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The toilers

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Content
THE TOILERS

by

Daniel Heimpel

____________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(JOURNALISM)

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Daniel Heimpel
1
In the long shadow of the Los Angeles Coliseum's faded gold lies Manual
Arts High School, a square block of fences, creaking buildings and a brown, muddy
sports field. It was here – unlikely as it seems – that four years ago, Sean McKeon
introduced a sport more associated with prep academies than a school that serves the
teenage children of blue-collar parents.
McKeon has struggled to teach the fundamentals of lacrosse, a game that
originated among the Six Tribes of the Iroquois.
For him, this game and the team he has assembled are a way to save himself
and a few kids along the way.
Finding this barren practice field and the hope it holds has not been an easy
path. McKeon, a Chicago native, played throughout high school. A decent, if hardly
outstanding player, he wanted to try his hand at NCAA Division I lacrosse. He
walked onto the team at Butler and, after a year of riding the bench, left.
Unsatisfied with his progress as a player, unsatisfied with himself as a person, he
would leave four more schools -- Kansas University, Ohio State, an arts school, a
junior college -- before settling down for two years to play club lacrosse at the
University of Arizona.
McKeon explains that the roving that marked his college career was because
of a gnawing disenchantment with the different campuses and programs he tried.
After patching disparate units into a degree, he continued to drift after
college. First he wired sound cables at concerts. Then he worked as a runner for a
recording studio, buying burgers and Philly Blunts for rappers. He also had a stint at
a bicycle shop. He was restless, rudderless, without purpose or goal until he finally
2
landed at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles’ fast-evolving South Central,
teaching a video-documentary class to indifferent teenagers.
At 26, McKeon had no illusions, no dreams. He saw his life as dull, gray,
boring, and worse, unchanging, no more than mediocre.
“I was burnt out and going through a quarter-life crisis,” he said one day after
a practice filled with the frustration of dropped balls and lethargic kids overfed on
McDonald’s and Doritos. “I remembered what had inspired me most had been
coaching my old high school team, so I decided to start an inner-city league in L.A.”
He started teaching at Manual Arts shortly after he first walked out onto a
neighborhood park with a few sticks and balls. Soon he would be volunteering his
free time to build a program. He thought that lacrosse would lift him up then. He
hopes it will lift him up now.
Three-and-a-half seasons, 38 games against both experienced and
inexperienced teams, and one victory.
That one win is a glimmer in a place that sometimes feels to McKeon as
hopeless and despairing.
South Los Angeles has gone through a major demographic shift in the past ten
years; the last census shows that Latinos account for 55 percent of South Los
Angeles residents while blacks make up 40. At Manual it is more pronounced, with
the Latino population closely reflecting the entire school district’s ethnic breakdown,
73 percent of students being Latino. But the change in color hasn’t changed much.
Economically disadvantaged students are still at a supreme deficit when it comes to
passing standardized tests and going on to college. Few make it.
3
On the day of Manual’s penultimate game in 2006, the lacrosse team still
winless, hordes of black and brown students crammed the streets outside the school’s
10-foot tall, wrought-iron fence topped with curving barbs. Rap and Reggaeton
music blared from big, boxy decade-or-more-old American cars. Long white tee
shirts on boys. Short tee shirts on girls. Four Los Angeles School Police (LASPD)
cruisers parked out front.
On the field, Manual Art’s lacrosse team, the Toilers, was playing a group
from Saugus. They stood sweating in their in their all black uniforms, huddled
around McKeon. "We are nine minutes away from a historic win," he yelled. "Yeah!
Yeah! Yeah!" his 14 players shouted. The score stood at 12-9. The team was, as had
rarely happened before, within reach of winning a game.
Ron Rodney, a junior, was Manual Arts’ star. He was still running hard late
into the fourth quarter. Long and lean, he pulled his arm length stick from his right
hand to his left, leaving the defender flat-footed. Rodney was in the open, charging at
