Rescued By The Game

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF ROBERTO BERGERSEN'S YOUNG LIFE SEEMED TO DICTATE THAT HE SHOULD FIND ANYTHING BUT SUCCESS. HOWEVER, THE DECATUR HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL STAR'S DETERMINATION HAS HELPED HIM PERSEVERE AND PREVAIL IN SPITE OF AN UNSTABLE FAMILY SITUATION.

FEDERAL WAY - Failure beckoned Roberto Clemente Bergersen from various corners of his life.

Drugs, alcohol, gangs, flunking out of school. Those might have been the obvious choices for Bergersen while growing up in South Tacoma. Surrounded by such temptations, he had the excuses.

But a tattered childhood was precariously held together by a strong, loving grandmother and his athletic promise was kept on track by a coach.

Bergersen had watched friends and family members get sucked into the dark hole of alcohol and drugs. His mother, Ruth Hayes, battled addiction for years and the two endured her recent relapse together. His older brother has gone through treatment, too. Help didn't come soon enough for an addicted uncle, who was shot and killed in January.

"Drugs and alcohol have been around my family and I've seen what they can do," the Decatur High senior said. "Failure was all around my family. I just don't want to be like that. I want to be my own person and learn from their mistakes."

He chose basketball.

"That was my escape from everything," Bergersen said. "Whenever anything went wrong, I'd just go somewhere and play and play and play. Maybe that's why I got better."

Good enough to earn a scholarship from the University of Washington and make fourth-ranked Decatur (21-3) a threat to win the state Class AAA tournament this week.

Bergersen, a 6-foot-6 senior who averages 26 points and 10 rebounds per game, is driven to make something of himself, on and off the basketball court, something his young cousins can look up to.

"I can be the person out of our family who can be a success story," he said, "even if just one person can learn from what I did."

From the beginning, it was clear Bergersen's story would not have a fairy-tale plot. His mother lost most of her hearing as a young child. Later, she found herself in a string of troubled relationships. She gave birth to her first son when she was 15 and a daughter three years later.

Then came Jack Bergersen, who was considered one of the area's best basketball players when he was at Roosevelt High School in the 1960s. He was recruited by Division I schools, but his grades weren't as good as his game and he wound up at Shoreline Community College. He transferred to Washington State three years later, but his dream of playing professionally died when he injured his left knee at midseason.

Jack Bergersen and Ruth Hayes never married, but had a son together. Jack named him after Roberto Clemente, his favorite baseball player. The five of them made a home in Ellensburg, where Jack hoped to make a comeback at Central Washington University. But the knee didn't heal properly and within a couple years the relationship weakened, too.

When Roberto was 4, his mother became involved with another man. One day, she dropped the three kids at her mother's house. The boyfriend beat her and Ruth was too embarrassed to face her mother and stepfather or to see her kids. She decided to wait a day to pick them up. Then another day. The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months.

Roberto remembers wondering when his mother would come back, certain it would be tomorrow. It wound up being 10 years.

Jack had been a "weekend father" and considered taking custody of Roberto when Ruth could no longer handle the responsibility. But he decided Roberto's grandparents, Bernice and Charles Morehead, could offer him far more. A few years later, Jack began to suffer serious bouts of depression, often becoming house-bound. At times, Roberto saw him only once or twice a year.

"He always begged me to teach him to play basketball," Jack recalled. "I took him to some gyms just to get the smell in his nostrils, to keep him from playing in the streets. I told him I'd teach him how to play basketball when he was 13. We used to meet at the South Tacoma Boys Club and play one on one."

Breaking free of drugs and alcohol, Ruth reclaimed her children the summer before Roberto's freshman year at Lincoln High.

Roberto excelled in basketball, but when he finished with a 1.6 (D-plus) grade-point average for the year, his mother decided they needed a different environment. She chose Federal Way and, upon the recommendation of Lincoln Coach John McCrossin, moved into the Decatur service area. Ed Boyce, now Decatur's head coach, was McCrossin's assistant coach at Fife for three years.

