For Many, It’s Tough to Escape : Rams’ Aaron Cox Did, Blessed With Speed and Determination

Aaron Cox would never concede that athletics are the best way to escape the streets of South Central Los Angeles.

Professional sport, he maintains, is more often a false god that teases and tempts, ultimately disappointing the kids near home on 36th Place and Normandie Avenue, a corner familiar to mobile gang task force units outside the Coliseum.

Mr. Cox’s neighborhood is on fire, his playground engaged in and enraged by virtual warfare.

Cox escaped the scene with soft hands and 4.39-second speed in the 40-yard dash. He’s a wide receiver who rose at warp speed from Dorsey High School to Arizona State to the Rams of the National Football League.

Cox, though, still hasn’t come to grips with sentences that include his name, the Rams and the words first-round draft choice. To him, they’re basically the same Rams--with a different zip code--that filled the Sunday voids of his youth in Exposition Park.

There were nervous moments, only weeks ago, when Cox first made the rounds at Rams Park and was introduced to such luminaries as Lawrence McCutcheon and Cullen Bryant.

“I had met them before,” Cox said. “But the last time, I was trying to get autographs.”

Soon it will be kids in parking lots chasing down Cox who, with Ron Brown fast out of town, will most likely find himself in the starting lineup come September.

His dream, blissfully as it turned out for Cox, was no different from those of a thousand others in his neighborhood. Few, though, had this kind of ending.

“If I wasn’t involved in sports, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now,” he said. “But it’s tough. If a kid can get involved in sports and keep at it. . . . But the thing about a lot of kids is, if they’re not good at it, they give up. I didn’t give, I just kept trying and got better and better.

“If a kid can keep at it, and not be persuaded. . . . But these days, it’s easy to be persuaded with the drugs and everything. If they can survive that, they can do OK.”

Weekends at the Coliseum with the Rams were rituals for Cox and friends, as were the weekdays when they clamored at the feet of then-Trojan coach John Robinson as he opened another day of practice.

“There were always kids running around,” Robinson said. “And every one of those kids said he was going to play for me.”

Robinson didn’t know that Aaron Cox was serious.

Cox knew. He was special.

“I was basically blessed,” he said.

He also was lucky. The Crips and Bloods stayed away from Cox, for reasons he is not quite sure of.

“I never had the desire to hang with gangs,” he said. “I was always doing something in sports, and even when I got bored or frustrated with it, I didn’t turn to anything else. I kept trying and kept getting better at it. As I got a little older I started hanging out at USC. I wanted to be like those guys. I wanted to be around athletes.”

Cox said he kept a close eye on gang members and they watched him.

“I don’t know if they respected that I was an athlete and was doing something that they couldn’t do,” Cox said. “Maybe they didn’t want to mess with athletes because they knew that we’d fight back, we wouldn’t let them push us around.”

Cox does remember a constant presence, though, and knows why he always carried his football helmet in his right hand as he made his way home from practice at night.

“I always carried it when they were standing there, just in case,” he said. “Because you never knew whether they were going to run at you and try to take your money or whatever. Now, I look back on it and all the situations that could have been. But growing up, you really didn’t think about it. I was just a kid, just having fun. I wasn’t thinking about how dangerous it was.”

He knows now. Cox has been away from home for five years, sharpening his skills as a wide receiver for Arizona State. The UCLA Bruins, he said, didn’t recruit him. The Trojans did, but Cox chose the more pass-oriented offense in Tempe.

In Cox’s time away from home, he watched from afar a gang scene escalate from bad to worse, with more innocents being caught in the cross-fire of a gang situation out of control.

Home now, presumably for good, Cox wonders what can be done. He said he can detect gang tendencies at age 11.

“A lot of kids start drifting a certain way to let you know,” Cox said. “If I’m walking down the street and see a kid dressed in baggy pants or just wearing certain colors or dressed a certain way or wearing his hair a certain way, then I can probably say that guy is going to be in a gang, But if I see a kid walking with track shoes on or a workout outfit, he’s probably going to be an athlete. I can tell that early.”

Cox also wonders about his being as a role model, and whether it’s right for him to offer false hope through athletics.

It was Cox’s way out, but not everyone has the talent of Aaron Cox. What then? Cox has no real answers.

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” he said of the gang situation. “I’ve thought about having them put in jail but I don’t know if that’s going to help or if that’s going to make them worse. I don’t know whether you get them involved in sports. Some kids just aren’t as good as others and they get frustrated because kids laugh at them. They’ll quit and go do something else.

“I think what it is is that a lot of kids come from poor families and there’s the money factor. They try to find a quick way to make money, so they can have nice clothes and do nice things.”

But for Cox and some others, sport at least provided another avenue to follow, one that was better than some alternatives.

The youngest of nine children, Cox gives much of the credit to his mother, Betty Gordon, who steered him along a difficult path, in spite of the odds.

“I always encouraged him,” Gordon said of Cox’s football career. “That’s what he really wanted to do. But I also encouraged him with education. I always stressed education. I’ve always been in his corner. Seldom do we dream and they come true. This is a dream come true for him. He told me his dream was to go to the Rose Bowl. I didn’t know this until a short time ago. He also wanted to play for the Rams.”

As a junior, Cox had 6 catches for 104 yards in the Sun Devils’ 22-15 Rose Bowl win over Michigan.

On April 24, 1988, the Rams used the 20th pick in the first round to draft Cox. At 5 feet 9 inches and 175 pounds, Cox is lacking the size of the so-called big three in this year’s draft: Notre Dame’s Tim Brown, Miami’s Michael Irvin and South Carolina’s Sterling Sharpe. But on receiving skills, Cox ranks with the best.

“Cox is a little bit small,” Robinson said. “But he will be as ready to play as any of those guys. If you said, ‘Who’s the player who’s going to come in and play right now?’ Cox would be right there.”

The last time Robinson told Cox he was too small, about 10 years ago at an USC practice, he really was.

Before he had met Robinson, though, Cox was inspired by older brother Lorenzo, who ran track and collected trophies at Manual Arts High School.

“I think his track running had a lot do do with me starting in sports,” Cox said. “He was always bringing trophies and medals home. When I asked him if I could have one of his trophies, he told me to go out and get my own.”

Cox, of course, did better than that.

Ram Notes

The Rams will open a 3-day minicamp for offensive players today. All 14 draft selections, including first-round choices Gaston Green and Aaron Cox, will be in attendance. . . . Also making his first Ram appearance will be veteran tight end Pete Holohan, acquired from the San Diego Chargers on draft day. Also expected are several unsigned veteran free agents, including tackle Jackie Slater, linebacker Kevin Greene and running back Tim Tyrrell.

Cornerback LeRoy Irvin, who has been told by Coach John Robinson that he would not be welcomed back to the team unless he undergoes an attitude transformation, was working out at Rams Park Monday. Could this be the start of something big? . . . The team will be on the field from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Mini-camp concludes Thursday.