By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

Maybe there's another reason why Kahuku High School football players aren't clamoring to play for June Jones' University of Hawai'i football team.

Maybe it's June Jones.

Certainly, there is a clash of football culture between the family-values style of Kahuku and the rap star bravado of Coach Jones.

Out on the North Shore, football is seen as a means to an end. It is a way to teach honor, sacrifice and hard work. It is a ticket to higher education. It is a way for country kids who practice on dirt fields and who catch a ride home at night in the back of pickup trucks to prove that they can compete against city slickers with nicer locker rooms.

On the day after winning the state football title in 2003, the pride of Kahuku was a newspaper photo that showed two of their players consoling the star kicker of the losing team. It was great that Kahuku won. It was even greater that Kahuku won with grace.

After an emotional loss, head coach Siuaki Livai, a math teacher and father of 11 children including five foster kids, reprimanded his players by saying:

"This was just a football game, and I told them they're young, they're going to be losing many more times in real life, at things much bigger than this. So they better learn how to deal with it."

Football under June Jones is a different kind of game.

There were the bench-clearing brawls on national television followed by the "Yeah, but they started it" press conferences by Jones.

There was the make-A pounding by Boise State followed by Jones' refusal to make his players watch the tape of the game.

There is the MTV-style impression that thuggery is admirable, responsibility is solely to self, and fatherhood before marriage and graduation is as acceptable as gang-style tattoos.

There is much complaining about the substandard training facilities and the lack of financial resources and always the underlying threat that Jones, the highest-paid state employee in Hawai'i, might take a job someplace else where he's paid more money and more respect.

(According to team lore, Kahuku got the name "Red Raiders" in the 1950s when the team got hand-me-down uniforms from Iolani. They tell this story not as a complaint, but with pride, because they worked hard to make the name their own.)

The tyranny of our small-town "No Talk Stink" policy keeps this kind of discussion contained to post-Super Bowl chats and sub-rosa discussions through the open windows of pickup trucks.

But little by little, the whispering has been surfacing.

Yes, we want a football team that brings honor by winning. But just as important, we want a football team that brings honor, win or lose.

And the good people of Kahuku are probably too polite to say it, but others will: Their kids deserve better.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or at lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.