Swanson: USC’s Destiny Littleton finds her voice

• February 24, 2023

A girl adrift, 12 years old and alone in the wilderness of San Diego’s concrete jungle. She keeps moving, keeps chopping wood, keeps her wits about her. Because there’s a play drawn up for her to succeed, she can feel it. Destiny, child.

***

“What’s the word? Serendipity?” USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb asks in regard to Destiny Littleton’s presence in her program this season.

She asks because back in 2017, when Littleton was a top recruit out of The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, a McDonald’s All-American whose 4,300 career points made her the state’s all-time leading scorer among girls, she thought she’d play all her college ball as a Trojan. Instead, she wound up at Texas, and then at South Carolina, where last year she became a national champion.

That she’s playing at USC only now, just as the Trojans have begun to crest upward again, breaking into the Associated Press’ Top 25 poll for the first time since 2016? That does seem like a stroke of serendipity.

A little like a touch of fate, that it’s happened just as Littleton – a 23-year-old graduate student and point guard, playing heavy, necessary minutes and making the most of the NCAA’s bonus COVID year – has dropped her disguise, emerging from an emotional thicket not unscathed, but untarnished. Good, stronger and the right woman to lead these tough-willed Trojans, whose wins don’t often come easy, but have come anyway.

A fighter, with the fortitude to take the big shots and live with the results. “A great overall person,” said Aaliyah Gayles, a teammate and friend. “A pick-me-up person, a loving person. I would take a thousand Destinys, if I could.”

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

To get a sense of that, you need only to sit and listen a while to Littleton, a 5-foot-9 floor general whose braces show when she smiles and who has a tattoo on the inside of her left forearm that reads, in neat, cursive script, “With pain comes strength ♡.”

As a kid, the baby of the family, she’d played football and basketball with the boys. But she couldn’t compete with the drug addictions poisoning her home, sending her parents and siblings spiraling and leaving her without much food or, half the time, functioning utilities, she said. She wound up living out of a duffle bag, and later, saw her father convicted of a decades-old murder.

But back then, when she’d been so angry and with so few tangible assets, she also had tons of talent, on the court and in class, and she was determined not to waste it. “Something in me was just like: Don’t just throw your life away,” she said. “Don’t give up on things that you can control.”

She found lifelines and opportunities, and she didn’t squander those either. She moved in with a coach, and with friends, with a teacher, and earned her way into a prestigious private high school and onto the radars of every major college women’s basketball coach.

All that while she kept the most important information about herself confidential, strictly on a need-to-know-basis – and dang near nobody needed to know.

What her classmates and teachers at The Bishop’s School knew was only “laughing-and-smiling Destiny.” High-achieving Destiny. Sober, focused Destiny. But no, almost no one knew anything at all about the family she was estranged from. Or that Marlon Wells, her basketball coach – her guardian and eventually her dad legally – wasn’t her father biologically.

She hadn’t wanted to be mislabeled on her affluent high school campus, where a friend’s biggest problem was how to hide a Hot Cheetos habit from her mom. Littleton didn’t want anyone looking at her and thinking, “You’re just another black kid from the inner city.”

More, she felt betrayed by the people who, above all others, she was supposed to count on. How in the world could she trust anyone else? Even with Wells, she said, it took three years.

It was a “mask,” Littleton calls it, that didn’t come off until last March, when she was coming off the bench for the top-ranked Gamecocks, and coming out of the fog of depression.

For the first time, she thought she’d be able to talk about it all without crying, and she looked around and she saw more athletes speaking on mental health. So she reached out to Mirin Fader, a best-selling author and feature writer for The Ringer, who had written a bit about her in high school, and whom she trusted to tell her whole truth.

The instincts that kept Littleton afloat for much of her life proved right again, because when Fader’s story, “The Determination of Destiny,” ran on The Ringer’s website, it meant Littleton’s secrets, well, they weren’t secrets anymore. Just facts. And we know what the truth shall do …

“Littleton has realized something she hasn’t always been able to: ‘The world is not against you,’” Fader wrote. “Instead of dwelling on why things have happened to her, she embraces the resilience that came from those experiences.”

The response to the piece was stunning: “It was crazy to see how many people were just like, ‘Oh my gosh, you went through all of this and you’re still here? Still playing at a high level?’ It was good to hear adults be like, ‘Wow, you’re my role model. I look up to you!’”

A hidden talent emerged – for public speaking. She began to talk, aloud, about everything she’d kept quiet all her life.

‘GET IN THIS CAR’

If you’re ever in a room to hear Littleton tell her story, you’d be rapt, like the students at Irmo High School in Columbia, S.C., where she spoke at last spring’s College Decision Day.

“You could hear a pin drop in our auditorium,” emailed Ruschell Pearson, an Irmo counselor. “The students were so focused on what she was sharing about life, the trials, triumphs and being a victor not a victim of your circumstances, learning how to face life head on and appreciate the good and the bad.”

