game for the first time in 15 years.

Then, six days before that game, at 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday, three of them were standing at his front door, waiting for him again.

His best lineman and a team leader, Steve Delgado, had been shot and killed by a security guard’s stray bullet.

The players were scared and confused. They didn’t want to play the game. They didn’t want to go home. They stood outside his door and tugged.

Once again, the coach opened up. He hugged his team. He wept with it. He grieved with it. He spent the worst week of his life trying to convince himself, and teach his children, that this was their best chance to become men.

Then, on Dec. 9, he sent them out on the Coliseum field against Gardena in the City Section Invitational division championship game.

The Roughriders scored on the game’s third play from scrimmage. They didn’t score again. They spent the rest of the game wandering the field in exhaustion, a children’s spirit ultimately too weak to withstand this adult burden.

Roosevelt eventually lost, 31-7. But you didn’t need to see Casagran walking across the field and thanking each sobbing player afterward to understand it might have been the biggest victory in school history.

Two weeks later, on the sidewalk, a kid is waiting again, no reason, none needed.

“Coach Casa,” Ruben Burgueno says, opening his arms.

“Ruben,” Casagran says, opening his arms.

*

Every good holiday story starts with a sound. A jingle. A crackle. A ho-ho-ho.

This one starts with a whine. It comes from a white machine sitting on the dirty tile floor of the concrete junk closet that has been converted into Jose Casagran’s office.

“An air purifier,” Casagran says, grinning.

He moved into this little corner of the windowless weight room three years ago after being named coach. Soon after, he began coughing up brown lumps.

He had patched the floor and painted over the graffiti, but realized he could not fix the air. Hence, the whine.

He points to the two folding chairs pulled up to two rickety desks.

“I apologize, it’s not very pretty around here,” he says.

But isn’t that what the holidays, with their tales of desert treks and leaps of faith, teach us? That hope has no dress code?

Hope does not always glow. Sometimes it has a rumpled shirt, piercing eyes and a lead voice that cracks as easily as glass.

Hope is not always a king. Sometimes it is someone who receives an annual take-home stipend of $2,000 to coach the football team representing a school of 5,140 students, the third-largest high school in the United States.

Jose Casagran, who earns his regular income as an English teacher, has 11 assistant coaches. But he pays most of them himself. And none are on campus with him during the day.

Like countless other sports coaches across our city, Casagran is a lone, unsupported flicker fighting the shadows.

We rarely notice people like him, their light often hidden under bushels of budget problems and facility decay.

Today, perhaps, is a good time to celebrate the burn.

“I’m no hero,” Casagran says. “I would do some things differently if I had another chance. But I try my best. This is about more than football here.”

Football? The least of his responsibilities. In proud but troubled Boyle Heights, as in other areas of town, a coach must form families where there sometimes are none. Their team must not only be a tough place, but a safe place.

“It’s about building a loyalty to something other than the street,” Casagran says. “If I can get these kids to commit to Roosevelt football, then I’ve gotten them to commit to saving their future.”

The prospects of playing football at a major college can’t lure them. In Casagran’s three years, none have received a scholarship.

Recruiters rarely show up here. Even USC, located only a few miles away and with an athletic department run by Roosevelt alumni Mike Garrett, hasn’t shown its face here once during Casagran’s tenure.

“There are 45 kids on every college team who never play a down, who only do special teams,” Casagran says. “Are you saying that none of my kids are even good enough for that? They’re small, but they are quick and can tackle a kid on a kickoff. I think it’s the same old thing. People don’t give Mexicans football scholarships.”

Without that carrot, Casagran has to entice players with things such as an annual torch-lit ceremony, during which they are indoctrinated into Roosevelt football with tales of Aztec warriors.

“Sometimes I make up the stories,” Casagran says with a wink. “But the message is the same. Pride, honor, courage.”

He also holds weekly team dinners that allow the kids to make fun of him and the coaches in skits.

“It’s about realizing that the one thing many of these kids need more than anything else is a hug,” says Nissim Leon, assistant coach. “Casa teaches them with that hug.”

The first lesson this year? One night last spring, around midnight, the coach received a phone call telling him that two of his starters had been arrested for robbing people in the East Los Angeles streets.

A couple of days later, he received a call from one of those starters, from a youth camp where the two players would spend the next couple of months.

“How stupid can you be?” Casagran asked him. “Don’t you know how much we care about you here?”

Later that summer, the student was released. His mother drove him straight to the weight room. Casagran ran to meet him. They hugged. The student wept again.

“I thought you would be mad,” the student said.

“Welcome home,” Casagran replied.

It was only July, and the games had already begun.

“The most difficult season of my life,” Casagran said. “It tested everything I knew.”

