Series: Unleashing the Best from the Worst. Episode 1.

Hello, hello, Yusef-Andre Wiley coming at you. How are you doing, my great leaders? I love, love, love being able to converse with you about success, about how to build that perfect, uh, program, that perfect mindset. And you know, for now, as I said, I wanted to continue with this series of unleashing the best from the worst. And unleashing the best from the worst means essentially myself coming from a, a background of crime and being a former gang member and things like that. And I want to share a story, this story today, um, from 1982. Where were you in 1982? 1982, we talking about the era of our then President Carter and then President Reagan, I believe. I think it was Ronald Reagan was our president. Um, they used to have this thing called Reaganomics, right? I'm sure if you guys are really young, y'all don't know what I'm talking about, but we had the Reagan period. Then later, uh, we went into the Bush area, the, the Bush era, um, of having, uh, George Bush, uh, Herbert Bush. I think it was George Herbert Bush, where then our president, the public schools were being wiped out in terms of his programs, especially like his music programs, his arts programs were being demolished, uh, defunded, if you would. And which means, of course, for a young person like myself in school No more programs, nothing to keep me busy, nothing to keep me out of trouble, nothing to keep me off the streets, right? So one day I was at home with my nephew. I have a nephew, he's only like about 4 years younger than myself, uh, Tony. Yeah, Tony, he's like 4 years younger than me. And you know, we used to be goofing off around the house, uh, we spent a lot of time with each other growing up as kids because our ages were so close, you know. It's my cousin as well. I have my cousin Renard. We're all in the same age group, and Renard was maybe a year or so older than me. And typical day, I want to say it was the summer, or almost the summer, uh, school was just getting out, and we were horsing around in the front yard in my parents' home in the city of Los Angeles. And my father came home from work. He pulled up in the driveway in his blue truck, Ford truck, and he got out of the truck and noticed me and my nephew and my cousin playing football on the yard. We were literally rough playing. We wasn't playing tag and flag. We were literally tackling each other on the front yard playing football, you know, the rough kids in the hood, right? And he stopped and paused and watched us for a minute. He looked and seen us there playing football, and he looked at me and he said, so you act like you want to sign up for the football team. And I looked at him with you know, a little shocked that he was all right with me playing tackle football because I'm assuming that's what he was referring to. And I was like, yeah, Dad, I, I, you know, yeah, Daddy, I, you know, I wanna— I like football, I like football. And he said, okay, maybe I'll take you up to the park and see if I can get you signed up, um, to play football. So our park is really adjacent to my home, it's not far. I can actually hop my back fence of my parents' home and be in the park, literally be in the park. Elementary school on one side and our park on the other side. And so he kept his word. He actually, that day, that's later on that day, that afternoon, like maybe 4 or 5 o'clock, you know, we're talking about in the early 1980s, '82, '83, that era. And he took me over to the park, drove me over in his truck to the park. Had my nephew and my cousin with us. You know, we all in the back. See, back then you can actually jump in the back of a truck and not be pulled over by law enforcement. You know, that's illegal now to drive around, I guess, with, with people, especially kids, in the back of a pickup truck. But back in the day, man, look, we did it. You know, I don't know about other states, other countries, and— but you know, California, LA, we ride around in trucks and folks piled in the back, right? Um, so we went up to the park and, you know, my father don't know anything about gangs or gang activity, and that he's totally clueless at the time of this, this element that, that hangs, that lurks in the parks and that lurks in the neighborhoods there. That's not on my mind at the time either. I'm Thinking football now. My dad take me to play football and sign me up. He gets me signed up on the spot. Boom! My son want to play sports, send him over there, go sit on the bleachers right there. I go sit on the bleachers and here we go. I'm, you know, opportunity for my parent to keep me out of trouble, to get me involved in something. Outside of the classroom when school is out, deciding to take his son to this park and to sign me up for the football team. And by the way, we're talking about the sheriffs. This was a league that was owned and managed and ran by the LA County Sheriffs. It was called the LA Sheriff League, the Sheriff League, right? Who cares? Nobody cared about that back then. Uh, we're talking about the '80s. People didn't care. It said Sheriff, you know, we knew they were Sheriff. I didn't— I was clueless. I mean, I knew it said Sheriff, but I was there to play football, okay? And, um, signed up. I made the team. I'm playing for the LA Sheriff's, uh,, team, all right? Broncos. We were called the Broncos. Days go by, I'm going to practice regularly, showing up. Couple of days I would start showing up early because I want to prove to the team that I'm ready for this. I'm ready. I want to play. I want to be good at it. Some of the rules of the game I didn't all the way know because I was a young kid. It was like peewee or midget football. I think it was peewee, my age at the time, based on my age and my weight. And so I started going up to the