Depression took a stronger grip on Jack. He rarely left home, but followed Roberto's career through newspaper reports until even that became too depressing.

"Every time I saw his name, it was just like a constant reminder of all the plans I had and everything I wanted to do with him in contrast to what happened," Jack said.

The day after Roberto's 18th birthday, Jack came to watch his son play for the first time in more than three years.

Roberto was thrilled - so excited, in fact, that Boyce had to sit him down in the first quarter and tell him to relax.

"I was kind of nervous at first, playing in front of my dad," Roberto said. "I know he was good and his expectations would be high."

They were. Jack, 45, still says Roberto's game needs work and constantly tells him that his 1965 and '66 Roosevelt teams could beat Decatur. Jack and the Roughriders reached the AAA championship game in 1965, losing to Davis of Yakima.

Jack hasn't missed a Decatur game since, although he generally stands or sits next to an exit. He isn't sure he'll be able to deal with the crowds at the Coliseum this week.

"I might go up in the rafters and get a bird's-eye view," he said. "My presence might be of some kind of value to him."

What Jack would really like to do, he said, is wisk Roberto away from all the pressures. "I'd take him in the hills to see eagles fly and fish in the streams and just get him to relax," he said.

Relax? Roberto? The two don't seem to go together. On the court, Roberto is constantly rubbing his hands through his hair and across the bottoms of his shoes, or tugging at his shorts.

Bergersen began his sophomore year at Decatur with the junior varsity, but was a key varsity player off the bench by the end of the regular season. Just before the district tournament, the Gators lost star Michael Dickerson to an injury and Jovan Holins to chicken pox. Bergersen led the Gators to their first state tournament, where he averaged 13 points in three games. More importantly, he finished the year with a 3.1 grade-point average.

Dickerson transferred to rival Federal Way, but he and Bergersen remain good friends. Dickerson was more heavily recruited last fall, ultimately signing with the University of Arizona.

Going into his junior year, Bergersen was on nearly every recruiter's players-to-watch list. Then inconsistency struck. He tried to do too much and wound up doing less. The Gators made it back to state, but Bergersen didn't play well, and again they went home 1-2.

Suddenly, Bergersen was crossed off a lot of Division I lists. He faced another opportunity to fail. Instead, he spent hours in the gym and weight room. He went to a shootout in Los Angeles and the phone started ringing again. He narrowed his choices to Boston College, Santa Clara and Washington. Bergersen thought he'd like to play away from home, until he thought about his mother.

"I couldn't leave her," he said.

The two are closer than ever since living through Ruth's recent relapse and renewed battle against addiction.

"I just had to keep on going," he said. "It made me stronger. I knew I had to do a little bit more for myself to make her proud."

Two days before Roberto's 18th birthday, Ruth decided she had to get help again. She fixed Roberto a birthday dinner, and the next day checked in for treatment. A month later, her youngest brother was shot and killed. The tragedy pulled the family pulled closer, she and her mother said.

Roberto continues to endure, often keeping his feelings to himself.

"I don't want to have excuses for anything I do," he said. "I just try to fight through everything that happens. I won't give up."Bernice Morehead and Roberto continue to have long talks regularly. She especially remembers one from that occurred two years ago.

"We were sitting out on the front porch and he said, `Grandma, I just need to tell you something. When we lived with you, I thought you were so hard on us, not letting us go do things or go to parties, but if it hadn't been for you and poppa (grandpa), I would probably either be in a gang or dead,' " said Morehead.

Said Boyce, "One of the reasons I've always felt there was something very special about Bert is because nine out of every 10 young people faced with the adversity he's been faced with would have turned to something else, or would have thrown their hands up in the air and said, `What's the use?' and basically given up. Because he hadn't done that with all he's been through was one of the things that led me to believe he's pretty unique."