A Final Return to the Huddle

“I could reach out to my teammates,” former USC football player Howard McCowan said recently, “but if I did, I know some of them would reach back, and it would hurt them to be associated with a felon. I don’t want to put any of them in that position.”

On Saturday, his former teammates reached out to him. They came forward -- among them police and parole officers, coaches and former professional football players -- to carry the former defensive back to his final resting place.

McCowan, 34, was found dead in his cell Feb. 22, while serving a life sentence as a three-strikes felon at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, Calif. Authorities at the prison and the Lassen County coroner said they are still investigating his death, which apparently was caused by hanging.

McCowan’s remains were returned to Los Angeles to be buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery. At his memorial service, a floral arrangement stood next to his casket with “USC” spelled out in red roses against a background of yellow carnations. The lining of the casket’s cover was imprinted with his name and an image of a football.

Calvin Holmes, who played with McGowan at both Carson High School and USC and was drafted by the Washington Redskins, served as a pallbearer. Though McGowan had avoided contact with his USC teammates in recent years, Holmes said he “wished I would have reached out to him, that he would have felt free to pick up the phone and talk to me.”

McCowan’s adult life played out in two institutions: USC and the California Department of Corrections.

In his first year at USC, the team won the 1990 Rose Bowl. The next year, McCowan was a starting safety, showing the sort of promise that could well have led to an NFL career.

But soon after his second season, he and teammate Marcel Brown went on a crime spree, robbing pedestrians one evening in Westwood and the South Bay. Both pleaded guilty and were sent to prison.

Brown, who was released and now lives in San Diego, where he coaches football and is working on getting back into college, also attended the funeral. “We’ll always be linked,” Brown said. “I know I’ll see him again.”

After serving seven years, McCowan returned to USC, renewed his friendships with teammates and was on the verge of graduating when he used a gun to hold up a liquor store in 2001. The offense, together with two counts from his earlier conviction, was his third strike and put him behind bars for life.

When a reporter visited him at High Desert State Prison in November, McCowan could not say why he had committed another crime. “I really want to give you a reason, but there’s no good explanation,” he said.

Life outside prison was a bigger shock than he imagined, he said, because it was the first time he confronted the world without his status as a football star.

“When I was incarcerated, I adapted,” he said. “When I got out, I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to do. Being a football player had been such a big part of my identity, and I did not have that anymore.”

Seeing friends from college both comforted and pained him, he said. Out of prison and in Los Angeles, he ran into former teammates playing in the NFL: Willie McGinest, Johnnie Morton, Pat Harlow. Though he was happy for their success, the differences in their circumstances unnerved him.

“You were at the same place, at the same time, with the same opportunities. Years later, their life is like this and mine is like that. It’s definitely a mind trip,” he said.

“I felt that no matter what I accomplished in life, it would not be good enough.... It sounds real silly. But you can’t help what you feel.”

Marvin Pollard, a fellow USC defensive back from Carson and now a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, said that when he saw McGowan after his first prison term, he sensed McGowan “felt incomplete.”

“Sometimes he talked about trying to play again, maybe for USC, if they would allow it, or even the Arena league,” Pollard said. “We had moved on, Willie [McGinest] was in the league, I had a career and was a homeowner. Howard said he didn’t know what to do without football.”

Holmes, now a parole agent, wondered if McGowan had become institutionalized, more comfortable in prison than out.

McGowan himself struggled with that question. “I wouldn’t say I wanted to be back in, but now that I’m here, it’s not like it’s unfamiliar,” he said.

In prison, McGowan followed the various efforts to reform the three-strikes law. He was dispirited by the 2004 defeat of a ballot measure to soften the law.

“I should serve prison time, but should I be here until I die? I didn’t kill anybody,” he said.

“Three strikes is killing me.”

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Marsha Johnson, the mother of McGowan’s 6-year-old son, read a letter from McGowan at Saturday’s service in which he asked her to “raise him well so he won’t break his mama’s heart.”

McCowan was raised very well. He grew up in a six-bedroom house in Carson, near the Del Amo mall. His mother, Thelma McCowan, had pushed her way to prosperity from humble beginnings in Paris, Texas, moving to California after high school and earning a nursing degree at night while working as a telephone operator.

In California, she met her husband, also named Howard McCowan, a Grambling football star who played briefly for the San Diego Chargers and in the Canadian Football League.

The elder Howard McCowan died when his son was 11. He had struggled to establish a career after football, working as a bus driver and a policeman at different times, Thelma McCowan said. She took it upon herself to keep the family financially secure.

By the time the younger Howard McGowan was ready for high school, his mother had put in enough double shifts at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Westwood to own a house in Baldwin Hills and drive a luxury car. The family moved to Carson in part so that McGowan, a star Pop Warner player, could play football at highly regarded Carson High.

Her son’s downfall, she told a reporter last year, sometimes made her think she should have stayed in Texas because “my life could not have turned out worse.” She agreed to talk about it, she said, partly to “send a message to young black boys: Unless you are rich, stay as far away from doing the wrong thing as you can.”

In prison, McCowan tried to make the best of his predicament.

He worked in the prison store, which he said enabled him to get snacks and other creature comforts when he wanted them. He had a television in his cell, and he knew many inmates from his previous prison stint.

But he also felt threatened, he said.

His face was scarred, he said, from fighting. He asked a reporter not to mention that he was scheduled to undergo surgery on his shoulder, saying he did not want adversaries to know he was physically vulnerable.

He had adapted, he said, but “by no means am I happy.”