Fortress of Fortitude : Robert Webb Defends Hard-Fought Gains on Field--and in His Stormy Life

Nobody expected Robert Webb to be where he is now. He would be somewhere on the streets, they predicted, as he was when he was 6. Or maybe he would be selling drugs, or sitting in jail, as he was when he was 14.

He wasn’t supposed to graduate from high school, they thought. He wasn’t supposed to go to college. He wasn’t supposed to end up living with a nice family in a two-story house with a spiked fence and a two-car garage and a bed of flowers in the front yard.

He was the kid with the temper and the attitude, the fiery troublemaker who burned his way through almost a dozen foster homes or boys’ homes. But of all the places he lived--from Northridge and Newhall to Chatsworth and Hollywood--there was one home to which Webb always returned: the football field.

Football anchored his turbulent life, and Webb grew to be one of Chatsworth High’s most talented linebackers--a ferocious, hard-hitting terror. He was named All-West Valley League his junior season, and his senior year he added All-City Section 3-A Division honors. He was selected as one of two Chatsworth athletes to play in the 14th Daily News All-Star football game scheduled for 6:30 p.m. today at Birmingham High.

A severely sprained ankle suffered during the first day of all-star practice might keep Webb from joining the West team on the field. His status is day-to-day.

Webb, 18, will play football at either Moorpark or Valley junior college this fall, where he hopes to boost his grades enough to earn a scholarship to an NCAA Division I school. He expects to decide between the schools by Saturday.

The 6-foot-3, 230-pound linebacker attracted attention from Division I recruiters last fall, but his academics were a concern. An athlete must pass two years of a foreign language to be eligible for a Division I scholarship, but Webb had taken only one year. Additionally, his SAT score of 690 fell short of the 700 minimum requirement.

“It may be better for me to go to a junior college and get my grades up and play a little bit more ball and then transfer to a Division I college,” Webb said.

“All the time I hear people saying, ‘Webb, you’re going to make it.’ They keep saying, ‘You’re going to make it. You’re going to go to a Division I college, you’re going to make a big name for yourself and, hopefully, go to the NFL.’ That’s a dream of mine.”

Webb grew up on the streets with his younger brother Timmy and their alcoholic parents. They didn’t have a home, so they lived in their car. His older brother Danny had been taken away by their grandmother when their father had gone bankrupt a year before.

Webb would steal from supermarkets to help his family when there wasn’t any money for food. While his father would go in and steal beer, Webb would grab steaks, hamburger meat and chicken. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would take candy and baseball cards for himself.

“Day by day we didn’t know where we were going to stay,” Webb said. “We stayed in Lanark Park (in Canoga Park) for a few months ‘cause my dad knew some wino over there. We used to sleep in Reseda Park, and we slept out in front of houses. Wherever my dad would end up drunk behind the wheel, that’s where we’d stay.

“My father would sometimes sleep on the roof of the van if it was summer and it was hot. But mostly, me and my brother slept on the floor. Wherever we could put a head down, we slept.”

Webb often came to his first-grade class tired, unbathed and poorly dressed. He finally told teachers he was living in his father’s van behind a convalescent home. Social service workers took him and his brother away the next day.

He began bouncing around different homes--sometimes with a foster family, sometimes with an aunt or uncle, other times in a boys’ home. Some of his foster parents treated him well. Others treated him badly. Many of them couldn’t handle Webb and his combative attitude--a front to disguise the scared, lonely boy inside.

“I was always saying to myself, ‘Why can’t I have normal parents like everyone else? Why am I always moving around? Why does this gotta happen to me?’ ” Webb said.

Webb started playing football when he was 6, and Oscar Swinton, a youth football coach in West Hills, met Webb when he was 10. When Webb was having problems with foster parents, Swinton took him into his home with his wife and three sons.

“He was aggressive, disagreeable and really angry at the world,” Swinton said. “He was angry and hard to deal with. And he didn’t have a lot of self-confidence.”

Living with the Swintons was good for Webb. There were occasional discipline problems, but Webb idolized Rich and Jamal, former Montclair Prep standouts who earned football scholarships to Washington State and Colgate, respectively. Webb and Eliel--who will play at Stanford in the fall--played fullback and tailback together on the Chatsworth Chiefs youth team that Swinton coached.

“The Swintons were role models for me because they were all great athletes,” Webb said. “They all went to big colleges and I guess I felt like the other brother--the other brother that wanted to go somewhere and be just as great as athletes as they are.”

Webb lived with Swinton during seventh and eighth grade before returning to a boys’ home, but it wasn’t long before he found himself in juvenile hall. Webb got into a fight with another boy, and when an administrator tried to break it up Webb hit him, too. The administrator pressed charges and Webb, only 14, spent a month and a half in jail.

“It hurt me a lot because I didn’t have to be in there as long as I was,” Webb said softly. “I was in there because no one wanted me. No one wanted to take care of me. No one wanted me in a boys’ home. No one wanted me in my family. No one wanted me.”

He tried to tell administrators he didn’t belong in jail with the other boys--who were in for murder, robbery and drugs--but nobody listened.

“They’d go, ‘Yeah, sure, you’ll be back, you’ll be back,’ “he said. “I never did go back. I’m not going back there ‘cause I didn’t like it.”

But he nearly did go back. At 17, Webb was charged with assault and battery against another Chatsworth student. He avoided jail time by serving 48 hours of community service.