the goalie. Rodney hurled the hard white ball off the dry mud and over the opposing
goalie’s shoulder. The four Manual players on the sideline exploded as it hit the net.
12-10! McKeon raised a clenched fist before him. “Yes!” he yelled, wild-eyed.
But Rodney’s play was too little, too late. The overweight Toilers faded and
the visitors held on to win. Too many of McKeon’s players were too tired to keep up
a sustained onslaught.
"Riding a 30-game losing streak isn't very fun," McKeon said after the game.
He spoke quickly as if it were better to spit out the dejection than hold it in.
California’s relentless sun in his light brown eyes made him look, for moments,
4
maniacal.
McKeon has had to cope with more than an exhibition of his players’
unfamiliarity with the lacrosse stick, their fat-heavy diets or even their inability to
run encumbered by the protective gear.
"It's one of our first practices and I hear a car screeching,” he recalled. Then he
mimicked automatic gunfire, “Gag gag gag… a drive by two hundred yards away."
McKeon laughed.
"All the guys were like, 'Ha, Sean that's your first drive by.' Hell yes, it was
my first drive by." He kicked at the hard dirt. A bit of wind caught his thinning hair.
"This is something to stand for. In high school everyone is looking for
something. Here it's not do I join the football team or do I join the car club… it's do I
join the Forties, the Hoovers, the Harpies. It's what street do I live on? What gang am
I going to join?"
"Gangs have a draw," Manual Arts’ Assistant Principal Miranda Raoof agreed.
"But lacrosse is a way to draw them to other things.” And it is also a place where
sometimes-contentious relations between black and Latino students are forgotten.
They are still “noiggas” and “beaners” but the hatred is leached from their voices.
Despite cussing incessantly, McKeon had managed to take nigger out of his players’
vocabularies.
“They see some positive things and that can trigger them to be more
motivated,” Raoof added. McKeon's lacrosse team “is a small effort that has turned
into something great.”
Whatever McKeon has accomplished with his lacrosse team, not much has
5
changed on the rutted streets that surround Manual Arts. In one week in a one-mile
radius of campus there were six rapes, six violent robberies, four aggravated assaults
and one car-jacking, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. (During the
same week in West Hills, the home of Manual opponent New Jewish Community
High School, not a single crime was reported.)
Carlos Lopez – dubbed “Supersize” because he weighs 280 pounds yet stands
only 5 feet 9 inches tall – sat in a patch of grass with Rodney, the one competitive
Manual Arts player. The afternoon sunlight filtered through the smog, burning
yellow on Rodney’s dark brown face with its straggly goatee and Supersize’s lighter
brown face and fuller beard.
This is where the Hoovers, Street Villains, Rollin 40’s, the Dark Side 40’s
operate. “I’d never die for some letters,” Supersize said. “That shit’s stupid. I’ll die
for something honorable.”
“Like what?” Rodney asked.
“Like dying for my country,” Supersize said. He was joking, maybe, or
pretending to joke, but somewhere inside he sounded serious. “I’d die for my
family,” he added.
They talked about Jeffrey, a former player, “who used to bang.”
“Naw, he was just in a tagging clique,” Rodney said laughing, cocky.
“Chucky?” Supersize asked.
“Naw he was just tagging too.”
“Chucky was in a crew,” McKeon later explained. “He got beat up, I made him
quit. Told him, either the crew or the lacrosse team. He chose us. Everyone on the
6
team knows gang members, and they're welcome to join, they just have to choose
us or the gang.”
Chucky’s grades ended his season before it began.
Three freshmen sat in the grass across from Rodney and Lopez. “Some of them
have shanks,” portly Daniel Leon said.
“Yeah they have random checks,” Supersize said. Police officers who patrol
the school sometimes walked into classes unannounced searching for weapons.
While some students carry guns in the street, they never do on campus.
But guns are commonplace in the neighborhood around Manual Arts. Blacks
and browns have them. And use them.
Both Rodney and Supersize have seen people shot or shot at.
In Rodney’s case it was during football practice, when a group of Latino
gangsters waited for a student and blasted a volley of bullets. That was ten feet from
where five teammates now sat, Rodney said casually. “Nobody was hit,” he added
smiling.
For Supersize it was two blocks up the street in front of his house on 44
th

