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POINT AFTER
No Free
Ride
An
old linemate reminded the author that there's a
'scholar' in football
scholarship
by Bruce
Anderson
Posted: Tue October 14, 1997
In 1971 Juan Chapa and I were starting defensive linemen for a
Hollister (Calif.) High freshman team that went 9-1. At 140
pounds and with no speed, I'm not sure what I was doing on
that line. What Juan was doing there was undoubtedly
covering my mistakes. He
was also taking the first steps on a journey that no one in
his family had ever
taken.
Juan's father, José, was a migrant farm worker who
had a starkly simple dream for his two sons. He wanted them
to have jobs like the guys at the auto parts store
had—they wore ties and kept their hands clean. José
looked at his own hands, weathered and
callused from work in the fields, and said to his sons,
"I don't want you to have hands like
this."
During the summers of his high school years Juan picked
cucumbers and tomatoes under the baking California sun.
Beginning in late August, while everyone else in his family
continued to work in the fields, Juan and José Jr.,
who was two years younger,
went off to practice for the upcoming football season. Juan
loved the contact, the camaraderie, the victories. He
enjoyed the bright lights, but he was never blinded by
them. Though he had trouble putting on weight, Juan kept
improving and, at 175 pounds,
was named an all-conference lineman in his junior and senior
years.
After high school graduation Juan became a cop in
Hollister. He was the rookie officer of the year for San
Benito and Santa Clara counties in 1976, but Juan was not
satisfied. He wanted
to complete his education, and he was tiring of the drunks and
petty crooks who took up much of his time on the beat. To
escape, he shouldered a full academic load at Gavilan
Junior College, played defensive end for the school
and worked the graveyard shift at the police department. After
Juan's sophomore season the University of the Pacific
offered him a football scholarship. "To me, this was
unbelievable," Juan says, his eyes still lit with
amazement.
Such appreciation for a free education isn't often apparent
among today's athletes. College football players rarely
speak of "athletic scholarships," imbued as that
phrase is with suggestions of classrooms, libraries and
learning. Instead, they speak of
"rides," a word that is loaded with associations
of coasting and of letting someone else move them along.
Nowadays a little more than half the football players who
receive rides ever
graduate.
Juan was an exception. He started at linebacker for the
Tigers, earned a B.A. with a major in sociology and a minor
in
business,
and graduated a semester early. When Pacific played at
Arizona State in 1980, José Sr. was at Sun Devil
Stadium to watch his first football game. Juan made it a
memorable one: Though the Tigers lost 37-9, he had 10
tackles, seven of them unassisted.
José proudly watched his son and then headed back to California
to finish the tomato
harvest.
Upon graduating, Juan landed a job, but it wasn't working
for Manny, Moe and Jack. He became a salesman for Xerox,
which gave him an expense account and a vehicle allowance.
"My dad thought I had died and gone to heaven,"
Juan says.
After losing touch with Juan, I bumped into him about eight
years
ago. He was working in marketing and sales for Cypress
Semiconductor, a chip manufacturer. He said that his dream
was to start his own firm, an even bolder dream than the
one his dad had had for him. The next time I saw Juan, at a
class reunion in 1995,
his first words
were, "I did it. I started my own business."
Nearly five years ago,
Juan and a partner founded
ZeusTec, a manufacturers' representative for Silicon Valley firms.
They expect to exceed
$50 million in sales this
year.
Juan represents the ideal of the scholarship athlete, the
real reason such grants ought to be given. He was a bright,
hardworking student who didn't have the financial
wherewithal to attend college but who found in football a
key to open the door to
higher education and then capitalized on that
opportunity.
Juan never played in the NFL, never played on national TV.
His alma mater no longer even fields a football team. Yet
he is a walking advertisement for the potential, too often
unrealized, of college football. He says his dream for his
own four
children—John, 17; Michael, 11; Rachel, 7; and Alexandra, 4—is to
support them in whatever pursuits they choose. Almost
needlessly Juan Chapa adds, "We're stressing their
education."
Bruce Anderson is a freelance writer living in San
Francisco.
Issue date: October 20, 1997
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