Much of that was learned from a longtime meatpacker at Farmer John named Federico Casagran. Casagran remembers scrambling into his father’s bed on Sunday mornings in their Eagle Rock home, prying apart Dad’s fingers before they could play.

“The fingers would get cramped from shoveling pig’s eyes,” he says. “I learned then about hard work and sacrifice.”

Too small to keep playing football after a career at Pomona-Pitzer College, Casagran began working as a substitute teacher. One of his first assignments was at Garfield High. The East Los Angeles spirit moved him.

“I loved the way the community rallied behind its football teams. I had not seen that anywhere else in town,” he recalls.

He spent the next five years as an assistant football coach there before being hired in 1998 at Roosevelt. Because of the rivalry between the schools, one of the most intense in the country, even some of his own coaches didn’t trust him.

“I didn’t vote to hire Casa, I thought a guy from a rival school would be trouble,” says Leon, a longtime Boyle Heights hero who founded a Pop Warner program there. “Now I would vote for him in a second.”

Of course, it helped that Casagran went 7-3 in his first season and broke a seven-game losing streak against Garfield. The next year, he went 7-4. Most of his best players were returning for this season. A school that could rarely compete against better-financed programs had a chance.

But then, there were the microscopes. Schools officials reported that some had been stolen from classes, and that one of Casagran’s players knew about it.

“I thought to myself, ‘Microscopes?’ ” Casagran says. “I thought, ‘C’mon!’ ”

He spent several days playing detective, recovered the equipment, returned it to the school, lost more players.

“The start of the year, we just had trouble getting straight, paying attention, doing the right things,” says tongue-studded defensive back Johnny Maldonado. “But Casa was like a member of our family. He hung in there with us.”

The coach was worried, though. Just before the season, he called his students together in the weight room, turned out the lights, and began reading a poem.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he recited.

Even if the kids didn’t know Dylan Thomas from Frank Thomas, they seemed to understand those words.

“He wanted us to fight for our season, for the honor of our neighborhood,” running back Robert Smith says. “He knows what some people think about us. He wanted us to fight against that stereotype.”

Casagran shakes his head and recalls, “I told them to rage against the dying of their season. I had no idea that a few months later, they would be asked to rage against a real death. I mean, it was just a poem.”

The Roughriders won only three of their first five games, but then players returned from suspensions and, for a few blessed weeks, Casagran could coach.

He spent every day off watching film on a big-screen TV, newly purchased after three years of saving. He figured out game plans that could help the little guys outsmart the big ones.

The kid who’d pulled the fire alarm while Casagran was handing out uniforms was still there. So were the kids who’d pelted an opposing junior varsity team with eggs. And the star player who needed time to care for his child.

Yet the Roughriders won seven of their next eight games. After one victory, one of the players was so excited that he picked up Casagran, then dropped him on his ankle.

“I limped for a month,” Casagran says. “But it was worth it.”

They qualified for the Invitational playoffs--for teams seeded Nos. 17-32 after the regular season--and eventually defeated Fremont to advance to the championship game at the Coliseum. The coaches celebrated that win by gathering at Casagran’s house and watching Fernando Vargas bravely battle Felix Trinidad on television.

“I am lost without my coaches,” says Casagran of the collection of firemen, truck drivers, office workers and other neighborhood guys.

Casagran asked us to print their names. He didn’t ask for anything else. So here they are:

Juan Hernandez. Hector Estrada. Richard Guillen. Jaime Leja. Cesar Trillo. Arnie Carrillo. Andy Torres. Eddie Ramos. Paul Burgueno. Johnny Martinez. Nissim Leon.

The Roosevelt coaches hung out late into that Saturday night, six days before the biggest game of their lives.

A few hours later, three more players knocked on Casagran’s door, three more sighs, the biggest tug of all.

*

A problem that psychologists can spend hours describing, Jose Casagran takes care of in one sentence:

“There is no guidebook that tells you what to do when one of your star players is killed one week before your championship game.”

What Casagran remembers first is the ringing. About 6 that Sunday morning, less than 48 hours after the victory over Fremont, his phone rang. It was answered by a machine. The person hung up.

This happened again. And again. And again.

There is no phone in Casagran’s bedroom, so his wife Gabby finally walked to the family room and answered herself.

“When the kids call here, it’s always for ‘Casa’ or ‘Coach Casa,’ ” she recalls. “When the girl on the other end asked for ‘Coach Casagrande,’ I knew something was wrong.”

It was Delgado’s girlfriend, Serena Estrada. Moments later, she was telling Casagran that her boyfriend had been shot in the head while sitting in the passenger seat of a car driven by his mother.

They had been driving away from a restaurant party. An unrelated incident had resulted in gunfire by a security guard.

A kid who had finally focused his life after attending seven elementary schools, a 6-foot-2, 225-pound child who had finally found a home, was killed by a stray bullet.

“Oh my God, no!” Casagran said.