Good. Bad. There they were, mixed up one night near San Diego Community College, one of those moments on which an entire plot hinges.

Littleton was a middle schooler then, trying to avoid being home. So she loitered at the gym late into the night, long after all the other kids had gone following a full day of action in the summer league run by Wells, a decorated coach who has worked with some of Southern California’s top girls hoopers in the past quarter-century, and who this year has led Temecula Rancho Christian to the CIF-SS Division 3A title game.

“(The adults) were just outside talking and I was just out there with them, knowing I can’t leave until they leave because they’re gonna be like, ‘Where’s your parents?’ ‘Who’s picking you up?’ Littleton said. “I was just like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’re coming.’”

But then Wells spotted Littleton walking alone toward the trolley.

“He pulls up,” Littleton said, “and I’m just like, ‘Oh crap.’”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

He remembers Littleton saying she didn’t have money, she was going to hop the trolley without paying. Littleton said she told him where she was headed – to the home of some friends whom she knew Wells would recognize as “bad influences, just terrible.”

Coach’s order: “Get in this car!”

Littleton remembers telling him he didn’t need to bother calling her mom: “She doesn’t care.”

He remembers trying. “Nobody answered.”

So Littleton wound up on Wells’ couch for the first of many nights, under the same roof as the coach and his wife and sons, “thinking, like, I don’t really know what this is gonna be, but I’m glad I’m not home. I’m sleeping on this couch. I’m cool. Like, I trust him, there is no like, ‘Oh my god, who is this man?’ But it was definitely more, ‘Don’t talk to me, just leave me alone. Take me to practice. And that’s it.’”

RELIVING OUT LOUD

So, no. Heck no. No way she would have imagined then that she’d be talking about those moments before 700-some fellow athletes last year at the Black Student-Athlete Summit in Houston.

And that she’d enjoy it? Shoot.

“She was dynamic,” said Leonard Moore, the executive director of the summit. “The way she was received, it just really affirmed for her, ‘Hey, I can have a dynamic life after basketball.’”

Moore, an American history professor at the University of Texas, invited Littleton to the stage last May because he’d gotten to know her during her two turbulent seasons playing for the Longhorns.

She’d re-routed because Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, who’d become a rare confidante for Littleton in high school, resigned as the Trojans’ coach in March 2017. But her time in Texas messed with her. Littleton had problems with her knee, with coaches wanting her to do therapy she wasn’t ready for, with prescriptions from doctors.

And the haymaker: “This whole news thing blew up about my dad,” Littleton said.

In July 2018, Stacy Littleton was convicted of first-degree murder for the stabbing death of an acquaintance, Cyrus Jefferson, in October 1986 – 13 years before Destiny was born.

The case was reopened in 2017, and previously unavailable DNA testing led to new charges. He was sentenced to 26 years to life. And, yeah, “a cold case cracked wide open, 31 years after a man was killed!”? That wound up all over the news, family photos and all.

“Just got people texting me, texting me, texting me. Facebooking me. Like, ‘Oh my gosh! Like, what’s going on?’” Destiny said. “Everyone knows that’s me.”

When her father started calling her from prison, she balked: “What? What are you calling me for? There’s nothing to talk about.”

But there were things to talk about.

“Eventually I was just like, you know what? Let me just stop being (a jerk),” she said. “So I would give him a little bit more information like, ‘Oh, practice was good.’ And he would send me letters.”

But then, when she’d begun to count on weekly conversations with him, they stopped. A month passed without her hearing from him. “And obviously you can’t call him,” she said. “So I sent an email, ‘Is everything OK?”

It wasn’t. He’d been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. He didn’t want treatment: “No point,’” he told her in January of 2019.

A BRAVE FACE

Destiny’s dynamism is evident not only when she’s speaking to a crowd, but to you alone.

There’s no dancing around delicate topics anymore. She doesn’t break eye contact and she doesn’t break stride, inflecting and emoting and unburdening herself. She plows forward like she must have in her short-lived youth football career, when she tackled one kid so hard it knocked her out.

She wobbles only as she forms the words to describe her final visit with her father, in prison.

“He was so skinny,” she said, after a deep breath. “Mind you, he’s been like a strong, hefty, beer-bellied guy his whole life. And so I see him and instantly, like, I have to look away because I could not start crying, not in front of him. He had this big – I swear it was watermelon-size – tumor in his neck. And I was like, ‘Holy crap.’ He didn’t even have the energy to hold his water. Couldn’t drink water, he couldn’t eat.

“And the first thing he asked was, ‘Do I look good?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely. You look great.’

“No,” she said, he did not, not really, not at all. “I can’t even get the image out of my head.”