park a little early. I would go up to the park a little early and jog, do my own jog. So I didn't wait for the coaches, the team captains, and folks like that to come up and encourage me or make us run a lap. I did it on my own. I was self-motivated to go up to the park and exercise and jog. As I'm jogging, you know, it's folks hanging out in the park. After I'm done jogging, I'm with my uniform, go pick up my uniform off the grass and head over to the area where we practice. And people see me in the park and they know me from growing up in the neighborhood. Hey, Andre! How you doing? You know, my legal name Andre, everybody know me as Yusef Wiley, but you know, my birth name, legal name is Andre. So I'm going by Andre and they call me over there. And as a kid, as a young kid, you know, making friends is something, is, is good. It's good, it's strong for a kid to have social, a social life. Our social life, however, in South Central Los Angeles is a little bit different. So when a kid in a park walks up to you and asks you, "What's up? How you doing? What you got going on? I see you on the team. What's going on? Hang out with us later. Hey, what you gonna be doing after practice?" type thing, all innocent in my eyes at the time. So I'm hanging out. I'm hanging out after practice, walking home with the fellas now. And actually a couple of the fellas was on the team just like I was. And you hear the exchange of, what's up, blood? Yeah, blood. You know, blood. And no harm, no foul. I'm not making a big deal out of it. It's not even moving me like that at the time. I'm just— it's normal. It's normal behavior, normal activity of young teenagers walking through the park on their way home saying, "What's up, Blood?" When in this world that we're in, we understand what that means. I mean, Blood is a gang. You're identifying with the red, with the Bloods. And now, as days go on and weeks go by on the team, and I turned out to be pretty good football player, mean on the field, tackling, you know, mean. I was mean. So guess what? That meanness that I displayed on the football field made people feel like, hmm, This dude right here, he probably can throw them things. He probably can, you know, he can, you know, that's the terminology. Throw them things was a code word, fight. No, he knows how to fight, you know how to throw them things, right? So now I'm after school, school is in, and I'm still involved in sports activity. After-school things are happening. Now I have a crowd. Now I have a group of individuals that I've met over the summer, over time, and we're spending time. We're going to the store, we're stopping at the ice cream trucks, and we're doing all the normal things that kids are doing, riding bikes. And but the problem is this, outside of that space of playing football, the idleness and the environment of neighborhoods, communities that have been targeted for, you know, crime, law enforcement surveillance, uh, poverty, all the things that makes up for a community that becomes a hood. That becomes gang-infested, that becomes crime-infested, because it was designed that way. It literally was designed to fail. Black and brown communities were designed to fail, and that's just how it was. And there was nothing to do outside of The Sheriff's Football. I'm sure there might have been some folks that were connected to that Sheriff League that did want peace in the community. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Maybe that meant more sheriffs on the street and more jobs for the sheriffs, having us acting a fool in the streets and becoming violent in the streets. Maybe that means more jobs, maybe that means an opportunity for them to hire more police to police our communities. Hmm. Right? But guess what? You know, I continued on my teenage years being involved a little bit with sports. But once problems start happening, once it meant, hey, this next stop that we have at a liquor store or at a, you know, to pick up, you know, sports gear or go outside of our— the bound— the borders, if you would, of our community into another community, etc., that might mean trouble because you're now in another neighborhood. Now you might be in a neighborhood that wears blue. It's not that far apart. A couple of main streets, you know, intersections or so over, it might be a totally different neighborhood, totally different group of kids and teenagers that's saying, "What's up, cuz?" that wear blue, that's not saying, "What's up, blood?" This is South Central LA, y'all. This is South Central. And the gunplay wasn't as bad back then in the early '80s, but there was fighting. Every now and then somebody gets shot, but there was a lot of fighting, a lot of, you know, there was some stabbing, there was some getting beat with bats and poles and things like that happening. And there were big brawls inside department stores and malls, uh, swap meets, uh, indoor swap meets, etc. These things were beginning to happen as we were growing up as young kids that probably had aspirations to be firemen, lawyers, doctors, if that was being encouraged in the public school system, uh, the arts and everything, if those programs wasn't canceled, right? Maybe we did want to do those things prior to, um, walking the communities and becoming thugs and becoming gang members, right? That's another story. That's another chapter. Us literally— the realization that we're becoming gang members. That's— think about that. There came a time where we started to realize, hey, this is becoming real. This is— we're becoming criminals. Um, we're becoming thugs. Homies, gang members, gangbangers. These— we're becoming this, you know. In my next episode, I want to talk about that. I want to talk about this whole realization that we're becoming more than just neighborhood friends. Peace out.