He phoned assistant Estrada, the fireman. Estrada phoned the hospital. Officials wouldn’t give him the child’s name, only his birth date.

Estrada phoned Casagran with that date. Casagran furiously flipped through his personnel cards until he found the match he had been dreading.

It was 2/20/84. A birthday Casagran won’t soon forget. He saw the date next to Delgado’s name and screamed.

“Then,” he recalls, “it was real.”

About that time, the captains knocked.

“We wanted to go to the hospital, but were told there was nothing we could do,” recalls Ruben Burgueno. “So we went to Coach Casa’s. We had to see him. We had nowhere else to go.”

Casagran answered the door.

By the time the players left around mid-morning, Casagran’s entire coaching staff had arrived, reclaiming seats on the couch that were still warm from the previous night.

“We had to plan, we had to figure out what to do,” Leon recalls. “We had no idea what came next.”

Casagran cried in front of his captains, sobbed amid the coaches, then finally stood.

“I remembered reading, in one of my coaching magazines, an article by Bruce Snyder about crisis management,” he recalls. “It talked about focus. So I guess I tried to talk about focus. But when you lose someone who’s like a son and a brother, how do you focus?”

The first matter was the championship game. Should they play the game? The captains had said no. Casagran had felt the same way.

“But I thought about my father, and I thought about that poem,” he says. “I knew, somehow, we had to play. I just didn’t know how to do it.”

He received a blessed assist from the boy’s mother, Maria Manfil. Even from outside the hospital that Sunday morning, she passed along a message that she wanted the Roughriders to play.

Casagran wondered whether she could deliver that same message to his team.

The next day, in a weight room already filled with flowers and candles and tears, she did.

“That was the start,” Casagran recalls. “But what do you do then?”

Casagran began by appealing to his players’ spiritual side.

“I’ve never been much for that sort of thing, but if saying that it’s God’s plan helps them understand, then I’ll say it,” Casagran says.

Then he worked their lighter side, gathering them in a circle before practice and encouraging them to tell funny stories about Delgado.

By Wednesday, Casagran was still struggling with unexpected tears, but he was trying.

“We knew he was hurting as much, or more, than we were,” recalls Maldonado. “But we respect him for that. When he cried, we knew it was because he was like us. When he didn’t, we knew it was because he was our coach.”

As the week passed, with practices becoming sharper, with hits more intense, Casagran was struck with a different worry.

“I didn’t want us to dwell only on the tragedy, but I also didn’t want this kid to disappear,” he recalls.

He spent $50 on black helmet stripes. A player’s mother sewed black armbands. He mounted Delgado’s photo in a frame, and pulled out his red jersey, and brought them both to the Coliseum for the game.

Once there Friday night, shortly before kickoff, he set Delgado’s helmet on a trash can at the front of the locker room.

“Next thing I know, players are walking up to it, touching it, kneeling in front of it, praying to it,” he recalls. “They turned it into an altar.”

Even then, just before they took the field, there were questions.

“Do we have to play?” asked running back Manuel Esparza, speaking for the entire team.

“Either that, or forfeit,” replied Casagran. “You must answer this yourself.”

They answered with a charge to the field, but Casagran knew.

“They were wiped out, they were done,” he says.

The emotion neared its peak just before kickoff, when the captains brought Delgado’s jersey to the center of the field, stretching it out like somebody was still wearing it.

It reached that peak three plays later with their first touchdown.

After that?

“I could feel Steve breathing down my neck,” recalls teammate Jody Adewale. “I kept trying to wake up from this dream, and I couldn’t.”

Says Robert Smith, “Inside, we were destroyed.”

The players weren’t the only ones.

“Outside, I was excited,” Casagran recalls. “But inside, I was flat-lining. I was torn to pieces. The week had beaten me down as a man. I did not call a good game.”

He was so tired, for the first time in his career, he gave a halftime speech sitting down, and only to the offense.

He was so tired afterward that he spoke for only a few seconds during the runner-up trophy ceremony, and didn’t stick around long enough to pick up the trophies.

He was too busy picking up his players, who had dropped, one by one, along the emptying field, curling up, staring, crying.

“Coach came over to me and all I could say was, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ ” Maldonado recalls. “But you know what he said? He said, ‘Don’t be sorry. You showed up, didn’t you? Thank you for that.’ ”

While the coach thanked the players, Delgado’s uncle, Johnny Venegas, was observing.

“Our family has been overwhelmed by the sensitivity of Coach Casagran and his staff and kids,” he says. “My nephew often talked about this great coach. Now I can see why.”

Two weeks later, Jose Casagran doesn’t feel so great. His locker room is too small. His office smells. His stomach hurts. But there is a player waiting.

“So Ruben, how you doin’ man,” he says, embracing Burgueno on that sidewalk, raging, raging still.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.