Their time together lasted only five minutes, she said, before he asked to go inside, saying he was hot even though it wasn’t a hot day.

She learned he died when she got a call in class, from her mom, on April 1. It fell on Destiny to handle the funeral arrangements, including the sticky act of fundraising to pay for them – all while going to college halfway across the country.

‘IT’S ALL PERSPECTIVE’

Have you ever wondered how people who have had to endure a lot feel about folks around them constantly sweating the small stuff, whining about life’s inconsequential inconveniences? Does it ever bug Destiny?

“Honestly, no,” she said, thinking back to the weeks following surgery for stress fractures in both feet after she transferred to South Carolina in 2019, when she couldn’t walk or shower or get to the bathroom without help.

“I thought, ‘Now I know what it feels like to be disabled.’ That part of my life was taken from me. I don’t usually wake up, ‘Man, I’m so grateful (to be able to walk).’ I can just walk out of bed and use the bathroom …

“But some people don’t have that, so that was a really big eye-opener for me, just looking in the mirror like, ‘I can’t walk right now – right now – but I will be able to.’

“It’s all perspective, honestly.”

MEET DESTINY LITTLETON

There’s a new, more accurate perception of Littleton now at The Bishop’s School. She spoke there last year at the athletics awards ceremony, telling her story to current students and members of the faculty who knew her but didn’t know her.

Striking in a red dress, microphone in hand, she told them what her high school life had really been like, and also about the depression that caught up with her at South Carolina. She shared what she’s learned: “It’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to not be the strong person that you put on for everyone.”

That’s the tough stuff, too. Opening up like that. That’s what’s going to help people. And, for Littleton, that’s where it’s at: “I always say my ‘why’ is to help others, to let people know that they can do it too.”

She’s thinking about becoming a doctor and, a few months ago, was considering basketball retirement so she could begin pursuing a medical degree. But hoops – and an opportunity to play at USC after all – won out.

She’s happy it did. An open book now, Littleton’s collegiate epilogue, her one chapter as a Trojan has just one home game remaining: against Washington State on Saturday afternoon at the Galen Center.

Related Articles

It’s been a good season; the Trojans are 20-8, their most wins since 2017-18; she’s averaging career-highs – 34.2 minutes per game, 13.9 points – and boasting a 3.7 grade-point average in communication management. There’s a sense at USC, as Gottlieb put it after the Trojans triumphed in Thursday night’s 47-43 rock fight with Washington, that there’s “a lot of season left.”

Energized, Littleton now knows that she, personally, has a lot of basketball left too. She’s game for the next chapter, wherever the sport takes her, wherever fate does. There’s a play drawn up for her to take the shot.

“Destiny is a really beautiful soul,” Fader said this week. “And the best part of her story is that it’s just beginning. She’s finally found her voice. When I first met her, I could tell she had so much heart, not just on the court, but as a person. And I think the fact that she is now comfortable sharing her story just shows how much light she has to give … that’s a real gift.”

A gift for us. “We’re lucky,” Fader said, “to hear her story.”

​ Orange County Register 

Chris Holden introduces another job-killing bill that would devastate small business owners

• February 24, 2023

Sacramento’s nastiness toward fast-food restaurants reignited last week with the introduction by Assemblymember Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, of a bill that would amend state law to make the parent corporation of franchised restaurants share liability for workplace health and safety violations.

Assembly Bill 1228 is backed by the powerful Service Employees International Union, which says the current system protects corporations from having to pay damages for violations of employment law. Another labor advocacy group, Fight for $15, says it found in a survey of California fast-food workers that nearly 425,000 of them had experienced some type of wage theft such as unpaid work, overtime violations, issues with meal breaks or paycheck problems.

Related: One of California’s worst ideas is to turn the state into a union for fast food workers

SEIU estimates that there are more than 557,000 fast-food workers in California at about 30,000 work sites.

Franchise owners are already liable for labor law violations, but they are generally small-business owners, and the bill’s sponsors seek to find deeper pockets. This is their second try at it — the same provision was stripped out of Assembly Bill 257, which established a state-run Fast Food Council empowered to raise wages as high as $22 per hour.

Gov. Newsom signed AB 257 in September, but the Save Local Restaurants Coalition, backed by major chains including Starbucks and Chipotle, quickly raised $12 million to qualify a referendum, so the law is now suspended until voters speak on the issue in November 2024.

Related: The California Legislature should repeal Chris Holden’s absurd AB 257

The state Legislature should not be picking and choosing industries to burden with extra layers of laws and liabilities based solely on the political juice of special interests. In this case, Holden has announced that he will be a candidate for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors next year, challenging incumbent Kathryn Barger. His political water-carrying for the SEIU on the fast-food liability bill will undoubtedly earn him valuable support at election time.

