News from The Opposite Field

It is an honor just to be invited to the party, as they say, and it was: Mark Keppel High School even chartered a bus for the team—a real bus—with cushioned recliners and TVs and a bathroom. But Keppel’s first-ever appearance in the state CIF basketball playoffs did not provide the splendid punctuation to a historic season that the journey might have occasioned. Instead, after a two-and-a-half-hour ride up to Bakersfield on Tuesday, over snow-capped passes, through farmland, into California’s Bible Belt, to where the oilfields meet the burbs, Keppel looked like a squad that had already hung it up for the year, a team that, in fact, had not played in 11 days and had not won in 14.

Compared to the Norwalks and Pasadenas, our host, Liberty High, was easy to underestimate, the smallest, whitest team we had faced in a long while. But they were as fast and disciplined as Keppel was erratic and passionless—Liberty picked and rolled us with almost mechanical precision—and after falling behind by 10 at the half, Keppel never really mounted much of a fight, losing by a desultory 69-49, the worst defeat of an otherwise extraordinary winter. Max played close to half the game but, like his teammates, did little to distinguish himself. After we got home, which was nearly 11:30 p.m., he said he had thought at several points of trying to ignite a rally, to slash and drive and break down the defense, but that was not his role this year, not his time to lead, and so he is back at baseball today, next year’s point guard taking his hacks at the plate.

So now the California Interscholastic Federation 2010 state basketball tournament: Mark Keppel opens Tuesday night at Liberty High in Bakersfield, a quick 125-mile jaunt up I-5, over the Grapevine, and into the great San Joaquin. Liberty went 21-8 this season and won the Central Section’s Division 2 championship. If Keppel loses, basketball will be done once and for all. If Keppel should prevail, there will be no rest: Round II would come Thursday against Rialto powerhouse Eisenhower High, which will be waiting for us out in the bowels of San Bernardino County, 50 miles to the east.

I first met Father Gregory J. Boyle—G-Dog to the homies in the Pico-Aliso housing projects—in my early days as the L.A. Times gang reporter. I was 29 and still learning my way around the city. He was 38 and already an iconic figure, the most celebrated gang worker—advocate, interventionist, shepherd—in the nation’s gang capital.  

The occasion for our introduction was his imminent transfer by the Jesuit hierarchy from Dolores Mission Church, a move that was stirring anxiety and grief throughout the Eastside, and that, frankly, was roiling Greg himself with all kinds of conflicting emotions. It led to a story, “Priest Prepares for Painful Farewell from L.A. Barrio,” on July 19, 1992, and more importantly, to a lasting friendship that has mostly been maintained from a distance but that gets reaffirmed at odd and surprising intervals—like the time we found ourselves both ministering (him spiritually, me literarily) to the same group of kids in the chapel of the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino.

This Wednesday, March 10, will be another one of those occasions. Eighteen years after our first embrace, I will be discussing The Opposite Field with Father G. as part of the ALOUD series at the Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium. Although my book was the impetus, Greg also has a book being published this week, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, which I hope he will use the opportunity to expound on.  Nobody in L.A. has done more to reach the unreachable, to redeem the irredeemable—and even though my story is putatively about baseball, I cannot think of another soul better suited to root around in it for larger meanings.

A funny thing happened on the way to baseball: Basketball refused to die. Turns out that as one of the CIF Southern Section Division 2A semifinalists, even though they were eliminated last Friday, Mark Keppel High School earned an invitation to the CIF’s state championship tournament, which begins next week. How nobody knew this—coaches included, apparently—I am at a loss to say. Having never advanced this far, maybe Keppel just never got the memo.    

It is, of course, a privilege to be heading to state, and the basketball staff has spun it as a chance for redemption, to avenge that humbling loss to Pasadena High. But I can see just as clearly that Max, having suited up for his first baseball practice Monday, having played in his first scrimmage Tuesday, was already moving on, physically and emotionally. It was a new season, a new sport, a new coach, new muscles, new mentality, and all of a sudden he was summoned back to the gym: Yesterday, after a four-hour baseball practice in brilliant sunshine, he had to suck it up for two hours of sprints and weaves on the old 1939 hardcourt.

So maybe it was not quite a spring awakening. More like a gloomy winter afternoon with rain clouds massing against the San Gabriels. But it was baseball—Keppel’s traditional preseason scrimmage against Bassett High of La Puente—and Max’s first look at live pitching since lending his services to an adult Mexican beer league early last fall. That is him at the plate, weight back, hands cocked, hips coiled, drawing a bases-loaded RBI walk in his first at-bat. Unfortunately, Max was frozen by a full-count curveball in his only other trip to the plate, and ended the game, which Bassett won 11-8, on a called strike three.

Average: .000. Nowhere to go but up.

My last few years at the Los Angeles Times were spent as an L.A.-based roving national correspondent, which meant I could pretty much go anywhere and write about anything, no matter how arcane or absurd. It was the best job in all of newspapers—and for the most part, I like to think I put that latitude to good use—but every now and again, I found myself drawn to subjects that stretched the boundaries of journalistic inquiry. For this 1999 front-page story, “For Good or Ill, Spitting Happens,” I convinced the paper to send me to Clemson, South Carolina, to cover the 19th annual installment of Spittoono, a celebration of long-distance expectorating sponsored by the Redneck Performing Arts Association. Whether these are the kind of stories the L.A. Times needs more of—or whether they are the kind that hastened its decline—you no longer see many like them nowadays.  

