Tough love translates to success for Crenshaw football Coach Robert Garrett

It was the summer of 2002 and Lonnie Neal Jr. had come home after spending time at college. He was working on his car when a stranger walked up and shot him, point-blank, nine times. The gunman, who ran off, had mistaken him for someone else.

Bleeding and dazed, Neal pulled up his shirt to survey the holes in his chest. Then everything went dark.

“I could see my own body lying on the ground,” he recalls. “My life flashed before my eyes.”

Just when the end seemed near, a gruff voice echoed through his head, a memory bubbling up.

“C’mon, Lonnie.”

The words kept him from slipping away. It was the growl of his high school football coach.

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Not that he means to be uncooperative, but the coach would rather not see a story about himself in the newspaper.

“There’s nothing to write,” he says. “Nothing special about me.”

Robert Garrett is built round as a bowling ball; he is wearing a bright blue T-shirt and shorts in the chill of evening, a cap tugged down over puffs of black hair. Aviator sunglasses conceal his eyes.

“I’ve just got a job to do,” he says. “We’ve all got to work somewhere.”

For the last two decades, Garrett has worked at transforming Crenshaw High from a downtrodden team into a powerhouse that will try for its second consecutive Los Angeles City Section championship against Carson on Saturday afternoon.

The program has produced dozens of big-time college players and a few — such as Brian Price and the Gbaja-Biamila brothers — who have reached the NFL. But for all his success, Garrett remains a controversial figure.

His temper is the stuff of folklore. He can go from smiling to furious in seconds flat, his wrath directed at players and officials, even parents. So, depending on whom you ask around Crenshaw, the man is either a godsend or a cancer.

Tilting his head at a skeptical angle, peering over the top of those sunglasses, Garrett dismisses the commotion that whirls around him. He pulls out that Jack Nicholson line from “A Few Good Men.”

“You want the truth?” he asks. “You can’t handle the truth.”

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Crenshaw was known as a basketball school when Garrett became coach in 1988. It took a while to build up the football team and, in the process, good players kept transferring to schools on the Westside or in the San Fernando Valley.

That is what happened before the 1996 season, when a star running back left.

Garrett summoned the remainder of his squad onto the field. All these years later, former defensive end Akbar Gbaja-Biamila recalls the moment clearly.

The coach said: “I only need 11 good men to follow me.”

Then he walked to the opposite end zone, yelling for his players to meet him there.

“If you guys are with me,” he said, “you’ve got to follow.”

This dance continued for half an hour, Garrett shifting from one spot to another, the team moving in his footsteps. It might sound corny, but the message stuck.

“He was challenging us,” says Gbaja-Biamila, now an analyst for CBS College Sports Network. “That’s what he does.”

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The Crenshaw players know when they have made a mistake.

“That loud voice,” says De’Anthony Thomas, the star tailback this season. “You’ll hear him from miles away.”

Garrett refuses to tell his age. If his style — blunt and in your face — seems outdated, he does not care to discuss that either.

“I guess you do what your upbringings were,” he says. “In my era, they were hard on us.”

Winning helps. Crenshaw began to turn itself around with a championship in 1991 and a near miss three years later. Over the last seven seasons, the Cougars have gone 70-22 with two titles and now a shot at a third.

Each successful season persuaded more and more local kids to hang around. Yet when players talk about Garrett — about their devotion to him — they don’t just talk about football.

Their coach, who also teaches physical education, helps them with schoolwork and always seems to have a sandwich for anyone who shows up hungry before practice.

“I try to find personal things about each child,” Garrett says, slipping into a preacher’s cadence, which he is wont to do. “Mama’s name, daddy’s name, where they live, who they hang out with, what they’re doin’ and why they’re doin’ it.”

Chuck Price, an NFL agent whose father coached at Crenshaw through the early 1980s, recalls visiting Garrett recently because two of his clients wanted to stage a football camp at the school. When a player burst into the office and shouted out a question, Garrett sat the teenager down to lecture him gently, but at length, on being more respectful.

“Honestly,” Price says, “how many coaches take the time to do that?”

Brian Price, who plays defensive tackle for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and is not related to Chuck, puts it another way.

“Coach gives tough love,” he says. “But it’s good love.”

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By the spring of 2009, Jabari Ali could no longer contain his anger.

