Soul Survivor

The trip from New Mexico takes seven hours of driving, flying, then more driving. She comes every other week to watch a young and struggling USC basketball team.

“Her?” an usher at the Sports Arena asks. “That woman is in her own world.”

Diane Taylor stands just under five feet tall. She is middle-aged and suitably dressed, a gold cross hanging from a gold chain around her neck. She always sits behind the bench and everyone knows her by the odd-looking stick she carries.

The size of a cane, it is covered with bells and bangles, and there is a cymbal attached on top. It is the kind of contraption a fan might rattle after dunks and three-point baskets.

“My boombah,” she calls it. And once the game begins, Taylor pounds that stick.

She pounds it on the floor, hard enough to startle people sitting nearby. She pounds it for reasons that have little to do with basketball.

People wonder about that woman.

His voice settles between a whisper and a growl, his eyes half-lidded, as he tells his story. Elias Ayuso starts long ago, long before he became a sharpshooting guard for the Trojans, running the court with the jangle of the boombah in his ears. He was 8 when he left Puerto Rico with his mother and brothers and sisters, on their way to becoming another immigrant family in the South Bronx.

“The guy who lived below us, he had some problems with drug stuff,” Ayuso says. “I don’t know if he owed money or what but they wanted to kill him. They threw a firebomb into his apartment.”

It was late at night and Ayuso was watching television with his family.

“The hallway was nothing but smoke,” he says. “We couldn’t take the fire escape so we got everybody and we covered my little brother’s mouth and we just ran down the steps.”

They lost everything. People from the next building brought out old clothes but the best they could find for Ayuso was a blouse and baggy pants.

“They dressed me in girlie clothes,” he says.

The next few years, as his family drifted through shelters and low-rent hotels, he was teased about his unusual name and his accent. One day he started calling himself Larry because it sounded more American.

Eventually, shame turned to anger, anger to recklessness. Ayuso stopped going to school. His mother, Socorro Carrillo, was too busy rearing four other children to stop him from hanging out on the corner of 137th and Cypress, amid the tenements and abandoned cars, a narrow strip of sky above.

“I’d go with my friends,” he says. “Go do bad things.”

They fought and stole and robbed.

Tough, And Tender

What does it take to save a kid? What can salvage a child who learns to connive and brawl the way others learn to brush their teeth and do their homework? Before Taylor tries to answer the question, she has a story of her own to tell.

It goes back to a Pennsylvania mining town called Carbondale, where she was a little girl from an Irish-Italian family as big as it was poor. There wasn’t money for a doctor’s visit when she fell ill and she recalls coughing so loudly on the street that two well-dressed women stopped.

“Go home,” one of them said. “You’re disgusting.”

Decades later, the 49-year-old woman clenches her fist and says, “I remember thinking that no one would ever treat me that way again.”

The memory made her tough as nails, fiery as her red hair. It pushed her through college--neither of her parents made it past sixth grade--and into the hotel business in Los Angeles. Here, Taylor met her husband, Dick, an accountant as calm as she was manic, and they moved to New Mexico when he was hired by a firm in Roswell. They worked hard enough and saved long enough to buy the firm.

Then the memory did something else for her.

“It’s not something you plan to do,” Taylor says. “I went to work for the Boys Club. I became a youth director and started working with abused and neglected kids.

“When they got in trouble, I’d bring them home.”

The Natural

Two thousand miles east, a world apart, Ayuso was unknowingly inching toward Taylor.

The strength and reflexes that made him a street fighter also made him a basketball player. Not the typical New York City guard with a quick dribble and flashy moves. No one mistook him for another Kenny Anderson or Tiny Archibald. Ayuso had something different. He had a natural jump shot, with a flick of the wrist at the end.

A friend dragged him to tryouts for a church league when he was 15 and he made the team.

“I was shocked,” he says.

That pure shooting stroke got him noticed, got him a scholarship to St. Raymond’s High School. The day Ayuso transferred, a cousin was wounded in a knife fight at their public school.

“If I was there, I would have gone down with him,” he says, and he took his escape as a sign from God. Like so many kids in the projects, he saw basketball as a ticket out.

“He was raw but you could tell he had talent,” St. Raymond’s Coach Gary DeCesare says. “The game just came easily to him.”

Schoolwork did not. In class, Ayuso had little more to offer than a street-wise sense of humor, the charm of his dark eyes and a half-grin. He would not do the homework and did not make the grades to play in a single game, so the school did not invite him back after his sophomore year.

That is how kids end up on street corners like 137th and Cypress.

