What with all the activity, all the laughing and kids running around and families sitting on park blankets eating turkey sandwiches, this could be the suburbs.
But it's South L.A., next to the Harbor Freeway and El Segundo Avenue, one of the most blighted pockets of urban America.
It's 7 at night at Helen Keller Park. The baseball field and the basketball court glimmer under tall lights. Over by the small Rec Center building, where a gang member was once killed, little girls practice cheerleading routines. Over by the swimming pool, long the site of gang initiations, an old coach counsels a young boy. And on the potholed baseball field that sat unused for years because gangs claimed it, scores of kids in helmets and pads sprint every which way, chasing footballs.
Football? You walk around and talk to people who've lived their whole lives in these parts, and nobody can remember there ever having been a league or a team here. Life being hard as it was, nobody ever gave it much thought. Nobody, except Gary Robinson, a.k.a. "Nugget."
Not so long ago, the only people you'd find in Helen Keller at night were members of Robinson's former gang, the Raymond Avenue Crips. This was their place to smoke weed, drink and plot trouble.
That's why it has been a shock to nearly everyone familiar with the park -- even sometimes to Robinson himself -- that Helen Keller has blossomed, a turnaround that happened largely because Robinson took a stab at redemption.
"I used to be like Don Corleone," Robinson says. Now "I'm Jerry Jones. . . . This was always my dream, football . . . and it feels good."
Lanky, sharp, coarse-voiced, 48, Robinson freely admits that he was one of the people responsible for bringing pain to South L.A.
Says Ken Bell, a retired sheriff's deputy who patrolled the park for more than a decade: "Gary Robinson was one of those criminally minded guys that if I was working and I saw him, he is going to get stopped, because you never knew what he was up to and you wanted him to know you were on him good. . . . Honestly, it would have been the furthest thing from my mind to have guessed he would ever change."
By 2004, pushed by an unyielding community organizer named Cameron Bonner and supported by another former Crip, Reynaldo Reaser, Robinson began to take responsibility for the chaos he helped create. "I've got to change. We've got to change. We've got to fix the mess we made," he told anyone who would listen.
