On the day they posed for the team photo in their black and silver football uniforms, the boys were still champions.

That autumn of 1992, the south Sacramento Raiders Junior Midgets were mostly 12 and 13 years old. They hadn't lost a game.

Yet today, Tyrone Rhinehart isn't reliving childhood triumph. He's sitting in Meadowview's community center, a few miles from the football field his team once ruled, scouring the faces of his long-ago friends. They stare back from inside a smudged plastic frame, sealed in a moment 15 years ago.

What Tyrone sees in the photograph is wasted potential, lives gone awry.

That round-eyed boy in the second row? Shot to death, Tyrone says. He points to another boy in the third row: So was he.

Bullets stole the lung of this boy; that one stands accused of killing his girlfriend.

Tyrone turns his attention to a small, serious face in the second row: himself as a boy, already hardened to the world.

"There has been," he says simply, "a lot of loss."

On the morning of the photo shoot at Jackman Middle School, the teammates did not yet realize that the years ahead would prove their toughest opponent.

Statistically, boys like them -- most were African American and growing up in lower-income, violent neighborhoods -- would be the most likely to head to prison, the least likely to graduate high school. The greatest obstacle to reaching their 30th birthdays? Homicide.

As the 1992 season opened, some of the Raiders already seemed destined for trouble, while others clung to their childhood innocence -- though the coming years would prove such early indications less than reliable.

One of the fastest kids on the team, and one of the toughest, was Clifford McDowell. At 13, he considered himself a grown man and for a year had been driving himself to practice in a Buick Skylark he bought with drug money.

The team's popular jokester, Boyega "Mike" Adelekan, was a budding entrepreneur. He sold sour gumballs from the discount store to his teammates, at a profit.

Wyatt Johnson was among the team's stockiest and most talented athletes, yet he sometimes confided to his mother that he hated himself.

Lanky Cory Gathing was a dedicated, competitive player with a coach for a dad. He was a sometime honor roll student who could ace a test without studying.

And then there was troubled Tyrone Rhinehart. His teammates, with few exceptions, nurtured NFL dreams. Not Tyrone. By age 18, he expected to be dead.

They were five boys among the 35 on the team roster that fall, all standing on the precipice of adulthood. For some, it would be their last year playing PeeWee football.

Their teenage years would unfold just as young men in Sacramento's poorest neighborhoods were being swept up in a wave of crack sales and gang shootings. Killings would decline in the latter part of the decade, only to rise again.

In April 2006, one of the 1992 Raiders' most talented quarterbacks joined the list of casualties. Wyatt Johnson's cousin, LaMarr Alexander, the round-eyed boy wearing jersey No. 21, was shot in the back by an Elk Grove police officer after he crashed a 1993 Oldsmobile into an off-duty patrol car.

The officer was later cleared of wrongdoing, but LaMarr's descent from promise to tragedy underscored the risks faced by his teammates as they grew from boys to men.

After spending childhoods so devoted to football and the exhilaration of smoothly executed tackles and touchdowns, why did some gravitate toward a street culture of gangs and guns and drug sales? How would others avoid it? What futures did the teammates anticipate as children? What choices did they make as adolescents? What kinds of men did they become?

Just being a Raider gave them a leg up on their peers. The organization was formed to offer an alternative to the streets; the physical contact and teamwork of the game helped many boys stay grounded. And most of the teammates had an additional advantage: Somebody loved each of them enough to pay their football fees, wash their uniforms and get them to practices.

"To be part of the Raiders meant you were part of something special," said Sacramento Police Sgt. D.T. Martin, who worked the south area for years.

Many of the players would go on to beat the odds, to graduate from high school and attend college. They would become state workers and teachers. Today, one is a youth correctional counselor, another an attorney.

But even as the teammates' paths diverged, most of their lives would be touched by deep, personal loss.

The Raiders entered the 1992 season full of confidence. They were a new powerhouse in the Sacramento-based California Youth Football League. Their roster was stacked with talent.

Most of the boys had been playing together since they were 8, practicing in the evenings at Olde Florin Town Park, a few miles east of Florin Mall.

They talked about football at school and during sleepovers. They loved the sport's physical release, its competitive thrill, its discipline. Mike Adelekan -- the budding entrepreneur -- and his neighbor, Wyatt Johnson, would practice wrapped in trash bags to sweat their way down to the 120-pound maximum weight requirement.

