Check this out (thanks, Doug): 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."
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