This Rocky’s an Underdog but He’s Defied Odds Before

He may not be well known outside Los Angeles, but he does have that bell-ringing name: Rocky.

Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, running for California attorney general, says the moniker has always been an apt label for him as a competitor, underdog and winner.

Even as a teenager, he said, sharing a handle with legendary boxers Graziano and Marciano, and with the odds-defying Hollywood palooka played by Sylvester Stallone, “did make me feel like there was something different in my life.”

“Somehow I would have a fighting chance, so to speak.”

Delgadillo’s campaign is promoting his humble-beginnings-to-Harvard life story like an Oprah-ready memoir, even as critics say the tale is about all he has to offer, not counting a sometimes-bruising ambition.

Delgadillo was recruited to play football at Harvard after growing up in northeast Los Angeles, the son of a Mexican American father and a mother of German heritage.

In his online campaign biography, under a large “ROCKY” heading that evokes the Stallone movie posters, Delgadillo, 45, depicts life in the neighborhood as a struggle, with residents beset by gangs and bereft of good jobs.

“A number of my friends didn’t make it,” he says. “I was one of the lucky ones.”

But the hilly section of the Highland Park area, its bungalows owned by civil servants and blue-collar workers, was no bullets-flying dead end. Delgadillo acknowledged as much in an interview.

“It was and still is a real neighborhood,” he said while trying to relax at a Ventura Boulevard Starbucks, where none of the customers appeared to recognize him. “The majority of people who live there and dream there are really good people.”

Delgadillo also had the benefit of devoted parents who scrimped and sacrificed, teachers who pushed him to excel and physical gifts that made him a four-sport high school hero.

But if his talk of an underprivileged pedigree seems a bit mannered, his admirers note that he was far from the manner born -- unlike Jerry Brown, the governor’s-son-turned-governor who is now Oakland mayor and Delgadillo’s June opponent for the Democratic nomination for attorney general.

“Rocky had to work hard for everything he accomplished,” said Marc Mills, his Harvard teammate and roommate, who remains his best friend.

The Delgadillo described by Mills and other pals resembles the student every teacher loves and every class goof-off would love to punch.

At Harvard, Mills said, he and Delgadillo would work out at 4 a.m. so they’d have time later to study. Delgadillo’s idea of college carousing was to visit a Boston museum on a rare afternoon off, Mills related.

“It’s very difficult for him to not be consumed with whatever he’s focusing on,” said the Rolling Hills businessman.

Stuart Liner, a Westside attorney who has known Delgadillo since the late 1980s, said: “I’ve always sort of wondered if this guy has any peccadilloes. Is there something I’m missing? He’s always been transparently good.”

Delgadillo is a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, every-hair-in-place 6-footer who has a certain GQ flash, but exhibits an athlete’s discomfort in his business suits, as if the jackets need another vent.

He smiles easily and is quick to laugh, but can sound over-coached when he speaks, often taking to flights of beauty-pageant banalities.

Platitude in point: “If I could wake up every day and save another 5-year-old’s life, then that’s a good day,” Delgadillo said, referring to his office’s efforts to curb gangs.

Or: “I want to eliminate poverty and ignorance and violence. I’m not running against Jerry Brown. I’m running against ... poverty and ignorance. Against them, we’re the underdog.”

Delgadillo’s politics are a mixed bag. He supports abortion rights and the death penalty. He cozied up to the business community as a deputy to former Republican Mayor Richard Riordan. But he has landed numerous labor endorsements in the attorney general’s race.

Born in Glendale, he is the fourth of five children of Al and Beverly Delgadillo. His father was an Air Force-trained engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, his mother a homemaker before becoming a teacher’s assistant.

Sports was an early obsession, starting with youth basketball and Little League. At Franklin High School, he lettered in baseball, football, track and basketball, earned top grades and was class president.

“Rocky was very popular,” said his former coach and teacher Ernie Porras. “Some of the kids were jealous of him.”

Porras said Delgadillo would look out for less fortunate classmates, recalling that he had intervened on behalf of a teammate who had been disciplined for his performance.

“Rocky came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you have to understand where’s he coming from -- he’s poor, he’s from Cypress Park,’ ” Porras said.

