Antwone Shepherd finds purpose at Compton Centennial

“I’m not worth nothing.”

Four years ago, the skinny kid with the muffled voice stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the tiny Compton home, holding a towel and hearing those words.

“I’m not worth nothing.”

His mother was on the streets. His father was in the shadows. He wasn’t anywhere, having been passed around to four relatives in five years, chased out of his previous home by a crazed relative who yanked a garden hose inside the living room and started spraying.

He couldn’t remember the last time he celebrated a birthday. He just remembers his mother once leaving to buy his cake and never coming home.

“I’m not worth nothing.”

Antwone Shepherd slowly wrapped the towel around his neck and squeezed until everything went black.

::::::

“You’re the man!”

Four years later, the words are different, and the towels are flying, waving through the air, pounding on the ground, an article of death now fanning new life.

At the end of his first year of organized football, Antwone Shepherd sent the Compton Centennial High sidelines into a frenzy Friday by catching a touchdown pass and intercepting a pass in the Apaches’ improbable 67-48 victory over Oak Park in the first round of the Southern Section Northwest Division playoffs.

“You’re the man!”

A kid who didn’t even know how to wear his equipment wore the opponents out. A kid who had not caught a pass all year caught one of the biggest.

A kid looking for a family found one.

“I’ve never had a home like this,” said Shepherd, now 18, graduating in the spring and very much alive.

:::::::

Players holding hands in a huddle. Players jumping on top of each other in a circle. Players picking each other up off the ground, again and again.

You will see it all today in America’s Thanksgiving sport, and some of it will be awkward, and much of it will look silly. But all of it will be real, and all of it will be worthy of our thanks.

Football can be violent and senseless, but no sport does more to imitate the family life that many of its participants so desperately crave.

“It’s what everybody in this game preaches, isn’t it?” said Jimmy Nolan, coach of Compton Centennial. “It’s never really about football, it’s always about life, right?”

It is certainly that way with Nolan’s team, whose struggles and triumphs this fall have been chronicled in this column, the tale of a rookie outsider struggling to make sense of a rebuilding inner-city squad.

The Apaches have not only survived, but triumphed, the patchwork 6-5 team playing Friday in Templeton for a chance to advance to a division semifinal for what they believe is the first time in school history.

Nowhere is this triumph more evident than in Antwone Shepherd, a kid who began the season so distant that Nolan actually gave him his first cellphone to keep him connected.

“I mostly keep it in a drawer,” said Shepherd with a grin. “Still not used to having it.”

Today he is so connected that, as resident of the bottom bunk in a room he shares with his brother, he keeps his report card under the mattress of the top bunk so he can stare at it every night for inspiration.

“I don’t know how I’d do it, but I am thinking about college,” he said, noting later that he hasn’t applied just yet because his home computer has been broken for a month.

Football hasn’t done all of that. Shepherd is also the captain of Centennial’s basketball team, and he is such an innately good kid that while furiously munching on an energy bar during our early-evening interview — his first solid food since late morning — he offered me a bite.

But this fall, football completed him. In the summer, three weeks before the first game, for the first time in his life, Shepherd decided to play after watching Nolan’s nutty bunch hit and holler in practice.

“It looked like they were having so much fun together, and I wanted some of that,” Shepherd said.

The coaches loved him because he immediately hit harder than anyone else.

“For the first time in my life, I had a place to put my anger,” Shepherd said.

But the coaches worried about him because, well, he hit everything.

“He didn’t know the rules, he had zero football IQ, he would be tackling receivers and running offsides, he would get beat on every play, every day,” Nolan said.

Shepherd didn’t quit because it was the only place where he could act mad and somebody would hug him for it, and there was a lot that made him mad.

He had not lived with his mother or father since he was 3, and only rarely speaks to either. He spent his childhood moving from relative to relative, once living with several half siblings who simply didn’t have time to care for him. He missed an entire school year because nobody bothered to enroll him.

“I hated my living situation,” he said. “Friends had parents, and I didn’t. Friends had people to help them with their homework, and I didn’t.”

When he was in sixth grade, he moved into a home occupied by his cousin Gloria Porter and her husband Mark Waller, and for the last seven years they have acted as his guardians. But at first, even that stability wasn’t enough, leading Shepherd to attempt suicide.

Said Shepherd: “When I woke up I was like, ‘Damn, it didn’t work.’ ”

Said Gloria: “He had such terrible self-esteem, it was a constant struggle.”

Many therapist visits later, Shepherd reached the point where he could stand up in front of his football teammates this fall and tell his story. It was part of a sharing session that Nolan held after the Apaches lost their first two games.

“I just started crying,” Shepherd said. “I was worried they would think I was weak, but then I looked around and they were all crying with me.”

His worries continued throughout the early season as he struggled on defense, once allowing two touchdown passes on fade routes in the same game against North Torrance. After the second touchdown, he collapsed in the end zone in tears, then curled up when he spotted several teammates running toward him.

“I thought they were going to throw me off the team,” he said.

Instead, they had come to pick him up and drag him back into a huddle and encourage him to keep playing. He did, and Centennial did; the Apaches have won four of their five games since, including Friday’s game with Shepherd acting as captain.

“These guys are like my brothers, like we’re all connected,” Shepherd said.

He stuffs his equipment into a tiny school locker because all the football lockers are taken. He wears discount long johns outside his uniform during chilly practices because he doesn’t know any other way to keep warm. Going home after practice requires a dark 20-minute walk through two gang turfs.

But he now has a connection, as football does it every autumn day as only football can do it.

Earlier this week, after pulling into the school parking lot before practice, Nolan was sitting in his van when he was surrounded by several intense players banging on his window.

“Coach, coach, you should have seen Antwone in school today,” they said.

“What was wrong?” the worried Nolan said.

“He was smiling,” they said, savoring each word as if it were another victory. “He was happy.”

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