Street. Someone had fired a shotgun, then sped off in a white sedan “The dude’s leg
was on the floor, man,” he said.
“I’ve seen people shot,” Leon said, trying to be accepted by the older guys. “In
the movies.”
But one dark night, Leon earned the respect of his teammates. McKeon had
taken the kids to eat Korean BBQ north, and out of, Latino and Black Vermont.
7
A handful of the players needed rides home after the feast, it being late and
the streets dangerous. Leon and five others piled into a car.
“I live down on Century,” Daniel said.
“Damn, that’s in the hood,” said Tony, a player who shows up to practices at
his leisure, before getting out of the car.
“Yeah, I hear the ambulances going by all night long,” Leon said. “It’s like
woooo, woooo, woooo and I can’t sleep.”
Rodney, the star, and his little brother, Marvin, asked to be dropped off at 62nd
street. That’s 60 blocks below Wilshire and Koreatown.
The streets were dark. There were few people on the dimly lit sidewalks.
But Leon’s house lay a 40 blocks farther on Century Boulevard. Here no-one walked
on the streets, but hid behind barred windows and high fences.
Leon suggested taking Figueroa down. “There is a lot of prostitution here,”
he said. He turned his 14-year-old face to watch a thick-thighed black hooker
soliciting on a corner.
“Nothing ever happened to me yet down here,” Leon said as the car drifted
closer to his neighborhood. Yet.
He said that he felt something bad was always about to happen. That he
would get a “weird feeling” if he was on the street after the sun had pulled behind all
the squat apartment buildings and fortress-like homes. “I kinda hide when I come
home after dark,” he said.
“Take a right here,” Leon said. He pointed to the house. “We had to put some
pillars up and keep the door locked,” he explained.
8
This is what McKeon came down here for. In all his life of missed chances
and half-fulfilled opportunities, Manual Arts represented a chance to find himself.
But when McKeon started in 2003 he did not yet know the odds against him or his
players.
Among 4,113 students at Manual, just 511 of 704 seniors graduated in 2005,
according to the Los Angeles Unified School District. With SAT scores 132 points
lower than the rest of the school district's average of 901, Manual Arts students are
not on a fast track to college.
McKeon shakes his head. Seniors are reading the “Bernstein Bears,” he
laments. LAUSD statistics, while confusing, draw a picture of a school with major
problems preparing its students for life after Manual Arts.
Exit exams had 35 percent passing the math and 44 percent the English
language requirements, far behind the district’s 50 percent for math and English.
(The county meanwhile posted scores of 57 percent in math and 61 percent in
English. The state totaled 63 percent in math and 65 percent in English.)
McKeon’s students are among the successful, according to Assistant Principal
Raoof. "These kids, under Sean's instruction, none will drop out," she said. He won’t
let them.
So the players nurse dreams just forming.
Rodney leaned up against a dented sedan in the parking lot next to the field. "I
want to go to college and play lacrosse," he said, still sweating from the practice's
last set of sprints. But, he is a senior and has not applied to any school. McKeon too
had dreams of making Rodney his first college student. But that does not look like it
9
is going to happen. Rodney has only a C-average.
“At least he’s not such a dumb ass this year,” McKeon recently said of
Rodney. “He’s finally become responsible.”
Rodney says he goes to class more often now. And apart from Rodney, it is
clear that other players have started to see something beyond Manual.
Ernesto, a freshman “could be a phenomenal player,” McKeon told the slight
14-year-old. “If you got your stick skills together you could play back east, at Duke
or Yale or Princeton.”
“Really,” Ernesto said, incredulous.
“Really.”
Weeks later Ernesto tore through practice drills. He now wore short socks, in
the style of East Coast lacrosse players. His handling of the stick had improved; he
had become one of the team’s dominant players.
Did he want to go to college?
“Yes.”
Where?
“Princeton.”
Credit the discipline McKeon has handed down. If the kids are late to one
practice they miss a quarter in that week’s game, two times they miss a half and three
times and they can forget about stepping onto the field.
“This year I’m gonna make sure that the team GPA sticks at 2.5,” he insisted.
Could he field enough players? He just shook his head and said, “I don’t know.”
10
But half way through his fourth season at Manual, he has managed to hold
on to more than a handful of players on his unlikely lacrosse team.
The week had been stressful. The paperwork to create a non-profit lacrosse
league was lost in the mail. It would delay McKeon getting a grant of $2,000 from a
foundation.
McKeon’s vision is that the awkward sticks and a foreign game will be a
