The UCLA fight song screams from trumpets and other spit-tinted instruments announcing another touchdown, and Turner, who starred at UCLA in the 1980s, can’t be happy about it. Today, Marcus Turner is the head football coach at Juan Cabrillo High in Long Beach, and the team scoring touchdown after musically punctuated touchdown is Cabrillo’s opponent, Mater Dei.

Mater Dei scores on a pass less than two minutes into the game and another three minutes after that. By the end of the first quarter the score is 20-0 and the Mater Dei band is in heavy rotation. The fight song may be ironic but the score was predictable. Mater Dei is one of California’s traditional high school football powers—going into this mid-September game held on a drizzly Friday night at Cabrillo, the Mater Dei Monarchs were ranked fifth in the nation. What is surprising is that they are playing Cabrillo, a school that’s just 11 years old, a figure just slightly greater than the number of Southern Section football championships Mater Dei has won—nine.

And yet Cabrillo, which didn’t win a single football game last season, plays Mater Dei and another perennial power, St. John Bosco—damn Catholics—this season. And that’s before Cabrillo begins play in one of the state’s strongest football leagues, the Moore League, which includes Long Beach Poly, one of the few Southern California schools able to match Mater Dei for sustained football excellence.

Who would want to do all of that to Marcus Turner and his boys? Why not go with a little easier opponent? (Pretty much everyone else does. Bruce Rollinson, Mater Dei’s head coach, says scheduling “is always a challenge for us. It can be difficult for us to get games.”) What kind of twisted mind would run Turner and these young men through such a gauntlet? A clueless principal? Bitter, burned out administrators? OJ? Actually, the person you want to blame is a teacher named Marcus Turner.

Marcus Turner scheduled Mater Dei when he took over at Cabrillo in 2005 and the Panthers have been playing (and losing to) the Monarchs ever since. The question is, why?

“If you want to be the best, you have to play the best,” he said the day before the game, answering my question so quickly it was as if he’d anticipated it (he did) because he’d been asked it so many times before (he has).

He’ll tell you it has something to do with teaching, that you can only tell or show someone so much, that eventually they must live it. Remember the old Chinese proverb: Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand. Playing the likes of Mater Dei, he believes, helps his kids not only understand what it takes to be a football champion, but what is possible in life, and it’s the latter that’s most important to him.

Look at him, raised in Long Beach by two parents who got up and went to work so early he and his siblings joked that it was his mother’s job “to plug in the sun every morning.” The Turners worked. Marcus lived that; no complaints, no excuses, doing whatever was necessary. Out of that, he emerged: a football star at Jordan High and a scholarship to UCLA, where he was an All-Pac 10 defensive back—leading the Bruins in interceptions his junior and senior years. Then it was onto the NFL, where he played for seven seasons (1989-95) for the Phoenix Cardinals and New York Jets, distinguishing himself as the odd duck who actually liked the exquisite torture of training camp and two-a-days.

And now his son, Marcus II—Marc-Marc to the family—is the best player on the Cabrillo team, a defensive back who has verbally committed to Stanford not only because he believes new coach Jim Harbaugh capable of turning the program around—Stanford 24, USC 23 is a pretty good start—but because “I’m really interested in biology. I think I’d like to do something in the medical field. Maybe a surgeon.”

This is what is possible if you show up, if you work. It’s a lesson the coach talks about constantly to his players: the chance for advancement, the chance to do things beyond football, things they would have never dreamed of—college, a career—and so he pushes them. Always.

“He’s constantly going around and checking up on us,” says Kevin Williams, a Cabrillo lineman. “The last thing you want to see is Coach Turner talking with one of your teachers. And if you end up on his list of guys who aren’t doing what they need to be doing in class, well, you don’t want to be on that list. He’ll make your life very hard.”

So he schedules the Mater Deis to show his players what a successful football program looks like, how it conducts itself, how it does what it does.

One thing it takes is a decent snap to the punter. Cabrillo actually does a good job on offense in the first half, driving the ball consistently against Mater Dei, especially on the ground. Unfortunately, any time they’re stopped and forced to punt the exercise becomes an adventure—you know, if you consider what happened to the Donner party an adventure. Each time the punter sets up to kick, the snap invariably flies over his head and ends up in Mater Dei’s possession somewhere back in Cabrillo territory.

