Coming of Ages

By Sam Romero

Spring 2004

Once, when he was 10, Joriz De Guzman was kicked out of class. Okay, that may not feel too alarming given today’s doom-like chatter over pre-pubescent and adolescent nose-thumbing of anything that even suggests authority. But we’re talking about Joriz here, a boy who has always liked giving someone a hand, and as a small child never really complained when you woke him up. Even now, at 13, grumbling when his mother taps at his door in the morning for school just isn’t in his nature. “He’s not a grouchy morning person,” she says. He also is and always has been a fine student, and that is why, essentially, Joriz De Guzman was kicked out of class.

Under ordinary circumstances, anyone who wants a high school diploma earlier or later in life than usual can take the California Proficiency Test if they are at least 16 or in 10th grade. Joriz was neither, and three years ago that probably should have been the first clue for the folks administering the CPT when the young boy, unassuming and confident, walked into the testing room. What 10-year-old even knows what CPT means, much less wants to take it? The test administrator walked Joriz back to the sign-in room, where a woman was reading the newspaper. He’s too young, he told her. Then Joriz noticed something. “Look,” he said excitedly, pointing to The San Bernar-dino Sun article on the back of the woman’s newspaper about him taking college courses. “That’s me.” She looked at Joriz, looked at the picture, looked at Joriz again and said, “Why, that is you,” and they marched Joriz back to the testing room. Apparently, a college student was qualified to take a high school proficiency exam, too.

Now in his second year at Cal State San Bernardino, Joriz majors in both math and computer science, gets A’s, and – only 12 when he first enrolled – certainly is the youngest student at the university now and perhaps ever. Campus records simply don’t go back far enough to know for sure. No big thing. Amid all the fuss raised by the media at the novelty of a 13-year-old college student, Joriz is cool. His CSUSB classmates, by and large, think he’s older; his neighborhood playmates don’t know to think about it; and his teammates from the junior basketball league just think he’s Joriz. “I really don’t tell anybody unless they ask me straightforward,” he says. “I try to keep a low profile.”

But here’s where Joriz’s joy in doing good turns or inspiring someone overtakes any desire to fly below the radar. With each news story, including one on KABC Channel 7 in 2002, his cover is blown. Two or three kids who saw the Sun story decided to challenge the CPT as well, and two parents of students from his martial arts class began asking his mother questions after reading about Joriz. He also has tutored students from his computer science classes, and prior to the opening of the CSUSB men’s basketball season Paul Trevor, assistant coach for the team, asked Joriz to tutor any of the players that needed a little academic coaching. “Maybe to them it might be a little weird that someone younger is helping them,” Joriz says. “But I just tell them, ‘Help is help. It doesn’t matter who’s helping you, just as long as you’re succeeding in what you’re doing.’”
Inside the air-conditioned confines of CSUSB’s Coussoulis Arena last summer, it was Joriz who was being tutored by the men’s players during the CSUSB basketball camp. In a second life Joriz says he might like being that basketball player if intellectual property law weren’t his ultimate goal. His game says the same. On a nippy day last December he was playing his father at a school near home. Joriz dribbled one direction, spins 180 degrees in the other and shook free just enough to see a clear path to the basket. At 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall, he’s big for his age, and his physical style of play in one junior league once earned the wrath of a coach who chased him around the court yelling for him not to play so rough.
“That’s just the way I play!” Joriz said, pleading his case and supported, he believed, by the fact that referees weren’t calling him for any fouls. It’s the way he plays his father, too, a man of about the same height, but larger in his young son’s eyes. “So far there’s been no big shift at all,” Joriz says. “I always,” he pauses for a second to smile just slightly, and in what almost seems proud deference says, “lose.” He’s learning. “He beats you mentally,” Joriz says of his father’s court game. “He has that personality that, even though you’re doing well, he can break you down in an instant just by making you laugh or something. He can totally take your mind off the game.”

It’s the kind of mental toughness that only comes with age, because Joriz is, in so many other ways, the typical Southern California kid, born at Redlands Community Hospital and now growing up in Grand Terrace, where he plays Playstation, loves steak, sings karaoke, plays with his vegetables, knows he’s still too young to date and thinks Kobe Bryant brags too much. The Kobe idea and the fact that the Lakers are the last team he’d choose to root for isn’t kid stuff in Southern California; wars and barroom brawls have been launched on less. But knowing what he believes is typical for Joriz, whose grasp of math and computer science seems almost insignificant when seated next to his foresight and maturity. “You know what,” says Art Concepcion, chair of the CSUSB computer science department and one of Joriz’s mentors, “he knows what he wants, so that keeps motivating him.”