L.A. High football team honors fallen teammate Jamiel Shaw II
BILL PLASCHKE
Players walk to the place where he died.
Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times
They are a football team, so they marched.
Across the rutted field. Out the iron gates. Down Mullen Avenue.
They are 30 high school kids who lost their leader, so they went to bring him back.
Left on Pico Boulevard. Right on Crenshaw Boulevard. Left on Washington Boulevard.
They are 30 moving targets in bright white football jerseys, so the two-mile walk was filled with vicious catcalls, gang signs and slow stares.
Right on 5th Avenue. Past 21st Street. Ending at the house on 2120 5th.
They are fragile children, so when the Los Angeles High Romans arrived at the spot where star Jamiel Shaw II was gunned down last spring, they draped their arms over each other and cried.
Then they huddled in the middle of the busy street, bounced wildly against each other, and chanted.
"One-two-three-JSHAW-JSHAW-JSHAW!"
The high school football season can officially start now. The city's most devastating off-season loss has been reclaimed and fitted firmly in the hearts of teammates who found a most peculiar, perfect way to reach it.
They are a football team, so they marched.
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It was a crazy idea, and Hardy Williams knew it.
"People were like, 'You're going to do what?,' " he said. " 'You're going to march those kids where?' "
It was a crazy idea, but Williams hasn't survived for more than 30 years at Los Angeles by caring about crazy.
His team had showed up for fall practice having lost its best player, running back and defensive back Jamiel Shaw II. The Romans were closer than ever but more confused than ever. They were holding this memory that was at once both horrific and endearing, and they didn't know what to do with it.
Shaw was a model student who avoided gangs. Yet on March 2 he was murdered three doors from his house by a gunman who allegedly asked of his gang affiliation before firing.
Shaw was a funny, yet devout kid who led the weekly team in pregame prayer. Yet at age 17, he was murdered while standing on his street talking on his cellphone.
"The question is, how do we deal with all that?" asked Williams. "Then driving to school one day, on the streets where Jamiel used to walk, I had an idea."
On the eve of the team's first game of the season, why not put Shaw permanently under their jerseys by having them retrace his steps? Why not lead them along the streets of both his tragedies and triumphs to show them that it is OK to mourn, but also OK to live?