With the score 27-0—another touchdown pass, cue band—Cabrillo sets up to punt deep in its own territory. The ball is hiked and flies over the punter’s head into Cabrillo’s end zone. He scampers to retrieve it and, chased by several Mater Dei defenders, runs to his right, where he attempts to punt the ball anyway. What he does instead is kick the ball on a low line drive that hits a Mater Dei player at the five yard line, hits him in the chest with such force that the ball seems to stick. The player never breaks stride as he crosses the goal line for another touchdown.

And so it’s 34-0, with Mater Dei driving again, when Marcus II gets hurt and lies motionless on the ground.

Brandon Huffman of Scout.com says Marcus II ranks as one of the top “five or six corners in California,” and is “in the top 10 in the West in a very good, very deep year for defensive backs.”

With Long Beach’s open enrollment policy, a policy that allows students to choose the high school they wish to attend, he could have played anywhere; yes, he could have played at Poly. Instead, he chose—he chose—to play at Cabrillo with his father.“

He left it up to me but it really wasn’t a very hard decision,” Marcus II said. “I like being around him. I know I have a lot to learn from him because he’s been there. But he’s also a really fun person. I like him. I like my dad a lot.”

Normally, their relationship on the field is typical—professional, you might say. In fact, it took some time for most players to realize that Marcus Turner was Marcus Turner’s father because, as one player puts it, “He yells at all of us the same.”

“[Marcus II] called him ‘Coach’ just like the rest of us,” says Williams. “He’d act around him the same way we acted around him. But then I noticed he kept driving away from practice with Coach. So, finally, I asked him, ‘Hey, is Coach your dad?’ I had no idea.”

Except tonight Marcus II lies on the field, and it’s his dad who jogs out to look at his son. Concerned, the father notices that his son isn’t moving. “Then I saw him move, and I said to myself, ‘Okay, we can deal with this,’” Marcus remembers, “and I was back to being his coach, back to thinking about what we do next.”

The first thing he does is confer with his son’s replacement. Though he’s a decidedly laid-back guy away from the field, his body language changes drastically once the game starts; it’s not unusual for him to physically demonstrate what he wants his players to do, getting down in a squat or delivering a quasi-blow with his body. As one player notes: “There’s Coach, and then there’s game Coach.”

He demonstrates to the young man what he wants him to do, and impresses on him that Mater Dei will come right at him. The ball is snapped, and sure enough Mater Dei comes right at the replacement, who loses touch with his man. The ball flies over his head into the end zone where, well, the song remains the same. Mater Dei 41-0.

Mater Dei will score once more, and, as both teams run off the field, it’s 48-0.

Halftime.

MARCUS AND MARCUS II by RUSS ROCA

“Hi, I have an appointment with Coach Turner.”

“Who?”

“Coach Turner.”

“ . . . ”

“Marcus Turner.”

The last recitation seems to spring the student into action, and by “spring” I mean he slowly rotates his head toward his left shoulder, catches the eye of one of the office staff and asks, “Do we have a Marcus Turner?”

At most schools, the football coach is someone of note, the name instantly recognizable. You can be assured no one at Mater Dei asks, “Do we have a Bruce Rollinson?”

I’m eventually guided to Marcus’s classroom; he teaches health and, until this year, was the school’s athletic director. It’s the day before the Mater Dei game and he’s lying on the floor watching game video with his team. He springs to his feet when I peer in and, at 41, doesn’t look much older than his players. As we walk to a bench outside, I tell him about the kid who didn’t know his name. He smiles.

“We’re still trying to create something here,” he says. “It’ll come. It just needs time.”

And slowly, it has. Cabrillo won its first game of the season—against Beverly Hills—in part because this is the biggest team he’s been able to field.

“For the first time we’re able to actually field an offense against a defense and actually have some reserve players.”

But it’s been a gradual process, enduring parents showing up to take their sons off the field for all manner of extracurricular activities, including haircuts. That doesn’t happen anymore, though he does keep his practices short—a couple hours tops—so his kids can get going home before five. “I want them to be able to go home when the sun is out,” Marcus says. “I think parents feel a little safer that way and I want them to have time to take care of the other things in their lives.”

And this is the thing about Marcus Turner: he’s a guy who believes wholeheartedly in work but is by no means a workaholic. There are no Saturday practices after games because he wants kids to enjoy their lives. What’s the point in working hard if you can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor?

When Marcus II asked him if he should finish school early—he has the credits and grades to do so—and enroll at Stanford in the spring to be able to take part in spring drills, Marcus told him he’d rather he stay put.“I told him, enjoy high school. You’ll get to that job soon enough. For now, enjoy these days. Go to prom, go to senior ditch days. You only get these once.”

