COMMENTARY : The Good Guy Got a Bad Rap in Ugly Scene

Just when America cries out that too many youngsters are shooting bullets or dodging them--or that they’ve either lost their values or never acquired them--along comes a 16-year-old Crescenta Valley High football player named Alex Ghazalpour to do the right thing.

What Ghazalpour did Oct. 29 immediately after Crescenta Valley’s frosh-soph game against Glendale was arrange for an injured teammate to be taken to a hospital for treatment of a thumb so severely strained that his left hand had to be placed in a cast.

That by itself isn’t usually the kind of good deed that makes news in a society that overdoses on negative headlines.

What did make headlines this week in Alex Ghazalpour’s community of La Crescenta in Glendale was a report that our teen-aged good Samaritan has been made to feel like Al Capone.

For responding to teammate Jesse Daggett’s painful cry, “This is killing me. You’ve got to take me to the hospital,” Ghazalpour--who volunteers 16 to 20 hours a week in the Glendale Adventist Medical Center’s emergency room and who is certified by the hospital to teach first aid and CPR--got what he didn’t deserve:

Ghazalpour was:

-- Kicked off Crescenta Valley’s frosh-soph team for the rest of the season.

-- Not invited to the school’s annual football awards dinner.

-- Not awarded his team letter, though he played in half of his team’s 10 games.

Reason: Alex broke the rules, school officials say. Alex should have known about the school’s policy on transportation safety and liability--and, they say, he should have arranged with a coach to have Daggett transported to the hospital by means other than the bus that takes Crescenta Valley players to and from games.

Rules are rules--so take that, Alex Ghazalpour!

Just where--tell me, please!--does it say a broken rule supersedes a strained thumb?

Why are we so fixated by doing everything by the book that when something goes wrong, it’s always the instructions’ fault?

What does it say about our priorities when we punish our Alex Ghazalpours for helping a friend who hurt so badly, the friend’s mother was quoted as saying, that his thumb “ . . . looked horrible”?

In this case, the punishment fits neither the crime nor Alex Ghazalpour, himself an injured defensive end who had watched from the bench in street clothes that October evening at Glendale High as his teammates lost, 41-3.

Daggett says Ghazalpour “taped me up pretty good” during the game and got permission in writing (and Daggett’s insurance card) from Daggett’s parents to take him to the hospital. And when Daggett’s mother asked, “Have you told the coaches?” Daggett says, he and Ghazalpour told her that they sent a teammate to tell them.

The two were driven by a high school friend of Daggett’s from the stadium to the Glendale Adventist Medical Center, no more than a drop-kick or two away.

Crescenta Valley Principal Kenneth Biermann says the school’s athletic director and frosh-soph football coaches decided to dismiss Ghazalpour from the team. He adds that Ghazalpour also repeatedly disobeyed coaches when ordered to stop administering medical treatment to teammates, and that they twice disciplined him for doing so.

Not so, says Ghazalpour, explaining that his coaches never warned him and often asked for his help when players got hurt.

It’s the kind of colloquy that plays out in courtrooms across America: One side says he did it. The other says he didn’t. Who’s telling the truth?

Here, we may never know. What is clear is that Ghazalpour is a casualty of overkill, a youngster who deserves a parade, not persona non grata .

His punishment would make us think that Ghazalpour is an accomplished safe cracker, a kid who rolls drunks in alleys for nickels and dimes, or rides with gang-bangers in the night.

Do we handcuff Mother Teresa for overzealously comforting the sick and helpless? Do we impose gag orders on Billy Graham for saving too many souls?

If Ghazalpour is guilty of nothing more than impersonating Albert Schweitzer, then I hope he becomes the doctor he wants to be--and fixes countless Jesse Daggetts. His mission was not to sharp-shoot the rules but to trouble-shoot Jesse Daggett’s pain.

Those who punished Ghazalpour should be ordered to sit in a corner at Crescenta Valley High and write an apology to him on the blackboard 100 times.

The city of Glendale should give Alex a first -place Mayor’s Youth Citizenship Award (to go along with the runner-up award he got from the mayor in 1992).

And it’s never too late for Crescenta Valley High to cheer Alex for using his head and his heart.

At the very least, Alex Ghazalpour deserves two letters: the one he didn’t get for football and an A in human values.