beacon for blighted inner city Los Angeles. Manual is the nucleus of McKeon’s goal,
LAX (lacrosse) in LA.
The intent is to use lacrosse to change the lives of kids throughout LA’s
roughest ghettoes and barrios. McKeon has been successful in establishing both
men’s and women’s programs at Manual Arts High School and across the Los
Angeles River, in Huntington Park.
McKeon modeled his plan on San Francisco’s rough LAX for LIFE program
in hard-hit Hunter’s Point. Similarly, in Boston, METRO Lacrosse has long fostered
inner city lacrosse - bolstered by a $1 million annual donation from New Balance
shoes.
McKeon’s 501-C3 status is still in limbo. He has a wallet-full of maxed out
credit cards and still faces an overwhelmed LAUSD. Beyond logistics McKeon faces
apathy and low expectations among the kids that is sometimes overwhelming.
The day was uncommonly cold for Los Angeles. The coming darkness forced
the end of practice. A brisk wind shot down from the mountains just visible over
Manual’s buildings. The kids clearly wanted to leave, shivering in their shorts and
their sweaty pads on the desolate field. But McKeon had no such idea.
11
“If you guys don’t start working off the field then we won’t win one game
this season,” he screamed.
Lacrosse is not an easy game to pick up. It’s not like soccer or basketball
where the only real requisite is coordination. Instead, you are handed an awkward
stick with a net at the end and are expected to be able to throw and catch. But to do
that well requires standing in front of a wall and flinging the ball at it for hours. It
takes concentration and motivation.
On that day, like all the others, the players did not have their stick skills.
Other things were bothering him too. The LAUSD was two months late on
paying him, the sole provider for him and his wife, Amy. His pent frustration burst a
day before the scrimmage.
His eyes danced wild.
“I keep on telling you mother-fuckers to spend time outside of practice with
your sticks.” He scanned the players’ eyes, until he found a victim.
“You Mini-G,” he said to Eric, Gustavo’s little brother and a decent athlete.
“You probably have never hit the wall, even though I tell you to all the time.”
His voice picked up in tempo and intensity. “We are just going to be shit and
have our asses handed to us every game if you guys don’t do any fucking work!”
Again his eyes jotted through the players. He had found his next target.
He fumed at Rodney and his little brother, Marvin. “And you guys need to pay
me!” he screamed. “I agreed to pay $100 so you two could go to that camp and you
didn’t even show! Get me that $100! I’ll put it on my credit card but you better be
ready to pay the eight, nine percent interest on it.” McKeon was shaking, the veins
12
on his neck visible and grotesque.
Rodney and his little brother looked down. The other players said, “Yes
coach.” Rodney pulled his head up, his face obfuscated by the darkening sky. The
whites of his eyes were clear. They did not meet McKeon’s.
The next day – the day of Manual’s new hope - two players failed to show up.
Rodney and his little brother were missing. McKeon smoldered.
“Fuck if I know where they are,” he said. “They probably have some lame ass
excuse.”
McKeon and the players looked up from their work lining the field as a yellow
bus with tinted windows pulled past the iron fences of Manual Arts. It parked and a
procession of already-uniformed white players stepped out. They had come from
Windward High School, worlds west.
Following the bus came a small contingent of shiny cars. The lacrosse-moms
had shown up with their Gatorade and orange wedges. There were five, 10 and then
15 of them, some fathers too. All wore sunglasses, many wore visors.
McKeon jogged across the bald field to meet the opposing coaches. They
looked around, stunned at their surroundings.
A few minutes after the Windward team had settled into warm-up stretches,
one of the fathers walked around, scanning the school intently. He was wearing a
garish yellow polo tucked into khaki trousers with a smart leather belt. He asked
where he could find the bathroom.
When told that the locker rooms were shut and the bathrooms locked, he was
surprised.
13
“Hmm, that’s rustic,” he said, clearly bemused that there were no urinals for
his use.
Before the scrimmage started McKeon brought the players into his classroom.
They finished tying the laces on their cleats and donning their clean white jerseys
along the room’s long collapsible tables. Tables that had brand new Macintosh
computers on them. Computers that teacher McKeon had won grant money for.
Computers etched with graffiti.
“These guys are no better than you,” he said evenly. He stood on front of a
white board, covered with scribbles including the tenants of LAX in LA: “I must be
held accountable for myself, my team, my family and my community.”
McKeon had them walk in two rows. They looked formidable in their clean
uniforms. They looked like a lacrosse team as they stepped onto the field.
