Aaron Alexander-Bloch Excels at Much More Than Football

If you’re driving down Coldwater Canyon Boulevard and spot a Ford Explorer with 17-year-old Aaron Alexander-Bloch behind the wheel, roll down your window and listen to the surprising sounds coming from his CD player.

He’s usually blasting Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, the kind of music that could cause the Los Angeles Police Department to pull him over because no normal teenager listens to classical music.

Relaxing to the sounds of Beethoven, Bach and Chopin is how Alexander-Bloch prepares his mind and body for a football game.

When he arrives at Harvard-Westlake High and heads for the locker room to join his teammates, rap music thumps off the walls. He likes that, too.

Alexander-Bloch easily fits into any world.

He’s a scholar, athlete, musician and writer.

He carries a 4.2 grade-point average and scored 1480 on the Scholastic Assessment Test. He is a National Merit semifinalist and has applied for early admission to Harvard.

He’s a 5-foot-9, 170-pound senior linebacker who thinks he’s Luke Skywalker the way he flies through the air with no regard for his safety. He leads the Wolverines with 75 tackles, including 11 for losses, with two interceptions and two fumble recoveries.

He has been playing piano for 11 years. Every day, rain or shine, good mood or bad, tired or not, he plays, from Chopin waltzes to Bach’s Toccata.

His passion for football and music might only be surpassed by his love for writing. He’s the opinion page editor for his school’s newspaper.

This is what he wrote in a creative commentary imploring the school to hire a boys’ tennis coach:

Despite a record that’s beyond reproach,

The boys’ tennis team is lacking a coach.

Huyssoon was great until he bid adieu,

But time is a wastin’ without someone new.

The young tennis phenoms now cannot train,

Facing Peninsula, will they be slain?

Football’s got CJ and swimming’s got Stu,

All teams have coaches; boys’ tennis should, too.

Response to the problem’s slow as a snail,

Someone tell someone to get off his tail.

This travesty, still, may be averted,

The issue, we hope, will not be skirted.

Alexander-Bloch’s fellow Chronicle writers tease him by calling him a dumb jock, but he’s establishing a high standard for intellectual thought among athletes.

He speaks fluent French, which he learned while spending a year in Paris when he was in the fifth grade.

What does he use French for?

“I scare tight ends and seduce my girlfriend,” he said.

He’s so busy with homework, sports and music that he rarely falls asleep before 1 a.m. He rises at 6.

“When I’m doing my homework and it’s 12 in the morning and I’m wondering why this all matters, football is at the center of everything,” he said.

Watching Alexander-Bloch play football offers insight into why players who aren’t physically imposing find ways to succeed. Through quickness, anticipation and pure grit, he swarms to the ball to make tackles.

“You think about everything except for the fact the other guy is bigger than you and is probably going to beat you up,” he said. “You convince yourself you’re stronger than him and faster than him and in the end, if you’re not, it seems that way.”

When it comes to pain, Alexander-Bloch is a masochist.

“I like the pain during the game, I won’t deny that,” he said. “At some point, I realized when you’re hurting--and I usually am after the first play or so--it keeps you centered on what you’re doing. It’s gotten to the point if I couldn’t deal with pain, I couldn’t play football.

“Everybody hurts the next day after a football game. If you don’t hurt, you didn’t play as hard as you could. You brag about how sore you are.”

Others should be envious that Alexander-Bloch spends 60 minutes a day in his own little world. Playing the piano is his time to escape reality and seek rejuvenation. It’s so personal that he refuses to enter competitions or perform at school. He fears of cheapening his gift as if it were another homework assignment.

“I play to clear my head,” he said. “I play to work through my problems or forget about my problems. I play because it’s a chance to concentrate on completely different parts of myself, especially after you come home from football practice and you’re dirty and sweaty and you’re thinking of the formations to be run against you.”

If only he could make his piano teacher happy. At least three times in four years of playing football, he has arrived to class with broken fingers.

“Every time I show up for piano lessons with a cast, my teacher has a seizure and doesn’t talk to me,” he said.

Alexander-Bloch’s parents are professors at UCLA. They divorced when he was in elementary school but have remained strong influences. Both attended Harvard, which helps explain his desire to gain entrance to the Ivy League school.

He hopes to keep playing football in college, but if that doesn’t happen, he could become more dangerous with his fallback plan.

“I’ll join the newspaper and make fun of the football team,” he said.

Letting Alexander-Bloch loose with his pen means everyone should hide for cover.

Eric Sondheimer’s column appears Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at (818) 772-3422 or eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.