Coming to Grips

Peter Dobush is far different than his teammates at Manhattan Beach Mira Costa High, many of whom grew up in comfortable homes near the coast, with parents who doled out the proper ratio of affection and discipline.

Dobush’s life has taken many turns. He grew up in an economically-depressed, drug-infested part of Detroit, where his father slept with a gun under the pillow.

But as Dobush grew older, unsafe surroundings turned out to be the smallest worry in his life. By the time he turned 13, both of his parents had died in separate, saddening ways.

Mira Costa coaches say the senior quarterback is the hardest-working player they’ve seen.

Dobush was almost 6 years old when his mother, Patricia, died of kidney failure and pneumonia brought on by years of drug and alcohol abuse. She was in the hospital for a week. Then she was gone. She was 29.

Seven years later, Dobush was sharing a bed with his father, Joseph, when he heard his father thrashing and twisting at 3 a.m.

“I heard a gasp ... he couldn’t breathe,” Dobush said. “I rolled out of bed, ran into the kitchen and called 911. I tried to flip him over, get the [stuff] out of his mouth. I tried to give him mouth to mouth. It didn’t work.”

Dobush rode in the ambulance with his father to the hospital, where Joseph Dobush was pronounced dead of heart failure at age 46. Peter Dobush was one month from his 13th birthday. “It was tough to go on,” he said. “But I had to.”

It would have been even more difficult if not for Bill Slobodian, who was Joseph Dobush’s step-brother. Slobodian lived in Detroit with his wife, Cheryl, when Dobush’s father died, but Slobodian was in the process of moving to Torrance for work-related reasons. He and his wife had two sons and a daughter, but they didn’t flinch at taking Dobush with them.

“We wanted Peter to be in our family,” said Slobodian, an engineer. “We just felt he needed love.”

Dobush was quiet and shy, and sometimes acted inappropriately, stealing or destroying the toys of the Slobodians’ children.

“We had our ups and downs in the beginning,” Slobodian said. “It took a while to understand each other.”

It didn’t take long for Dobush to find something he was good at, something enjoyable, something to take his mind off the new, unfamiliar surroundings -- football.

He excelled on the freshman team as a quarterback. He started a varsity game as a sophomore, but even though the Mustangs won the game, Dobush was demoted. Within a short time, he fell into a depression.

The Slobodians paid for Dobush to start seeing a psychiatrist every week for almost a year. Dobush was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, which is usually associated with a child who didn’t have enough bonding time in early childhood with a parent. Dobush still had to work through the deaths of his parents.

“I thought all that stuff was behind me, but when I started talking about it again I was in tears sometimes,” Dobush said. “Before I went into therapy, I could never be close to anybody. Ever since [therapy], it’s been much better. I’m willing to have relationships and get close to people. It’s made me a better person, realizing what was wrong with me.”

Dobush’s high school career ends Friday when the Mustangs (13-0) play for the Southern Section Division III championship against Sherman Oaks Notre Dame (13-0) at El Camino College.

He is 26-1 as a starter, his lone loss coming against Newhall Hart in last season’s Division III semifinals.

In September, in his most rewarding on-field moment, Dobush pointed upward a few seconds after his fourth touchdown pass against Downey Warren and said to the sky, “That’s for you mom and dad.”

Dobush has one more wish before he throws his final pass for Mira Costa.

“Ever since my sophomore year, I’ve said we were going to go 14-0 and were going to win [Division III] as seniors,” Dobush said. “I don’t want to let anybody down.”