A player for Crenshaw in the 1980s, Ali had stayed connected with his alma mater, working briefly on Garrett’s staff, then becoming active with a parent booster group.

He and others eventually grew disenchanted with the coach. They started a campaign to have him fired.

In a letter to administrators, Ali called Garrett an “ill-mannered, self center [sic] human being” who was too rough on players and too rude to just about everyone else.

“His intolerable performance has caused alumni and members of the community to no longer support the boys’ football program,” Ali wrote.

It is not unusual for parents and alumni to complain about a coach, says Carrie Allen, the principal at Crenshaw. She spoke with the parties involved and saw no need for further action.

Still, she knows, her coach can occasionally “ruffle some feathers.”

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Prowling the sideline during last Friday’s playoff victory over Venice High, Garrett shouts at an officiating crew he thinks is treating his team unfairly. At halftime, he charges onto the field, cornering the referee, until his assistants gently tug him away.

“When I see officials who are not being professional out there,” he says, “that burns me up.”

Crenshaw is leading by three touchdowns at the time.

“The way he acts is embarrassing,” says Craig Hart, a former president of the booster group who joined Ali in complaining to administrators. “If I can hear it in the stands, come on.”

Detractors continue to insist that Garrett sets a poor example for his team and they do not like that he closes practice to parents and alumni. They bristle at tales of him chasing away college recruiters who come to assess Crenshaw players.

The coach explains that he cannot check on every outsider who shows up at practice so it’s better to keep the gates shut. He says he has clashed with recruiters because he suspects some colleges discriminate against Crenshaw. While top players such as Thomas and receiver Marquis Thompson attract interest, he believes that lesser athletes — who might otherwise receive offers if they were on a suburban team — get passed over.

“I don’t want them to give my kids false hope,” he says. “Do you know these colleges send kids letters every day? The kids hang them on the wall and the parents show them off. They don’t know the process — college recruiting is a dirty, nasty job.”

Not that Garrett’s screening process has soured relations with everyone.

“You just have to get through all that,” says Ed Orgeron of USC. “Once you know him, he’s good as gold.”

Still, Ali, Hart and others worry that Garrett’s behavior might cost some players a shot at a free education.

“We’ve heard some recruiters won’t touch Crenshaw,” Ali says. “There’s no way our babies will get the offers from them.”

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Lonnie Neal Jr. has another story — this one from the mid-1990s when he played receiver and cornerback at Crenshaw.

Neal was living with his grandmother and getting in trouble too often. One night, Garrett invited him to meet his wife and six children.

“He took me to his home and I saw how he treated women,” Neal recalls. “He talked to me about my grandmother and how I was giving her a hard time.”

It took several years for the lesson to sink in. Only after he was shot — one bullet struck a lung, the others missed his vital organs — did Neal finally understand what Garrett was saying. He pulled his life together and now publishes a hip-hop entertainment magazine, Phressh Buzz, and coaches at a middle school.

“I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve had people say, ‘I don’t like that guy,’ ” Neal says of his former coach, to whom he still talks regularly. “But how many times has he changed kids like me who were on the road to destruction?”

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A tough childhood might have something to do with the way Garrett runs his team.

His mother moved to Los Angeles from the rural South, rearing eight boys and a girl by herself. She didn’t have much education and had to work several jobs to keep the family afloat.

“Coming up,” Garrett says, “I had to fend for myself.”

After graduating from Jefferson High, he made it through a teacher’s college in Nebraska. Later, he earned graduate degrees in physical education and administration from Azusa Pacific.

Coaches who have worked on his staff — respected assistants such as Eric Scott and Ted Baker — say that more than anything, Garrett is determined to shield his players from the dangers he sees all around.

“I’m not saying that he is easy to deal with,” Baker says. “But you really have to be a tough person to be the alpha person in that environment.”

If the coach has doubts — “I’m flesh and blood,” Garrett says. “I’ve made a lot of errors” — they tend to pass quickly. No criticism from parents, alumni or the media will deter him.

“I don’t know any other way to do it,” he says. “So I’m not going to hold back any punches.”

That blunt demeanor and gruff voice have a way of sticking in a player’s head. Just ask Neal.

“You go home from practice,” he says, “and you’ve learned something.”

Something that might come back to a young man years later. Might alter the way he thinks. Might even save him.

david.wharton@latimes.com

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