“We gotta beat them,” Gustavo said as the team huddled a last time before the
game started.
McKeon didn’t say anything. The twenty players squeezed closer together.
“They don’t want this shit!” Chris screamed.
“They scared.” Gustavo said in an intense hush.
Rogelio, the captain looked back at his team, “They aint got nothing, we got
brown pride!” he yelled.
But all the pride in the world couldn’t make up for what Manual lacked that
day. They were under-coached, out of shape and shy of skill. More than anything
they were without their leader, Rodney.
In a matter of minutes, the visitors had jumped out by five goals, a deficit the
14
players knew they would not surmount. McKeon yelled and shook as if he could
will some energy into his players, but they were in a daze.
The team fell into frustration. Chris took it out on a midfielder he was
covering. Holding his stick like bicycle handles, Chris beat into a Windward player’s
arm. The referee threw a yellow flag and blew the whistle.
Chris shouted to the referee: “You mother-fucker.” It would cost him another
minute of penalty time.
“Goddamn shit,” McKeon muttered.
The Windward lax-moms and dads sat on Manual’s bleak aluminum bleachers
in tight formation. Not one Manual Arts parent had made the game.
The game was a rout. Manual didn’t score a single goal. Rodney wasn’t there.
Instead, he and his little brother had spent the day hauling construction site debris for
their father. They earned $50 each, half their debt to McKeon.
Players turn out. Players quit. “I don’t want to play on a team that will never
win,” explained Marco. Marco had made the switch from soccer to lacrosse as soon
as his soccer season was over. He had quickly developed into a deft if slightly brutal
defender, slashing at his opponents wildly. Gustavo had said that Marco played like
that because he “hated white people.”
“He doesn’t get it,” McKeon said in the car as he drove way from Manual Arts.
“We won’t win anything if they keep on leaving. I spend all this time trying to teach
these guys life lessons and they just don’t get it. They just give up. They just go
‘uhhh’ and that’s it.
“Once I tried to hit a bottle cap with my stick. I couldn’t do it so they all made
15
fun of me. I tried again and missed. They made fun of me some more, but I kept
on swinging at the bottle cap until I finally hit it. They would have just given up.”
The Toilers. A lacrosse team looking for its second win in four years.
Manual Arts. An overcrowded place with graffiti that re-appears as soon as it is
painted over. A place of low expectations.
Still McKeon comes to the sadly worn field each day. Been a failure, still a
failure, but always trying to hit the bottle cap.
So are the kids – or some of them. Chris, glistening in sweat, takes the bus to
his group home every night after practice. Rodney tries to lift up the team in each
game and at each practice. Ernesto grows in confidence and ability. Gustavo wrestles
with his little brother, Mini G, and yells out “noigga!” as loud as he can. Supersize
runs the two warm up laps before practice under the weight of two, sweating and
panting and feeling his chest and stomach bounce.
They all fight the feeling of inferiority played out when all-white teams come
onto their dingy field and beat them. The kids see something called opportunity.
Opportunity that would not be there if it wasn’t for McKeon. “We love Sean,”
Supersize once said of him.
And then there is McKeon himself - a coach frustrated with himself,
frustrated with his players. But he is there each day.
These are the Toilers – a team on the verge of much more than their second
victory.

16

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This is the story of South LA's unlikely Manual Arts High School lacrosse team. It follows the head coach, Sean McKeon, and his rag-tag team through a year of striving for a hard to find win.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Heimpel, Daniel (author)

Core Title The toilers

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 04/25/2007

Defense Date 05/11/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag LaCrosse,Manual Arts,OAI-PMH Harvest,South Central,south la

Place Name California (states), educational facilities: Manual Arts High School (geographic subject), Los Angeles (city or populated place), Los Angeles (counties), USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Gutierrez, Felix (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Cray, Edward (committee member)

Creator Email dheimpel@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m464

Unique identifier UC1282115

Identifier etd-Heimpel-20070425 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-493201 (legacy record id),usctheses-m464 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Heimpel-20070425.pdf

Dmrecord 493201

Document Type Thesis

Rights Heimpel, Daniel

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu