Back in Gear

Malaefou MacKenzie is a USC running back who can swallow the field with his power.

Matt MacKenzie drops to a knee on that field after every practice to pray that his late father is watching.

Malaefou MacKenzie is a proud Samoan whose sculpted body is dotted with the tattoos of a warrior.

Matt MacKenzie curls up his arms and weeps when pondering his family’s pain.

Malaefou MacKenzie will be one of the stable, senior inspirations for a Trojan team that plays Iowa in next week’s Orange Bowl game.

Matt MacKenzie still has a plastic bag filled with blades of grass as a reminder of when he walked away from it all.

It was last fall, his father had just died of prostate cancer in Samoa, and the kid with two names was consumed with grief and responsibility.

His father had hugged him, harassed him, lived through him. Now that he was gone, where did that leave him?

MacKenzie needed his family to share his sorrow. His family needed him to help with their grocery business.

It didn’t matter that he was a senior on the verge of graduation. It didn’t matter that, several years ago, he had changed his name from Matt to Malaefou in hopes of declaring his independence.

Suddenly, he was Matt again, the name his family still calls him, his father’s little boy again, with history leaving him no choice.

When his father was in college, he had given up a football career to return to Samoa for his ailing father.

Now it was Matt’s turn.

After a mid-October game against Arizona State, he walked to the Coliseum field, scooped up some grass and said goodbye. He then climbed on a plane to Samoa with no intention of coming back.

“My career was done,” he remembered. “My father was dead and I was going home where I belonged.”

He gave away all of his football gear. He left behind all of his schoolwork. He took a wrecking ball to old priorities.

He spent the next three months sleeping on a couch in a sweltering house with no hot water in the tiny town of Vauala on the island of Upolu.

During the day, he would haul bags of sugar and potatoes at MacKenzie’s wholesalers. At night, he would run for hours along the city’s rocky streets.

For showers, he would stand outside in the rain. For food, he would eat roadside fried chicken.

For inspiration, he would sit by the plain, unmarked concrete box that was his father’s grave.

Sometimes, unable to sleep because of the heat, he would jog five miles to that grave at 3 a.m. Several hours later, his worried sister would drive to find him there, weeding.

“I was looking for answers,” he said. “I was looking for my father to tell me what to do next.”

After the Trojan football season ended in a disappointing loss -- an event he learned about a week later -- he found it.

It wasn’t in the yelping of the stray dogs that nipped at his feet while he ran, or the smoky rumble of the city bus that he would board when he was late for work.

It was in, of all things, the long-distance scratchy voice of Coach Pete Carroll on a phone call across thousands of miles of ocean.

He wanted MacKenzie back. He had kept MacKenzie’s scholarship. Even though MacKenzie had walked away and used up his eligibility and probably would be of no use to the program, Carroll had not cut him or taken away his tuition.

Said Carroll: “This was about more than football, it was about the rest of this kid’s life.”

Said MacKenzie: “I realized I had more than one family.”

So, at the urging of both of his families, he returned to school in January.

At the prodding of USC officials, the NCAA properly gave him a rare sixth year of eligibility.

And today? While the ending might be storybook, the pages are still yellowed.

MacKenzie had a terrific season, scoring nine touchdowns even though he touched the ball only 80 times.

But he still mourns. He still aches. He still wonders.

Underneath his jersey, he wears a weathered T-shirt imprinted with photographs of his late father and late brother Hornell, who had Down syndrome and died when MacKenzie was 10.

In his room in the house he shares with several other Trojans, he keeps a cross that was around his father’s neck when he died.

Even after splendid plays like the juggling touchdown catch against Notre Dame, he stands in the end zone wondering what his father would have thought.

“He’s not over it, no,” sister Dayna Faupusa said. “He still sometimes shuts everything out, makes it hard to get through to him.”

When the Trojans held their swanky football banquet in Beverly Hills recently, they gave a courage award to Malaefou MacKenzie.

But Matt couldn’t bring himself to leave his house.

“His coaches called me from the banquet in a panic, wondering where he was,” Dayna said. “But I just don’t think he was ready to face all the talk about his father again.”

He said he was studying. But, he admits now, he was also hiding.

“I heard the banquet was beautiful,” he said. “But I could just not be there.”

He will be there next week in Miami, though, strong and speedy and alive. To him, it will be more than a game. It will be another step in the process of Malaefou learning to live with Matt.

It’s what college does best. It’s what USC has done well. It’s about a boy becoming a man.

“What a story,” Carroll said this week, shaking his head. “What a sad, wonderful story.”

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You won’t see Malaefou MacKenzie talk about this story on television. He is not comfortable on TV.

You won’t hear him doing a phone interview on the radio. He is constantly losing his cell phone. Earlier this year, he went four months without any sort of phone.

He won’t want to get rich off this story. As recently as last year, he was keeping his money in a shoe box under his bed.

He won’t drive around town bragging about this story. He gave his truck to his sister, making him perhaps the only 23-year-old L.A. personality who walks or bums rides.

“Footmobile,” he said with a grin.

Where others of his stature walk around campus in designer gear, he buys his clothes at a swap meet. Where others like PlayStation, he prefers dominoes.

“I’m simple like that,” he said.

Since he arrived in Mission Viejo from Samoa at age 9, that simplicity has been both Malaefou MacKenzie’s blessing and his curse.

When he was younger, to instill discipline, his mother Stella would sometimes spank him at school. To instill hard work, his father Vernon would make him train like a pro, jogging and lifting weights seemingly from the time he could hold a bottle.

“My dad lived through him,” Dayna said. “Because he never realized his football dream, he would say, ‘It’s all up to you.’ It made it kind of hard for him.”

MacKenzie remembers the time he was half a pound overweight in Pop Warner football. He said his father drove him home, dropped him off, and told him to run the four miles back to school before his father drove there.

“So I ran back to school and when I got there, my dad turned the car around and I had to run home after him,” MacKenzie said. “It was like that all the time.”

Is it any wonder, then, that during his high school years at Capistrano Valley, police were once summoned to the training room late at night, only to discover that MacKenzie was lifting weights?

Or, is it any wonder that during his recruiting trip to USC, he was spotted by other recruits jogging down Figueroa at 2 a.m.?

“Any time I went out partying, I always jogged it off, it didn’t matter what time,” he said. “But this time, I was really embarrassed.”

He truly had become his father’s son, so much that his father asked the USC coaches to harness his spirit.

Unbowed, MacKenzie vowed to work even harder to give his dad a Pacific 10 Conference championship ring.

But his father became sick and even more stubborn. And in January 2001, he moved back to Samoa full time. It turns out, he was moving back to die.

Said Malaefou: “I always thought he was going to come back for my senior season.”

Said Dayna: “My father knew what he was doing. He didn’t want anybody to see him suffer.”

In the final days, he even sent his wife to the United States to arrange for hospital care, but he never joined her.

At 3 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Malaefou awoke in his off-campus apartment with a funny feeling inside. When he later heard about the terrorist devastation, he thought that was it.

But then his mother showed up at his door crying about his father, and he knew he was wrong.

At first, he blamed himself. If he had not suffered a sprained knee, maybe his father would have joined his mother here to watch him, and received better treatment.

Then, he blamed life for splitting up a family with an ocean between them.

Because they could not get a flight back for two weeks, he had time to blame plenty of things.

When he arrived in Samoa, he was so distraught he could not look at his father’s body until just before the casket was closed. Then he tossed in a red No. 21 Trojan jersey and turned away.

He initially returned to Los Angeles and the team, but his mind stayed in Samoa.

“I was numb, I was lost, I was depressed like never before, the worst in my life,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know why I was there.”

Teammates and coaches noticed.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Carson Palmer, one of his roommates. “He was just out of it.”

Added Carroll: “We were genuinely concerned that he could make it to the next day, then the day after that.”

When his mother felt this in their phone conversations, she told him to come home. He said he wanted to, but he didn’t have the strength.

One day, after he had been back about a week, she put down the phone, climbed on a plane, and took the 11-hour flight to get him.

“I needed to be with my family,” he said. “But I needed help getting there.”

Once back in Samoa, a place he had not lived for 14 years, he said it was culture shock. The humidity was stifling, the work overwhelming.

“I would get up at 3 a.m. because I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Running was the only way I could relax.”

The only news from USC came off the computer in the office of the wholesaler. He would talk to his teammates every couple of weeks, but only for a couple of minutes, with his old life seeming more distant with each call.

As his arms grew sore from carrying 100-pound bags of sugar, and his back grew sore from bumpy rides delivering food around the island, he started to wonder.

“Sometimes I would hit myself in the head and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” he said.

It would be those times when he would find himself sitting next to his father’s grave, remembering something his father always told him.

Be like me, but don’t be like me. Take care of your family, but don’t lose yourself doing it.

“What finally came out was that Matt was so close to graduation, so close to all his dreams, he needed to finish it,” Dayna said. “He needed to do it not for my dad, but for himself.”

Whether it be a mother or father or any other mentor, isn’t that what all young people have to eventually learn?

Slowly and painfully, Malaefou MacKenzie is learning it.

He is going to try to make it in the NFL, where Carroll thinks he has a chance because of his versatility. But if he doesn’t, he’s going to be a policeman or a fireman.

He agreed to accept that courage award in the coach’s office. But he’s going to give it to a relative.

He’s thinking about himself more, but not forgetting the person who once walked away from his life because he thought it would help others.

He’s celebrating Malaefou, without losing Matt.

“This is the best man I’ve ever met in my life,” said Palmer, quarterback for USC’s Pac-10 co-champions this season. “I just wish everyone would have a chance to meet him.”

Who knows, maybe they’d get some jewelry out of it.

“I always promised my Pac-10 ring to my dad, now I’m going to put it on a necklace and give it to my mom,” he explained recently after a lengthy interview, his eyes red but his voice strong. “But now I find out, we’re getting an Orange Bowl ring too? Now who can I give that to? Man, there’s got to be somebody....”

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.