Tall, lanky Cory Gathing was 17 when he found out his high school girlfriend was pregnant.

A doctor had lectured Cory and his younger brother about condoms. Unfortunately, Cory explained to his mother in the spring of 1997, one night the condoms ran out.

Fatherhood was an early dividing line among the teenagers who'd played football together as boys on the 1992 south Sacramento Raiders Junior Midgets. While some immersed themselves in classes, team sports and after-school activities, others had children to support.

Growing up mostly in rough, lower-income neighborhoods, sports had offered the players a bright spot amid some sobering probabilities. African American boys in those communities face particularly high arrest and incarceration rates and low graduation rates. Becoming a teenage parent didn't help those odds.

Clifford McDowell -- the fast, skinny running back who had driven himself to practice at age 12, was among the first to father a child. Tequila McDowell was born when Clifford was barely 16, months before a bullet took out his lung. Clifford IV followed the next year, then Cliffon, then Marques, then Santa, then Yelce, then Cliffonte.

By the time he turned 24, Clifford would have seven children with five girlfriends. He tattooed the name of each child on his forearms.

On and off during those years, Clifford dated his longtime girlfriend, Yaxchi Bell, the mother of his third and seventh children. Though Clifford's betrayals stung, Yaxchi made it a point to welcome his other children into her life. She was determined to be their connection to their father.

Wyatt Johnson, the Raiders' stocky running back, was 17 when his cousin, LaMarr Alexander, asked him to come along as a buffer while he told his mother about the birth of her first grandson. It was not a total shock to her. For months, she had noticed LaMarr marking his calendar "one month," "two months," "three months."

That same spring, by the time Cory learned Zakiyyah Hill was pregnant, the couple were no longer together. Still, months before baby Alayzia was born, the teenagers sat down with their parents in the Gathings' living room.

"You've made us a family," Cory's father remembers saying. "We're going to be a family for Alayzia."

Before dawn on Oct. 12, 1997, Cory got the phone call. He and his mother rushed to the hospital. There, the 17-year-old held his tiny daughter in his arms for the first time.

Cory and his family cared for Alayzia two weekends a month. The little girl was his everything. Cory, the former elementary school honor roll student, dropped out of high school and started working at a Toys "R" Us to help pay for Alayzia's diapers and formula. Whenever he could, he outfitted her in brand new Nike Jordans.

Alayzia was not yet 2 in February 1999, when Cory started dating his old friend Roslyn. Though she knew some people considered Cory a bully, Roslyn saw something different.

She loved watching him play with Alayzia and with her own small daughter, Adrianna. Cory was the only father Adrianna knew. He chased the girls around the park and played ball with them. In those tender moments, Roslyn felt, Cory found peace.

Once the couple began living together, Roslyn tried to ignore what Cory did when he wasn't home. She knew he'd been arrested on suspicion of selling rock cocaine and hoped he'd stop.

"I didn't want details," she says.

At times Cory had so much money coming in that, rather than bother with the laundry, he'd take Roslyn and the girls shopping for new clothes.

She tried to tell him: You have more than enough money. You have nice cars and clothing. You can stop now.

Sometimes, for a while, he would.

Cory's close friend, Wyatt Johnson, had returned to Sacramento around 1998, after more than four years at a school for troubled youth in the Nevada desert.

He'd hated the reform school at first. The huts they slept in crawled with spiders. But Wyatt, a star football and baseball player long burdened with self-doubt, eventually learned to rock climb and cross-country ski.

The Bee's Jocelyn Wiener can be reached at (916) 321-1967 or jwiener@sacbee.com.