Jeff Bryant, a youth director at the local Boys Club, calls it the process of “kids getting swallowed up.” Bryant, a native of the Bronx, escaped to college in New Mexico, then returned to give others the same shot at redemption. The money he raised from raffles and car washes sent boys to foster families out West. First two, then two more.

In the summer of 1993, a new candidate for the program showed up at the club to shoot baskets.

“I don’t want to say Larry was a slickster, but he was always looking out for himself,” Bryant says. “If he could get one over on you, he would. If there was a shortcut, he would take it.”

Ayuso was 16 and just desperate enough to wonder about New Mexico. His older brother and three friends had died on the streets. He had a long, tearful talk with his mother.

“I thought, ‘Damn, I’ve got to get out of New York,’ ” he says. “I knew it was my last chance.”

Another Bad Beginning

Two hundred miles of dirt separates Roswell and any major city. The place is undeniably oddball--a few too many locals insist a flying saucer crashed on a nearby ranch in 1947, a few too many shops peddle alien T-shirts and coffee mugs along Main Street.

Yet, in many respects, Roswell is a typical small town. Everyone knows everyone else and news travels fast when a transfer student starts a fight at Roswell High, or starts a gambling ring in the hallways, scamming his classmates out of their lunch money and Walkman radios.

Ayuso was living with a religious couple in the town’s wealthiest neighborhood. Within a few weeks, they were on the telephone with Bryant, saying they could not handle the kid, but knew of someone who could. That’s how Ayuso landed on Taylor’s doorstep.

“You don’t know what a jerk he was,” Taylor says. “He thought he was the man. . . . Well, he ran into the wrong woman.”

Other troubled kids had passed through her house, a cozy four bedrooms with a front lawn that turns brown in winter and an above-ground pool in back. They came one at a time, a boy here, a girl there, and Taylor treated them exactly as she had treated her own two sons. If they followed the rules, they got rewards.

The rules came first. No more misbehaving at school, no phone calls after 8 p.m. and no more baggy street clothes, which she confiscated one day. The next morning, Ayuso tore up his room looking for them, then ran from the house. She dragged him back by the shirt collar and made him clean up.

“She was the big dog,” Ayuso says. “She wasn’t going to cut the truth up in pieces and give me a little here and there. She gave it to me all at once.”

Taylor overpowered the 6-foot-2 teenager with a single threat: “I can have you back in the Bronx by noon tomorrow.”

That kept him out of trouble and kept him doing homework for two hours at the kitchen table each night. When he passed all his classes, she pushed him even harder, enrolling him in summer school and getting him a job on the 5 a.m. shift at a nearby Christmas ornament factory. He came home afternoons sweaty and covered with glitter.

But it was still a scam, the kid doing just enough to get by. Taylor could tell by the angry words he wrote in his notebook and left out for her to see. She could tell by the rap songs he performed in his room, loudly enough for her to hear: “Can’t wait to get smart/ I’ll get rid of her and depart.”

Taylor got the message: Ayuso had come West to escape but not to change. That wasn’t good enough.

Setting the Hook

Life had dealt him so many broken promises. Ayuso says, “I realized Diane was trying to teach me a different way, but it was hard for me to trust her.” He made Taylor prove herself.

That summer, they drove three hours to Albuquerque, where she wangled a meeting with two assistant coaches at the University of New Mexico. Ayuso followed them down a dark tunnel into their arena, “the Pit.” Just as he stepped onto the court, overhead lights flickered on and they handed him a ball, told him to take a few shots.

“You should have seen him,” Taylor says. “You have to hit a nerve with Larry. You have to shock him.”

There, on the shining hardwood, he told her, “This is what I want to do. I want to play college basketball.”

Every night after work and studies, they went to the Boys Club where he shot baskets for hours while she rebounded or waved a broom in his face, trying to imitate a defender. He did workouts she took from books on physical conditioning. When the school district declared him ineligible to play as a transfer student, Taylor became his legal guardian.

“She was showing me she was real,” Ayuso says. “She was going to help me, no matter what it took.”

No one on the playground had taught him to play zone defense or set screens away from the ball. As Roswell Coach Britt Cooper explains, “He was totally lacking in fundamentals.” But once the high school season began, that sweet stroke translated to 28.8 points a game. Better than A.J. Bramlett, now a starting center at Arizona. Better than Kenny Thomas, who became a star for New Mexico at the Pit.

And every game, no matter where, Ayuso heard the clang of a cowbell--the first incarnation of the boombah--letting him know Taylor was in the stands. She faxed his statistics to universities across the nation and pestered coaches, though she knew nothing about the college game. At one point, she called North Carolina State and asked for Dean Smith, the coach at rival North Carolina.