“That was three years after (the incident at the boys’ home), so I figured I was improving,” he said. “I used to get into fights every day when I was 14 and younger. And now I got into only one when I was 17 and I haven’t gotten in any since. So I think I’ve been improving and handling my attitude.”

Those incidents helped Webb to realize that all of the people who had been trying to help him over the years--social workers, foster parents and the Swintons--were right.

“They kept telling me (not to fight), but it would go in one ear and out the other,” he said. “And now I have to start listening to them and”. . . covering his ears with his hands . . . “trying to keep it in. I wouldn’t listen to what they said before, but they were right. I ended up going to jail and getting in trouble and (I was) shipped from home to home.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to (get in trouble) any more. I’m going to try and control my temper. I’m going to ask others for help.’ ”

Aid has come from Clarke and Carolyn Wright, the foster parents in Canoga Park with whom Webb has been living since 10th grade. Wright, a film distributor, met Webb through a San Fernando Valley youth-football program. Webb started spending his weekends with the Wrights, doing “family things” such as going to movies or for ice cream, and a friendship developed.

Seven years later, Webb was having problems with an aunt he was living with. The Wrights, who had talked about it years earlier, decided the time was right for Webb to move in.

“He wanted to accomplish a lot of things,” Clarke Wright, 45, said. “He wanted to get an education, go on in school and pursue sports, and do the best he could at everything. But he didn’t have a lot of purpose and he didn’t have good roots.”

Moving in with the Wrights started Webb in the right direction.

“I love this foster home the best,” Webb said. “Clarke is real religious and he tries to teach me right from wrong without yelling at me. I’ve only been grounded once since I’ve been here. I don’t cuss around the house, I don’t yell at anybody, and I’m always in on curfew. They’ve given me a lot of responsibilities that I never had before.”

He sees his brother Danny, 19, every three or four months, but there have been times when he hasn’t seen Timmy, 17, for as much as three years. His mother, he said, is somewhere in Florida, and he hasn’t seen her in eight years. He last saw his father three years ago, but he remembers his father’s words as if they were spoken yesterday.

“He always said, ‘It’s your fault, Robert. It’s your fault that you got taken away. You’re the one that went to the school and told them that we lived in the streets. If it wasn’t for you, you’d be living with me now.’

“And I’m glad I said something (in the first grade), because if I didn’t . . . who knows. I could be selling drugs on the street and being alcoholic like him. I’m glad I got the chance to live in this home and other homes--to experience life and really know what parenting and growing up is.”

Webb leaves no doubt his rough-and-tumble upbringing has shaped him into the kind of football player he is today. His reputation for hard hitting is as well known as his reputation for clashing with coaches. He’s rough, sometimes too rough, and he has been pulled from the field on more than one occasion.

“If I grew up in a normal childhood life, I don’t think I’d be this kind of athlete,” Webb said. “The attitude I always had was, if I can’t hit somebody legally on the streets, I’m going to do it on the field.”

Oscar Swinton, who worked hard to discipline Webb when he lived with him, encouraged him to develop that attitude.

“I told him, ‘If you’re mad at the world, save it for the field, and take it out there,’ ” Swinton said. “That’s where he can discipline himself. He’s a terror on the field trying to take people’s heads off. He never takes it easy. He’s got to hit them hard.”

Webb acknowledges, “I like giving pain, and I don’t know why. I don’t like seeing people lying with broken legs or anything like that, but I’ve put a couple of people in the hospital. It’s a good feeling inside when you hit someone and you hear that pop.”

Football was an acceptable outlet for Webb’s pent-up anger, but it was also the reason he stayed in school.

“When I was in high school I went to school to play football,” Webb said. “I didn’t really go to school to get A’s and B’s and do real good in anything. I just wanted to play football.

“(Last fall) I was being recruited by some colleges and my grades weren’t so good and it made me wake up and realize, ‘You gotta study, school is important.’

“I’m willing to do the work if I knew how to do it. It’s like, ‘Can someone hear me? Help me out! You know I’m complaining here, help me out!’ But I’m afraid to ask for help. I don’t want anyone to think I’m stupid.”

Swinton and Wright both encouraged Webb to go to college.

“I think it says a lot for Robert that he grabbed that goal (to go to college) and hung on to it,” Oscar Swinton said. “I kept telling him, ‘You can be whatever you want to be, you can do whatever you want to do.’ It was a good start (when he lived with me), and Clarke is finishing him off.”

Now that he has graduated, Webb will be moving out of the Wrights’ foster home and finding his own apartment near the school he decides to attend.

“He’s a lot more focused now, and he’s stepping out into the world on his own,” Wright said. “But I don’t think he realizes the scope of what is involved--even things like replacing the toilet paper--with living on his own. It’s one thing to say it, but it’s another thing to go out there and do it.”

Said Swinton, “(Webb) is a success story right now, although there is still more work to do. He’s graduated from high school--the only one in his family--and he’s going to college. Most people expected him to be in jail by now.”

But Webb is determined to focus on football and his education.

“I want to succeed,” Webb said. “I don’t want to fail out of junior college. That’s probably a good reason why I didn’t go to a Division I college--’cause I don’t want to flunk out. I want to be smart.

“I may not be too good in books, but I know that I want too much to live on the streets. I don’t want to be an alcoholic. I don’t want to be dirty. I want to be a respected, well-off man. I want to be middle class.”

He clenched both fists and took a deep breath and repeated himself.

“I just don’t want to go back to where I was before,” he said. “I got too much (going) for myself to go back to that.”