A TIGER’S TRAIL : After Moving From School to School, Prized Back Leonice Brown Discovers He Belonged at San Fernando All Along

All that was visible was a helmet, shoes the size of those that some folks hang from their rear-view mirrors, and a football. Somewhere, encased in all that equipment, was the body of a 7-year-old running back bent on reaching the end zone.

Or so it seemed.

“The kids are so small you can’t tell the linemen from the backs,” Leonice Brown said as he surveyed a practice of the San Fernando Braves, a youth team. “They’re all the same size.”

A dozen years ago, Brown was a mighty mite running back too. Same team. Same field. Same feeling. He gets a mite wistful thinking about it.

“When I was little, I broke a 99-yarder,” Brown said with a wave of a hand. “I still remember it. I took it straight up the middle and sprinted. All the way from there to there.”

Over the past three seasons, Brown has been there and back, although it was never in an end-zone beeline. From his home in Pacoima to Westlake Village. From Westlake High to Crespi in Encino. From Crespi to San Fernando High, where a Pop Warner practice prompted a flood of memories.

Brown’s blood had been spilled on the field long before Leonice cut his teeth with the Braves. His half-brother, Charles White, was an All-City Section player for San Fernando in 1974 and ’75. His nephew, Russell White, starred for the North Valley Golden Bears before breaking the state rushing record at Crespi.

You see, San Fernando is steeped in tradition. A wall in the coach’s office has photos of several former All-City players--54 have been honored in the school’s 75 seasons of football--and the team consistently draws the biggest crowds on the Valley floor.

“I love this field,” said Brown, whose Tigers will play host to rival Granada Hills in a key Northwest Valley Conference game tonight at 8. “I grew up here.”

Maturity is a continual process.

Brown is the kind of running back who makes defenses palpitate. As a ninth-grader, Brown ran 200 meters in 22.8 seconds; he has been timed at 10.9 in the 100 meters and is the fastest member of the Tiger team. San Fernando Coach Tom Hernandez says most of the schools west of the Rockies are sending mountains of mail to Brown, who has been described as mobile, elusive and agile.

He runs darn well with a football too, which is what started Brown’s odd little odyssey in the first place.

Naivete can be brutal and Leonice Brown knows it. For a time, he believed he had stumbled on the silver spoon. Eventually, the main course started tasting peculiar.

Brown was one of four Pacoima sports standouts who moved in with Westlake Village businessman Buzz Holcomb in the summer of 1988. Others included Mukasa Crowe, now at Chatsworth High, and Ontiwaun Carter, now at Kennedy. Brian Brison, the fourth member of the group, enrolled at Alemany and later transferred to San Fernando. He now attends school in Las Vegas.

Holcomb assumed legal guardianship of the athletes and planned to enroll them at Westlake High, prompting a storm of criticism from several coaches, including Hernandez. They accused Holcomb of recruiting the group for athletic purposes. Holcomb said he merely was offering the boys a chance to escape the mean streets of Pacoima, much of which happens to fall within San Fernando High’s attendance boundaries.

A Southern Section inquiry exonerated Holcomb of the recruiting charges and cleared the way for the group’s eligibility, but by then the plan was coming apart at the seams. Carter bolted the Holcomb fold during the investigation, returned to Pacoima and registered at Kennedy. Crowe left Westlake soon thereafter and enrolled at Chatsworth.

Brown said the plan was flawed from the beginning and conceded that the four had not adapted to the affluent Westlake environment. In fact, Brown said he would routinely head home on weekends to hang out with Carter and other schoolboy friends from Pacoima’s Maclay Junior High.

“It was a big mix-up,” Brown said. “I met Holcomb, he had my mind going. I wanted to go to Westlake, but then I saw the school and I just didn’t like it.”

Holcomb suggested that Brown enroll at Crespi, where Russell White--whose father Roosevelt is Brown’s half-brother--was rewriting the state record book. Brown said he dreamed of making fans cry uncle.

“Because I had seen Crespi play, with all the crowd and all the big linemen, I thought, ‘Yeah!’

“I was up in the stands thinking, ‘That could be me when (Russell) leaves.’ I thought it was the right choice.”

Once again, Brown’s travels ended in travail. As a sophomore at Crespi, Brown rushed 25 times for 122 yards and served primarily as White’s caddy. Meanwhile, Carter rushed for 1,190 yards as a sophomore starter at Kennedy, and the seeds of discontent had been sown. Brown now calls his decision to attend Crespi a “mistake” and “a waste.”

“That year hurt me, I mean, it made me really think about things,” he said. “It made me want to quit. (After) growing up playing, sitting on the bench the whole time was just a waste.”

After White graduated, Brown was installed as the Celts’ starting tailback in 1989 and he gained 1,097 yards and scored nine touchdowns. By season’s end, however, Brown was on the ropes. And back on the road.

Depending on who tells the story, Brown left Crespi because he either was facing academic ineligibility or was unhappy with the way he was utilized by the coaching staff.