“Is this a joke?” asked the voice at the other end of the line.

Recruiters eventually took notice, but no one believed Ayuso would graduate, let alone qualify for college. Needing to complete two years’ worth of credits in his senior year, he took extra classes and correspondence courses. He spent nights and weekends at the kitchen table.

“It was real tough,” Ayuso says. “Diane sat down with me and made sure I got down to it. She told me to be the first one in class, sit up front, get to know my teachers and turn in my papers before they were due.”

Virginia Burton, an English teacher at Roswell High, saw a change in the kid who’d wandered the halls and flirted with girls.

“It was a whole new ballgame for Larry,” she said. “He would listen better and he began to understand the concept of working for what you get academically.”

On days when the grind became too much, Ayuso went to dinner with Dick Taylor, or they would play golf, anything to get out of the house for a few hours. Ayuso kept at it, earning a 3.67 grade-point average his senior year, and began taking the ACT in pursuit of a qualifying score.

“I took that test five times,” he says. “I kept failing and feeling bad. When I passed, I was so happy you couldn’t believe it.”

But by that time, New Mexico had awarded all its basketball scholarships and Ayuso balked at leaving home for Fresno State or Brigham Young. He spent a year at New Mexico Junior College, an hour’s drive from Roswell, close enough for weekend visits and for Taylor to clang her boombah at all his games.

The Thunderbirds won a regional championship that season. In the spring, USC Coach Henry Bibby visited to scout another player on the squad and noticed Ayuso draining one long jumper after another.

“I want him,” the coach said.

‘Never Give Up’

What does it take to save a kid?

Maybe it takes something inside the kid himself. Courage. Fear. The instinct to swim when others are sinking.

Maybe it takes a woman who has turned her pain around, who lives by one rule: “Never give up. Never, never, never.” The more Ayuso fought her, the more committed she became.

Somewhere along the way, Taylor opened her heart to Ayuso. She stopped threatening to send him back to the Bronx, vowing instead that if he ever returned to his old life, she would track him down and drag him back by his shirt collar.

Somewhere along the way, Ayuso started telling people he had two mothers.

Maybe it takes a miracle.

“Just like you read in the Bible,” Ayuso says. God works in mysterious ways, he says.

A Work in Progress

There is no more need for shame. Going into tonight’s game at UCLA, Ayuso is averaging 11.7 points and is scheduled to graduate with a history degree in May. He has gone back to using his real name, Elias.

But this is no success story. Not yet.

“It’s very tough living 16 years a certain way and then trying to change your whole life,” Ayuso says.

Temptation persists. Soon after arriving at USC in the fall of 1996, Ayuso ran back to the Bronx, back to 137th and Cypress, where he did not have to prove himself to anyone. Taylor got him on the phone and gave him one day to reconsider, then she was coming to New York.

“I thought about it for a couple hours,” Ayuso says. “The next day, I was back on the plane.”

As recently as last spring, Ayuso cursed at Bibby in the weight room. Taylor found out and made Ayuso apologize before the entire team. A month ago, when he accumulated $1,000 in parking tickets, she flew to Los Angeles and confiscated the car she and Dick had given him.

Bibby chuckles about all this. The ups and downs have brought him closer to Ayuso, and he says what everyone says about the young man: “Larry is a great guy. He has come a long way, but he has a long way to go.”

It gets no easier from here. The NBA is a pipe dream for a 21-year-old guard with only six years of organized basketball under his belt. Graduation means leaving school, the routine he once avoided, the structure to which he now clings.

“I’ve been having a good life, eating well and sleeping in a nice place,” Ayuso says. “Maybe I’m not ready for the real world.”

Maybe that is why Taylor has not brought any kids into her home since Ayuso left four years ago. She still meets regularly with his coaches and school counselors. She still devotes herself to Ayuso, though in darker moments, she wonders if he will ever love her as much as she loves him.

“I’m sure there are days he hates me,” she says. “But I’ve only got a short window, a few years to teach him. I’ve got to stay in his face.”

People wonder about that woman. They wonder why she travels so far to watch a mediocre basketball team. They wonder why she sits behind the bench every game, pounding that odd-looking stick.

She pounds it out of love and worry and sheer will. She pounds it to let him know she is still there.

USC at UCLA

7:30 tonight

Fox Sports West 2

ARENA APPROVED: The USC Board of Trustees has approved an on-campus arena to be built within five years. Page 3