Away from the field, Marcus and Marc-Marc fish and hit golf balls. They actually enjoy each other’s company. Of course, Marcus and wife Martha have a lot of company: seven children, ranging in age from 17 to one. Every day is a series of tasks, which is how Marcus grew up. Father James worked at the Naval Weapons Station; mother Ulato got up every morning at 4 to go to her job at the Port of Long Beach.

“What I remember growing up is just watching them get up and go to work,” Marcus says. “It may sound simple, but that has always stuck with me: getting up, doing what you have to do. Discipline and hard work. There are going to be days when you’re not going to want to play football, when you’re not going to want to study. I remember there were plenty of days when I didn’t want to play football, especially when I got into the pros.”

James Turner died Marcus’s first year in the pros, four days before Marcus II was born. Marcus cradled his son on Thursday and then was driven to the airport on Friday to attend his father’s funeral. Martha drove him, her one-day-old son in tow.

It’s doubtful that Marcus knew he’d found a kindred spirit when he first noticed Martha at UCLA. “He approached me and introduced himself,” Martha says. “Then, some time later, he approached me again. So I told my friends that I met this person and asked them if they’d ever heard of Marcus Turner. They said he was on the football team and I said, ‘Oh, then, forget it.’ You know athletes. But he was very persistent. I kept saying no when he asked me out, but we kept talking. He was a very nice person.”

Martha’s parents had immigrated to the United States from El Salvador when she was only two. Like Marcus, she grew up in a family where work was necessary and elevated. And so it didn’t surprise Martha that, when Marcus’s football career ended, he chose to take on a demanding career in teaching and coaching.

He says he always wanted to teach. And he has had success doing it. Before Cabrillo, he was at Hueneme High in Ventura County, a school, like Cabrillo, with very little football tradition.

“Hueneme was the kind of school that everyone wanted to play for homecoming,” Scout.com’s Huffman says. “It was like a guaranteed win. But once Turner got there they started developing something. And they developed some good players—Josh Pinkard, a starting safety at USC; Charles Dillon, who was the leading receiver at Washington State. They actually won the league when he was there. That’s pretty incredible if you understand where they were coming from.”

Marcus says his formula at Hueneme was no different from what he tries to instill at Cabrillo. Martha knows the drill.

“Wherever he goes, those boys who want to be challenged, want to learn, learn to love Marcus,” she says. “If you don’t like morals, discipline and hard work, you won’t like my husband.”

Halftime is over and the teams make their way onto the Cabrillo football field. Mater Dei comes like a wave—in numbers, this may be the biggest team Cabrillo has ever fielded, but Mater Dei appears to have at least twice the team. They run onto the field businesslike and go through their warm-ups.

Then comes Cabrillo. With the score 48-0 you’d expect heads to hang, guys to retreat into themselves. Instead, the mood is energetic with players pounding each others’ shoulder pads and slapping hands. If you didn’t know it, you’d think the score was tied or that Cabrillo was actually wining. And when the game resumes, they play hard. Cabrillo will go on to shut out Mater Dei—okay, Mater Dei’s reserves—in the second half while scoring a touchdown and two-point conversion of their own.

“I talked to Coach Turner after the game,” Mater Dei’s Rollinson says. “I told him how impressed I was that his kids kept playing hard. They have some fundamental problems, especially the snap to the punter, but they competed for him the whole game. At a school still searching for its football identity you can’t ask for anything more.”

When the game is over, Marcus tells his team essentially the same thing. Then he and Marc-Marc go home as they do after every game, pop the game tape into the VCR and watch the entire game again with Martha on the couch.

Huffman says there’s something unique about Coach’s kids. They have a higher “football IQ,” he says, but something even more intangible, a simple understanding of how things are to be done. “They know how to pay attention to detail,” he adds. “They have a wealth of knowledge they’re able to tap into. They’re ahead of the game.”

The Monday following the Mater Dei game, Marcus II smiles at the explanation, agrees with it. He’s lucky to have the father he has, he says.

Minutes later, I tell Marcus what his son has said and he smiles broadly.“Well, he’s a great kid.”

Fearful of a diabetic seizure, I quickly think to add something about the snap to the punter. Marcus smiles again, a bit pained but undeniably eager.

“Yeah,” he says. “We’re going to have to work on that.”

Tags: cabrillo, football, Long Beach, marcus turner, Sports