EX-BRUIN LIVES FOR CITY KIDS.

Byline: Ira Berkow The New York Times

He grew up in Watts and knew harrowing times. It is virtually a cliche now, unless you experience it.

People close to him suffered drug addiction. Others were sent to prison, and some were murdered in the violence that is now too often numbing and commonplace. But he survived, got out, thrived.

``Why me?'' Willie Naulls asked himself. ``Why was I blessed?''

It is the holiday season, but the 63-year-old Naulls knows that for many there can be little gaiety. Over the years, particularly at times like these, such thoughts troubled him.

Naulls, who stands 6-foot-6 and still looks fit. He was a star basketball player, the first All-American John Wooden coached at UCLA and then an all-star forward in the NBA, with the New York Knicks for seven years from 1957 to 1962, then briefly with San Francisco.

When Naulls decided to retire at age 28, his friend Bill Russell called and persuaded him to join the Celtics. Naulls played three more years, earning championship rings in each.

Then, finished with basketball, he purchased an auto dealership in Los Angeles, married a gynecologist and had two daughters and two sons.

But Naulls felt there was something missing from his life. He saw the breakdown of family structures in the inner cities. He was lucky, he thought.

He had been raised by two concerned, working parents while many children in poverty-stricken neighborhoods lived with only a single parent or some other relative. He saw kids losing hope as early as age 10, but he remembered an instructor at a boys' club taking an interest in him. He saw a collapse of the educational system, in which kids graduate from high school and can barely read.

``What I saw was ignorance,'' he said, ``an inability to see the possibilities and opportunities in life. I saw how we - parents, the community, the government - were failing these kids. It bothered me.''

One day about six years ago, as he recalls, he was driving down a freeway in Los Angeles on his way to his successful automobile agency when he heard a voice. ``I believe it was God speaking to me,'' he said. ``The voice said: `Get out of business. Better prepare yourself to tell people what great things I've done in your life.' ''

Naulls was out of business in two months and enrolled in the Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., where he received a master's degree in theology and was ordained a minister.

At one point, he worked with teen-age basketball players, but that wasn't enough. He yearned to educate the younger kids - boys and girls generally 5 to 13 - and show them options beyond the gangs in their neighborhoods.

``After they're 13 or 14,'' said Naulls, ``you've probably lost them. It's heart-wrenching.''

Naulls leased a group of buildings that had been part of a defense plant in a rough part of Los Angeles. He established the Willie Naulls Ministry and The Church of Common Ground. He took in some 100 to 150 children from the area during summer days and after school.