But the California restaurant industry has been put through the trials of Hercules over the last three years, and restaurants that are still in business, fast-food or otherwise, are not without scars on their balance sheets. This attempt to make franchisees a more lucrative target for lawsuits could be the last straw for many small businesses. If they go out of business, their employees’ jobs go with them.

​ Orange County Register 

HOA Homefront: Election questions swirl as boards avoid, deflect

• February 24, 2023

Q: No one on our HOA board has been elected and they all remain on by default year after year. We never meet quorum. I suspect foul play and would like to have the property manager as well as the board members investigated. I was wondering if you had any ideas on how we can investigate them all. — C.M., Pomona

A: Low voter turnout in HOA elections could be caused by member discouragement, but it also could be caused by contentment and a lack of desire to have different people staff the board of directors. Either way, directors can sit on a board for years without ever being re-elected. There may be some hope on the horizon from Assembly Bill 1458, recently introduced in the California Legislature.

Assembly Bill 1458, by Member Ta of Westminster, would add a new subpart 2 to Civil Code Section 5115(d), allowing a member election that fails for lack of quorum to proceed within 5 to 30 days later, changing the quorum to be those members participating. It’s very early in the legislative session, so it is very difficult to predict if the bill has a chance.

Generally, I find that boards are staffed by well-intentioned people, and outright foul play is rare. However, boards can easily create the impression that they are hiding something when they become defensive in response to criticism and behave in a less transparent manner.

HOAs are little democracies – if you talk to enough neighbors who want a new board, you can elect a new board.

Q: An HOA that I am involved with is holding upcoming elections and is looking for a truly independent inspector of elections. I am wondering whether you know of any paralegals or junior associates who might be willing to perform that function for a modest fee or as pro bono work to enhance their resume. —C.S., Los Angeles

A: The HOA election reforms from 2005 and Senate Bill 61 dramatically changed the way HOA elections are conducted. One new requirement was that an “inspector of elections” be appointed to run the election and count and announce the vote. This created a small cottage industry of election inspector businesses. However, not all HOAs need professional inspectors.

The law allows the board to appoint a volunteer inspector, so long as they are not a director or candidate and are not related to a director or candidate (Civil Code Section 5110(b)). Management and legal counsel can assist the Inspector but cannot act as Inspector.

Q: Can a member waive their “secret ballot” vote and sign, date and return a ballot via e-mail? — D.K., Novato

A: No. California law, unfortunately, does not permit voting for directors, governing document amendments, or major assessments, by any other method than secret written ballots contained in sealed envelopes. The procedure, described in Civil Code Section 5115(c), does not allow for emailing or faxing of a ballot. Interestingly, California HOAs are still the only nonprofit corporations in California that are not allowed to use electronic voting.

Kelly G. Richardson, Esq. is a Fellow of the College of Community Association Lawyers and Partner of Richardson Ober LLP, a California law firm known for community association expertise. Submit column questions to [email protected].

​ Orange County Register 

Mission Viejo football storms to title in the Battle at the Beach passing tournament

• August 18, 2022

Support our high school sports coverage by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribe now HUNTINGTON BEACH — The sun eventually broke through overcast skies at the Battle at the Beach passing tournament Saturday and made the shades donned on the field by USC-committed quarterback Malachi Nelson of Los Alamitos fit right in. Mission Viejo, however, shined the…

Mets win with circus walk-off in 10th inning on Keith Hernandez Day

• August 18, 2022

What began as a nostalgic day in Flushing honoring Keith Hernandez ended in a dramatic walk-off win for the home team. “We really wanted to try to figure out a way to win a game on Keith’s day,” Buck Showalter said. “The baseball gods shined on us.” The Marlins charged ahead in the top of…0

Dodgers remain committed to Dustin May returning as starter

• August 18, 2022

LOS ANGELES – Fourteen months after undergoing Tommy John surgery, Dodgers right-hander Dustin May is “close” to taking the final step in his rehab. May has been throwing to hitters in live batting sessions at Camelback Ranch for three weeks now. The next step — and final one before he would be ready to rejoin…

Yankees lose 10th-inning head-slapper to Red Sox, 6-5

• August 18, 2022

BOSTON — This is why the Yankees talk about staying hungry. These are the memories that have had them talking since spring training about not letting up. Saturday night, a dropped ball on what could have been an game-ending double play and an extended 10th inning allowed the Red Sox to rally for a 6-5 walk-off…

Hermosa Beach Open: Chase Budinger settling into rhythm with Olympics in mind

• August 18, 2022

Chase Budinger (left) battles Tri Bourne (center) at the net while Trevor Crabb (right) repositions himself during day two of the AVP Hemosa Beach Open on Saturday, July 9. (Eric Licas, Orange County Register / SCNG) Troy Field (right), Tri Bourne (center) and Trevor Crabb (left) compete during the AVP Hermosa Beach Open on Saturday,…