Wyatt's second cousin, LaMarr Alexander, wore special Raiders logo underwear to every game.

The kinship the boys found on the field spilled over into the rest of their lives. The Raiders, for some, became the family they didn't have at home. On weekends, they played pickup football together or headed to the Cal Skate rink off Mack Road to check out girls.

In the tangle of two-story apartment buildings on 47th Avenue where some Raiders lived, however, another sort of family was forming.

Gang activity had been blossoming in Sacramento since the mid-1980s, as the already-established Bloods faced off with Los Angeles Crips migrating north. Young men wearing red and blue staked their claim on the city's street corners, marking territory with spray paint and bullets. Crack was tightening its grip around the region's poorest neighborhoods.

In Oak Park, Meadowview and G Parkway -- a particularly rough neighborhood east of Meadowview -- drug dealers marketed their wares from street corners and crack houses. They often enlisted younger teens to do grunt work, because legal penalties were milder for minors.

Whether or not they participated in the new economy, Tyrone Rhinehart and his teammates would soon learn: Street justice was harsh at any age.

At the time he posed for the Raiders photo, Tyrone was a small, pensive adolescent modeling himself after a neighborhood boy who'd been shot dead at 15. He anticipated a similar fate for himself.

Born to a 19-year-old mother heading toward a career in nursing and a father who soon disappeared from his life, Tyrone had made good grades and joined the church choir. And he had cherished those moments when his fun-loving mother took him to the beach or bought him G.I. Joes, even when she scolded him if his pants sagged too low.

Then his mother met and married a man who, Tyrone and his aunt would later recall, drove a Mercedes, flashed wads of cash and promised nothing short of the moon. The couple moved around a lot, leaving Tyrone mostly to his two unmarried aunts, who worked multiple jobs to provide for him and his six cousins. Tyrone sought out male role models among the Meadowview Bloods.

During a Christmas visit to his mother's place in Pasadena one year, Tyrone remembers sitting in the back of her Cadillac Eldorado. She pulled up to a corner. A friend leaned in and dropped a stack of condoms in her lap.

Tyrone knew for certain then what he'd long suspected, and what court records already showed: His mother was working as a prostitute.

"He didn't know," he heard her admonish her friend.

"He do now," he heard the friend reply.

At one point, with his stepfather doing a stint in jail, Tyrone served as a lookout in Pasadena while his mother turned tricks. News coverage of murders of several area prostitutes terrified him.

Back in Sacramento, Tyrone's aunt Brenda pawned all her jewelry to cover the $100 Raiders fees for him and her son, J.R.

She and J.R. -- No. 75 on the 1992 team -- worried about Tyrone. He landed in juvenile hall once. Then again. Other boys on the Raiders were afraid of him.

"Tyrone was no joke," said Gary Lewis, No. 42. "He was no one to be played around with."

Like Tyrone, Clifford McDowell was attracted early to the world of gangs. By the time of the team picture, the skinny sprinter had adopted a chief moneymaking strategy of the older Oak Park Bloods: selling rock cocaine.

Feeling too grown-up at age 12 to depend on adults for rides, Clifford asked a cousin's husband to take him to an impound lot. He shelled out less than $400 for the cheapest, best-running vehicle there: a green 1975 Buick Skylark.

Chaos had pervaded much of Clifford's childhood. His father, court records show, dealt drugs and stole. His mother, Rosalyn, remembers young Clifford waking up at a cousin's house one morning and happening upon people with crack pipes in the kitchen.

With so many troubles at home, Rosalyn thought, it was little wonder her son struggled in school. Sometimes, if teachers asked him to read aloud, Clifford would get so frustrated he'd storm from the classroom.

On the football field, though, Clifford shone. Cheerleaders laughed at his flirtatious antics; teammates marveled at his speed. Afraid of getting tackled, he would tear across the grass in his sister's hand-me-down soccer cleats -- untouchable.

Several weeks into the 1992 football season, however, tragedy pierced that sense of invincibility. Sometime after midnight on Oct. 4, several Raiders and their friends left a party near Mack Road. Clifford was wearing red, the color of the Bloods.

