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By Root 4066 0

long ago suspected Tadao because of his mastery of English. Now he was openly stigmatized as a haole-lover, and six times in September, Kakaako gangs waylaid him as he came home from football practice and beat him thoroughly. "We'll teach you to be better than we are!" they warned him. When he made three touchdowns against a team mainly of Japanese and other pidgin-speakers, they hammered him desperately, shouting, "You goddamned traitor! Who do you think you are, playing for Punahou?" Tadao never tried to enlist Goro's aid. This punishment from Kakaako was something he had to absorb. He learned to keep his hands over his face so that his teeth would not be broken, and he quickly mastered the art of using his feet and knees as lethal weapons. By mid-October the assaults ended, especially since McKinley was having a good year with Goro as one of its brightest stars.

This football business in Honolulu was one of the strangest aberrations in the Pacific. Because Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos were mad about games, and because haoles like Janders, Hoxworth and Hale constantly, recalled their days of glory at Punahou, the islands were sports-crazy and the easiest way to sell a newspaper was to work up a frenzy over football or basketball. Having no college league to focus on, the entire community bore down on the high schools. Radio commentators reported breathlessly that Akaiamu Kalanianaole had damaged a tendon in his right foot and would not be able to play Saturday for Hewlett Hall. Newspapers carried enormous photographs of fifteen-year-old boys, growling ferociously under captions like "Tiger Chung About to Tear into Punahou." Youths who should have been thinking of themselves as unshaven adolescents having trouble with the square roots of decimals, were forced to believe that they were minor Red Granges, and all the publicity that on the mainland was thrown at mature professional athletes, was in Hawaii directed at callow youths in nigh school. Consequently, from one year to the next, disgraceful scandals erupted in which adult gamblers bribed these boys to throw games. Then headlines moralized over the lack of character-training in the schools and occasionally some bewildered lad was actually thrown into jail for "corrupting the fabric of our sports world," while the adult gamblers who framed him went free.

At no time did this great Hawaiian nonsense flourish with more abandon than in the fall of 1938 when Goro Sakagawa was playing his last year at McKinley and his brother Tadao his first at Punahou. As the Thanksgiving Day classic between the two schools approached, all the local newspapers carried flamboyant stories about the two dramatic young men. The Mail got a fine shot of their father Kamejiro standing before his barbershop with a Punahou pennant in one hand, a McKinley banner in the other. "Impartial!" the caption read. It was one of the first pictures of a Japanese other than a criminal or an embassy official to appear outside the sports pages of a Honolulu newspaper.

On the day of the game there were two half-page spreads, one of Goro looking like an insane bulldog about to tear a squirrel apart and one of Tadao straight-arming an imaginary tackier. "Brother against Brother" read the headlines, two inches tall. It was a great game, and except for an extraordinary play by Goro in the last fifteen seconds, Tadao's three flaming touchdowns would have led Punahou to victory. That night, as he walked home through Kakaako, confused by the plaudits of the huge crowd who had eulogized him as the star of the Punahou team, he got his worst beating from the toughs. When they left him they warned: "Don't you never play like that against McKinley again!"

He stumbled home, his face bleeding from three different cuts, and Goro had had enough. "You know who did it?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Let's go!” They took sixteen-year-old Minoru and fifteen-year-old Shigeo along. Goro gave each a baseball bat or a railing from a picket fence, and they cruised Kakaako until they came upon seven members of the gang. "No mercy!" Goro whispered,