Photo: Erik Lesser

I almost missed out on Keppel’s semifinal basketball game Friday night: Hundreds of people had swarmed the gym at Muir High School in Pasadena—the “neutral” location for our 7 p.m. matchup with Pasadena High—and even though I arrived 45 minutes early, I was still waiting outside the ticket window when it was shut down at 6:25 p.m. I spent the next 15 minutes frantically working the crowd, waving a $20 bill, trying to get it done old-school scalper style. The CIF playoffs are new to us…and somehow Max failed to pass along the memo on presale tickets.

Fortunately, somebody in line had a spare—and was kind enough to charge me only the $8 face value—and I soon found myself in the midst of prep sports bedlam, the loudest, densest, most emotionally fraught high school event I have ever witnessed. This was a huge deal, a trip to the Southern Section Division 2A championship at stake. In its entire 72-year history, Keppel has won only one CIF crown in a traditional team sport—and that was back during the Roosevelt Administration, in 1944, when Keppel’s football team knocked off Pasadena at the Rose Bowl. The gridders (as they were called in the L.A. Times account at left) returned once to the semifinals in 1949, as did Keppel’s baseball team (which boasted future Cy Young winner Mike McCormick on the mound) in 1955. My apologies to the badminton kids, who have amassed eight CIF championships, and to the superb boys and girls swim squads that each notched back-to-back titles in 2007 and 2008, not to mention the victorious soccer team of 1979 and the gymnasts of 1954; I am talking the big three spectator sports—football, baseball, basketball—and basketball had never made it this far.

At the Muir gym, it was immediately apparent why. The realities of race and culture and economics and genetics all conspire against a school like Keppel, which generally relies on fitness and finesse. Against a team like Pasadena, which had 11 guys over six feet, including half a dozen over six-foot-four, there is just too much jumping, too much reaching, too much ground covered in too short a time—and well, that is just the nature of the game, the reason some young men get recruited to play in college and a select few even make it to the NBA. It is not fair, and it is not supposed to be. Max got called for a foul midway through the second quarter: The dude he was trying to guard, the dude barreling down the lane, was his age but six-foot-six and 190 pounds. As they say, you can’t coach that.

That said, Keppel kept it reasonably close, down by just three after the first quarter and by 10 at the half. Max had two rebounds and an assist but made a costly turnover in the third quarter, which prompted Coach Duong to yank him and shout, “Max, give up the damn ball!” The final was 63-48, and by then, it felt as though it had been over for some time.

The Keppel baseball program was supposed to host a pancake breakfast this morning, followed by an intrasquad game, but overnight rains washed it out. That gives Max until Monday to oil his glove—and me a chance to wash some socks and pants.

Now this is getting to be something. Really something. One of those special seasons that comes along only once every few years, maybe every few decades—the right players, in the right combination, in the right division, under the right coach—and all of a sudden, a school better known for its academics, a school ranked in the top three percent of public high schools nationwide by U.S. News & World Report for its “college readiness index,” is contending on the hardcourt with ballers from across the L.A. basin.

A dismantling of Baldwin Park on Tuesday night, 77-63, will send Keppel to the CIF Southern Section Division 2A semifinals Friday against Pasadena. The Aztecs, alternately fierce and patient, are playing their best ball of the season, and after a rocky couple of outings last week, Max finally found his stride, notching three assists, three rebounds, and one free throw in 16 minutes while also shutting down the Braves’ top scorer, 5-foot-8 senior Tomas Montes, who came in averaging 16.9 points. Or maybe Max just needed to guard a little Mexican dude to have a chance of staying in the game.

Photo: Kelvin Chen

Subjecting a TV weatherman to the harsh glare of investigative journalism may seem like overkill: The forecast is the toy box of local news, a shtick more than a prognosis, full of puns and nudges and batted eyelashes. But NBC4’s Christopher Nance—you remember him, the terminally sunny goofus with the trademark carnation in his lapel—was up to such creepy stuff, on- and off-camera, that he was practically daring someone to call him on it. My chronicle of his transgressions, ”Storm Watch,” appeared in the February 2003 Los Angeles magazine. Days before we went to press, Channel 4 announced that Nance was no longer employed by the station.

Photo Illustration: Michael Elins

The chants of “quar-ter-finals…quar-ter-finals…” filled the Norwalk gym as the clock wound down Friday night on Keppel’s second-round manhandling of the Lancers, 63-54.  Dozens of Monterey Park students and parents and teachers and boosters—including the stalwart Ms. Toshi and her signature Kahlua cake—had made the trip down Interstate 5, and after years of first-round exits, there was at last something to celebrate: Matching its best finish in a decade, Keppel will travel to Baldwin Park on Tuesday for the CIF quarterfinals.

Coach Hung (H-Factor) Duong gave Max a little more slack on his suddenly much-shortened leash—about four minutes of playing time, instead of the two minutes the previous game—but defensive matchups are proving to be a genetic challenge. Max’s task at Norwalk was to guard Anthony Holliday, a six-foot-three senior who was a nominee for the 2010 McDonald’s All-American Games this summer.  According to an ESPN scouting report, which ranks Holliday as the #177 shooting guard prospect in the nation, “His frame is excellent (long arms and very broad shoulders) for the D-1 level…” As fit and fearless as Max has become, he still lacks the height or reach to shut down the Anthony Hollidays of the prep world. That might change next week against Baldwin Park, a high school that is 89 percent Latino: Like Max, 10 of its 12 guards are under six feet.