The boys came across a cluster of young men they recognized as rival Crips. Too late, they started running. Clifford turned to see his buddy, 13-year-old Marcus Thompson, on the ground, dying from a bullet wound.

Clifford's mother moved her family to Richmond. She was starting a new relationship, a new job and -- she hoped -- a new life for them all.

Missing Sacramento, Clifford and his older sister habitually sneaked their mother's car keys and drove back to their old neighborhood. Relenting, Rosalyn agreed to let them stay with their older cousin in south Sacramento.

Soon, she started getting calls from the police. She'd race out to Sacramento to argue in her son's defense.

Although Clifford's teammates watched in awe as he filled his pockets with wads of cash, few realized that, on his first night inside juvenile hall, their street-savvy friend broke down and cried.

Seeing childhood slip away from Tyrone and Clifford, other Raiders' parents redoubled their efforts to protect their own sons.

Many of the teammates came from similar family circumstances. At least a third were being raised by single mothers who juggled football commitments with school appointments, household chores and multiple jobs. For many, child support payments were rare.

In an effort to keep her only son off the streets, Wyatt Johnson's mother, Lorraine -- a supervisor at the Campbell's Soup plant on Franklin Boulevard -- volunteered 20-plus hours a week to help run the Raiders. The organization was made up of four football teams with corresponding cheer squads. The Junior Midgets were the second-oldest.

Over the years, Lorraine and other board members would contribute thousands of dollars from their modest incomes to keep the institution afloat.

Her three-bedroom Meadowview home became a team gathering place.

"The gangs are out there," she says today, matter of factly. "I'd have all these guys spend the night ... so (I'd) know who's doing what, who's not doing something."

Wyatt was one of the Raiders' star running backs. With his dual aptitude for baseball and football, some of the other boys expected him to be the next Bo Jackson, the multisport athlete who played football with the Oakland Raiders and Major League baseball for three teams.

Once, Lorraine overheard a man in the bleachers murmur appreciation for her son's booming football kicks. "You know him?" she asked. She remembers the man telling her he scouted for a pro team and already had taken note of Wyatt. He told her, she says, to keep her son in school.

Privately, though, Wyatt was riddled with self-doubt. His father was in and out of jail and rarely around. In class, he couldn't understand the work, but felt too shy to raise his hand.

Naturally protective of the boy who had been born small enough to fit in her palm, Lorraine enlisted his cousin, LaMarr Alexander, to counsel him. Little LaMarr was a fun-loving prankster, but he ran from trouble.

Trouble had a bad habit of sucking Wyatt in.

On and off the field, the two became inseparable.

"It was almost like they shared the same heart," remembers their friend, Jazmine Dennis.

Other Raiders' mothers tried to counter bad influences in their sons' lives, too. Mike Adelekan's mother, Pat, grew alarmed the day she overheard her son talking about playing craps at Sam Brannan Middle School. Mike, who had a knack for making money, saw gambling as a way to multiply profits from his sour gumball sales.

Pat Adelekan wasn't having it. "Dr. Pat," as she called herself, held a doctorate in education from a Nigerian university. Her ex-husband, Mike's father, was a Harvard-trained kidney specialist.

Though Mike's teammates considered their Nigerian-born friend smart and responsible, Dr. Pat sensed her youngest son heading in the wrong direction.

"The teacher would tell me, 'When I say sit, he would stand,' " she remembers.

Dr. Pat had started a local nonprofit to link her youngest son and his friends with professional mentors and take them on civil rights-themed field trips.

The year of the team picture, she expanded her nonprofit into a six-student charter school.

Despite Mike's protests -- In eighth grade!? Away from all my friends!? -- Pat Adelekan enrolled him in her Youth-on-the-Move Preparatory Academy, housed in an athletic complex on Jackson Road. On the drive to school, she played motivational tapes. The recorded speeches about wealth and success made Mike's mornings almost bearable.

As single mothers such as Dr. Pat tried to shield their sons, full-time fathers remained the rare commodity. In south Sacramento at the time, half of black children were not living with their biological fathers -- twice the rate for other local children.

Some boys on the 1992 team looked to football coaches to fill the void. Several zeroed in on Cory Gathing's dad, the head coach of the younger Raiders Junior PeeWees. Like the son who shared his name, Cornell Gathing Sr. -- "Coach C" -- was tall, lean and deeply competitive.