Delgadillo’s high school memories include a gang shooting during a baseball game.

“I’m running to protect my mom, because she’s in the stands ... and I almost get run over by a guy running across the field with a shotgun in his hands,” he said. “These are lasting images.”

He said he could remember getting into trouble just once in school -- “I think I dogged it at practice” -- although police occasionally stopped him while he was behind the wheel.

“But not for doing anything wrong,” Delgadillo said with a barbed laugh. After some hemming and hawing, he said he believed the “issue” had been his brown skin.

At Harvard, he encountered similar attitudes among a few students: “They would come up to me and say, you know, ‘I don’t know what to call you. What do we call you, like a spic? ... We know what to call Puerto Ricans, but what do we call Mexican Americans?’ ”

As a defensive back, Delgadillo received an honorable mention as an All-American, despite beginning his junior year on the bench. “I just worked as hard as I could, and I wouldn’t quit,” he said.

After graduation, professional football beckoned. A tryout with the New York Giants failed, so he signed with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League.

“I was cut before the ink was dry,” he said. “I wasn’t good enough.”

Delgadillo returned home to teach and coach at Franklin High for a year, then enrolled in Columbia Law School. His first stop as an attorney was O’Melveny & Myers, a prominent Los Angeles firm, where he worked in entertainment industry law.

The firm’s chairman, soon-to-be U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, took him under his wing, and later encouraged him to join Rebuild LA, the organization formed after the 1992 riots. His task was to lure investors and developers to the inner city.

He subsequently did much the same for Riordan, who appointed him deputy mayor for economic development.

In that role, he met his wife, Michelle, who was a city legislative aide. “I thought that I probably wouldn’t be married, that I wasn’t going to meet somebody,” he said. “My wife hit right between the beats of my heart.”

They now have two small boys and live in Windsor Village. Delgadillo said he spends virtually all his free time with them.

Free time has been scarce since his election as city attorney in 2001. He won in an upset; the polls had him well behind the better-known City Councilman Mike Feuer. Last year, he was reelected with no opposition.

Along the way, he has taken hits for what critics call a calculating, outsized ambition that has his sights set on the presidency. In his East City Hall office, a couple of books on John F. Kennedy rest on the coffee table; some suggest that Delgadillo might prize them as how-to manuals.

Insiders say his advisors have referred to themselves, at least half-seriously, as “Team 1600,” for the White House’s Pennsylvania Avenue address. His drive for higher office is said to have produced some casualties -- city attorney employees shoved aside for not advancing his political agenda.

“He was going to remake the office, and you remake the office by badmouthing the people who work there,” said Julie Butcher, general manager of Service Employees International Union Local 347, which represents lawyers in the office.

The union has brought several complaints against Delgadillo, but relations have improved during the last year, Butcher said.

“He was a lot more stubborn and rigid” early in his tenure, she said. “He’s turned out to be much more open.”

None of the purported victims of Delgadillo’s aspirations would speak for the record, saying they feared that doing so would damage their careers.

Delgadillo said his office went through a normal shake-up, after being helmed by James K. Hahn for 16 years before Hahn became mayor in 2001. “Some people don’t like change,” he said.

He did not flatly deny coveting the presidency, but said, “The odds against me going beyond the state of California are nearly insurmountable,” if only because it’s tough for anyone to win the White House.

And he already has his hands full with Brown, who enjoys a commanding lead in voter surveys. Delgadillo’s campaign says it is unconcerned. In a recent statement, it hammered away at the battling underdog theme: “Rocky was named after a fighter.”

Not so, says Al Delgadillo. Now retired, he and his wife still live in the modest home they built for their brood, on a bluff with calendar-art views of the San Gabriel Mountains.

“In my grammar school, one of the kids was called Rocky, and he was very popular,” the father said. “I thought, ‘Why not call my kid a name that’s popular?’ ”

Beverly Delgadillo hadn’t been completely sold, so she coined the name Rockard -- a blend of Rocky and Richard -- to enter on his birth certificate.

“It was in case he did something professional,” she said. “He’s not a boxer; he’s a fighter.”

This is the second of two stories profiling the major candidates for state attorney general. The profile of Jerry Brown was published Saturday.