“I get one version from him and another from other people,” said White, now a sophomore at California. “I hear he just wasn’t doing the (academic) work, but he says he had some other problems, that he just wasn’t happy there.”

Brown said he was not in hot academic water when he left Crespi--school officials won’t comment on Brown’s scholastic standing--and believes that he should have been allowed to carry the ball more often.

Brown’s itinerary would include a third stop in as many years, and, after he transferred to San Fernando last spring, his high school career had come full circle.

A City Section committee ruled that Brown had satisfied the California Interscholastic Federation’s criteria for financial hardship and granted him athletic eligibility at San Fernando--the public school that many of his boyhood friends attend.

To hear Brown tell it now, this is where he should have been all along.

“If your address is to a school, go straight to that school,” Brown said. “Don’t change your mind. Don’t . That’s a big mistake.”

It did not take long for Brown to do it right as a San Fernando ballcarrier. Late last season, Hernandez decided to reinstitute the Tigers’ storied wishbone, which once was fueled by Leonice’s half-brother, Charles White.

After six games, Brown has rolled up a team-high 484 yards and eight touchdowns in 71 carries and he could become the first Tiger back to top the 1,000-yard plateau since Chris Richards in 1983.

Richards was the most recent of San Fernando’s many big-play backs, a legacy of which Brown is both aware and leery. Before Richards there was brother Charles, who won a Heisman Trophy at USC and an NFL rushing title with the Rams.

The blood that pumps through Brown’s heart also makes it race, for like his nephew Russell, his relationship with Charles has been disappointing. Brown, in fact, prefers not to discuss his famous brother.

“To me, I feel that he should have come home and visited my mother more,” Brown said as he stared straight ahead. “Sometimes I see my mother hurting, I know she’s hurt. She tries not to show it, but I know.

“I promised myself that I’m not going to go his way. It’s like we’re talking now, when people bring up his name, I’m always (saying,) ‘Change it.’ I don’t want to think about it.”

But Brown and his two younger brothers, Johnnie and Jerry, have thought about it--at length.

“We love him, he’s our brother and everything, but when he comes around . . . It’s basically, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ ”

Yet Brown wears No. 12, the number worn by Charles while at San Fernando and USC. Johnnie, a sophomore at San Fernando, likely will wear No. 12 when Leonice graduates. Jerry, an eighth-grader, also likely will wear the jersey when Johnnie graduates.

“I wore No. 25 when he was with the Cleveland Browns and I went to No. 33 when he was with the Rams,” Leonice said of his decision to copy Charles’ choice of uniform number. “But when he stopped coming around, I went my own way and got my own number at Crespi, No. 2.

“When I got back here, I went to No. 12. It’s the family tradition.”

Russell disrupted the tradition when he decided to attend Crespi, a private parochial school. Like Leonice, Russell had been a San Fernando High ball boy as a kid and was viewed as salvation in cleats. But Russell chose Crespi partly because it offered a better academic curriculum.

Indeed, White questioned the wisdom of Brown’s transfer to San Fernando--on athletic and academic grounds.

“Wood shop doesn’t satisfy college requirements,” said White, who was a Proposition 48 casualty as a freshman. “Being a T.A. (teacher’s aide) doesn’t satisfy college requirements. He’s gonna find out out that colleges won’t take you because of your name.

“And if he’s only carrying the ball eight times (actually, nearly 12) a game, I don’t see that. . . . I hope it works out like he wants it to.”

Hernandez said he is trying to work out the kinks in Brown’s academic portfolio and predicts that the NCAA-required core classes will be completed. Brown has yet to score 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test--required by the NCAA to gain eligibility as a college freshman--but will retake the exam next weekend, Hernandez said.

It did not take long for Brown to fall in step philosophically. He says tonight’s game against Granada Hills is the most important of his career. Kennedy tailback Carter, whom he considers his best friend, long has chided Brown about the difficulty of playing against faster and more explosive City teams.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, you played St. Francis. Why don’t you come to a City league and see what you get?’

“I can’t wait to get Granada on this field,” he said, breaking into another smile. “It is the biggest game of my life.”

Judging by Brown’s fervent tone, Hernandez has found himself a real Tiger. This time, the end zone marked the terminus of Brown’s trail.

“I’ve been through a lot,” Brown said, rubbing a hand across his mouth. “I’ve been from city to city. Man, I know the freeways. I learned you should always stay home.”

Brown took another long look at the Braves as they skittered about the San Fernando High field, looking like a collection of ceramic sports dolls, the kind whose oversized heads bounce from side to side on springs. You know, the kind of doll that some folks place in their car’s rear windows.

Brown’s thoughts were as easy to read as the dive plays the Braves were running a few feet in front of him. Things sure were simple then.

Even at age 18, it isn’t easy to look back.

“If I had to do it all over again, I would go to San Fernando High School,” he said. “I would be a Tiger. This is where I belonged in the first place.”

He swears it’s his last place.

“Home sweet home,” he said.