After school and on weekends, he led neighborhood boys in backyard pushups, sprints and drills. He analyzed game footage with them, offering a steady stream of advice.

Coach C, says Raiders teammate Lawrence McAlister, No. 34, "was around more than my own dad."

Sometimes, Cory and his younger brother, Jason, got fed up with the constant coaching. But, Jason remembers, they couldn't help but appreciate their father's unwavering dedication to their game -- and, by extension, to them. They knew lots of boys didn't have that.

The spring after the boys posed for their team picture, Cory hit his first home run. His mother, Regina, rushed him to Jackman Middle School where Coach C was refereeing a basketball game. Cory entered the gym clutching the home run ball, a grin stretched across his face. His dad asked the teams to hold on for a moment while he hugged his son.

Regina remembers Raiders players sometimes asking her: "Is this what a real family is like?"

The 1992 season ended too soon.

By the day of the playoffs, circumstances had conspired against the Raiders.

A starting lineman, No. 55, Chuck Thorntona, had been waylaid by appendicitis. Lawrence McAlister, a hard hitter, broke his wrist halfway through the season. And the father of lineman Noah Hayes, No. 40, pulled him from the lineup after he got in trouble for talking in class.

Then, during the game, Wyatt -- one of the team's star running backs -- was tackled and hobbled off the field, his ankle broken. Soon after, Clifford fractured his elbow.

At game's end, the failure was splashed across the scoreboard. The boys threw their consolation patches on the ground.

In the coming year, as some Raiders entered high school, violence in Sacramento -- and across the country -- would hit an all-time high. The county recorded 145 homicides in 1993. Residents of Meadowview and Oak Park held community meetings and took to the streets in protest.

The following year, Californians fought back, voting to send three-time felony offenders to prison for life. Already crowded prisons began to overflow.

In the latter part of the decade, crime levels dropped significantly in the city and across the nation. Public outcry faded. But violence never truly disappeared -- especially not for boys living in Sacramento's toughest neighborhoods.

At first, Cory Gathing's parents didn't notice the change in his behavior. To Coach C and his wife, their older son was still the happy boy who earned good grades easily, loved ninja movies and relished teasing his younger brother.

But his teammates remember two Corys -- a loving, book-smart son at home; a tough, angry young man on the street.

"Cory was like a time bomb," remembers teammate Gary Lewis. "This was a dude that was once mad at the whole world."

Cory's parents' first inkling of trouble arrived with his report card partway through freshman year at Burbank High School: He'd been absent more than a third of the time.

Not long after, they received a call from the police. Their son was under arrest on suspicion of stealing another boy's bicycle -- at gunpoint. He was facing months at the Sacramento County Boys Ranch, a juvenile facility in the foothills.

Coach C couldn't figure it out. Cory had a bike. Why would he take someone else's? And where did he get the gun?

In truth, in south Sacramento at that time, guns were readily available on the streets for as little as $80. Friends often passed them around for free. "A gun," recalls Clifford, "was the easiest thing in the world to get."

By the time Clifford turned 16, he, his best friend and former Raider, Curtie Clark, and two other teenagers were using earnings from drug sales to rent their own apartment in violence-plagued G Parkway. There were guns under every mattress. And where there were guns, shootings tended to follow.

On Aug. 26, 1995, the night before his first junior varsity football game for Burbank High, Clifford headed to a concert with Curtie, whose brother had rented an American Legion Hall on Gerber Road to host a Meadowview rap artist. While Curtie and Clifford hung with the Oak Park Bloods, many at the concert were rival Meadowview Bloods.

After the concert let out, the boys started back to their car.

The previous week, a young man had approached the pair: "I don't like you, Clifford," Curtie remembers him saying. Now, that teen was back at it with one of their friends.

The yelling escalated. Clifford pulled out a gun and waved it around. He and Curtie rushed to the car. People around them started shooting.

Curtie got behind the wheel and, from the front passenger's seat, Clifford reached back to open the door for their friend. More shots.

Curtie tried to put the car in gear, but felt something weighing on the gearshift. He turned to see Clifford slumped over, his eyes rolled back in his head, a red spot swelling on his shirt. Unable to shift gears, Curtie drove to the hospital in first, running every red light.

That night, the phone rang at Clifford's mother's house in Richmond.

"We have a John Doe here," the officer said.

Fearing the worst, Rosalyn McDowell dropped the phone.

News of Clifford's brush with death spread quickly among the Raiders teammates; he was hospitalized for three weeks, and lost a lung.

Many of the boys felt lucky to have steered clear of the violence closing in around their peers by maintaining good grades and finding productive outside interests. In all, 22 had gone on to play some high school football or other school sports. Fourteen got after-school jobs.

Lawrence McAlister worked so hard to be the man of the house for his single mom and younger sisters, that friends teasingly called him a square. Levi Terrill, No. 64, spent weekends studying bodybuilding videos; he'd eventually win the title of Natural Mr. California Teen.

And Noah Hayes got involved in acting and dance classes. He practiced his lines on the bus to away basketball games and tried to keep the hours he spent in a dance company secret from his varsity football teammates.

But even some of the more-focused boys' parents concluded the only way to protect their sons was to get them out of harm's way.

Several moved out to one of the shiny new subdivisions. Cory Gathing's parents were attracted by Elk Grove's top-notch schools and strong athletic programs. But, Cory, his younger brother and some of their Raiders teammates received a cool welcome at Elk Grove High in 1996. Some remember seeing KKK and the N-word scribbled on lockers and lunch tables.

Other parents, like Pat Adelekan, sent their children much farther away. For a while, Dr. Pat had not been too worried about her popular youngest son, Mike. He had applied himself at the tiny charter school she'd started. But as Mike's friends got pulled toward trouble, sometimes he did, too.

One night, Mike was caught joyriding. He wasn't driving, but the police carted him home. The walk from the squad car to his mother's door was long and painful.

Raising four kids on her own had left Dr. Pat exhausted. The summer after the team picture, 1993, she and her ex-husband gave Mike the news: He'd be moving to the affluent Southern California community of Palos Verdes for high school, living with his father, who had returned from Nigeria to practice medicine in the United States.

Mike hated leaving his friends, but he also dreaded the path he was headed down. In his neighborhood, the question was not if a boy would affiliate with a gang, he would later say, but, rather, which one.

Soon after, Wyatt Johnson's mother decided her son was no longer safe in Sacramento, either. For Wyatt, the stakes were even higher: he had been arrested on suspicion of possessing a gun.

Lorraine scribbled a note, imploring the judge to let Wyatt plead guilty to a misdemeanor. She wanted to send him to a school for troubled youth in Nevada that wouldn't take boys with felonies.

The judge agreed. Soon after, Wyatt climbed into a parole officer's car and miserably awaited his arrival in the Nevada desert.

As friends left south Sacramento, Tyrone stayed behind. His Meadowview mentors were running crack houses or pulling the trigger in gang-related shootings. His mother was selling sex on the streets.

The violence seeped into Tyrone. He carried a gun. Once, he shot a man in the leg. Starting around 14, he established a pattern: He spent most birthdays, and six months out of every year, behind bars.

On the evening of April 13, 1994, Tyrone watched one of his role models get shot to death. Willie Young was 21 years old, a father and a popular neighborhood figure.

It all began with a fistfight, police would say. The shooter pulled out a gun and pumped bullets into Willie.

After that, Tyrone's morning routine became a warped tribute to Willie Young. He'd cross 47th Avenue and hop a fence into Sacramento Memorial Lawn cemetery. Standing over his mentor's headstone, he'd smoke marijuana and stare and stare and stare.

Using the moniker, Brotha Ty-Bud, Tyrone began to rap about his perspective on life:

Reasons I'm stepping with precaution

Any mistake may lay my coffin

Thinking about the sacrifices I be making

Hoping to see my 18th day

Juvenile court officials warned Tyrone's aunt Brenda that her nephew was a bad influence on her own son, J.R. But Brenda couldn't let go of Tyrone. "He was my heart," she remembers. And she felt that she and his aunt Barbara were all he had.

For many Raiders players, the future still seemed infinite in its possibility. But Brenda figured she would bury Tyrone before long.

Like other south Sacramento mothers, she stayed awake at night, terrified of the news a ringing phone might bring. Those mothers saw evidence on every street corner of the escalating risks and temptations facing their boys.

The years ahead would prove they had reason to worry.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.