Wow. This is stunning news.
ESPN’s Ric Bucher has written a story about Brian Grant, who has early on-set Parkinson’s Disease. He is just 37 years old. This is the guy who was thrust into a different role here (center) as a result of Alonzo Mourning’s kidney disease. And this is the third jarring story this month — after the deaths of Chuck Daly and Wayman Tisdale — about one of the game’s true gentlemen.
Grant is on the short list of the favorite people that I’ve covered. Intelligent. Honest. Hard-working. Charitable. He may not lived up to the contract here, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying.
This is a story that I wrote in 2000 for the Miami Herald, after Grant’s acquisition from Portland.
August 27, 2000 Sunday FINAL EDITION PLANTING HOPE, QUIETLY
It was late, and they were alone again, Miguel Reyes, his wife, their daughter and her illness. They did not long for visitors. Three years earlier, Jovita’s leukemia had returned after three years in remission, and the Reyes family had since been visited by seizures, infections and worst-case scenarios.
Sure, people visited, too, those times when Jovita wasn’t in isolation after her bone marrow transplant. A few weeks earlier, a member of the Portland Trail Blazers had stopped by as part of a group. He seemed concerned, but that wasn’t unusual. Concern had never translated into tangible assistance before, though. So Miguel Reyes had forgotten him.
But then this night, unexpectedly, the basketball player visited again.
“It was a vision of a man, not much light, down a hallway, a tall man, in white satin,” Reyes said. “It wasn’t a man I saw, not a man like I was used to. It was like an angel.”
An angel in dreadlocks, with ice packs on his knees. A 6-9, 260-pound, bruising power forward of an angel who is about to become a member of the Miami Heat, in a trade expected to be finalized this week.
Brian Grant had come straight from a game to visit Jovita and offer help, money perhaps. Reyes, a boarding school administrator and wrestling coach, sought something more significant. He asked if Grant would help guide his son, because Reyes and his wife, Cassandra, were so busy with Jovita.
He didn’t expect Grant would start picking Ramon up, organizing paintball outings, entertaining him at his house on the four days each week that Ramon (then 16) would drive into Portland for wrestling practice. He didn’t expect that Grant would spearhead a drive to get Jovita a $15,000 wheelchair van so she wouldn’t be stuck in the house, and could still get ice cream and go to the movies even when she was bloated because of medication. He didn’t expect that Grant’s wife, Gina, would become a big sister to Jovita, offering advice about modeling, relationships and cheerleading.
Reyes couldn’t expect this because he didn’t know about all Grant had done: the 90-minute trips for eight months to visit a brain cancer-stricken boy named Dash; the tireless work to sign up possible donors for a bone-marrow transplant for a boy named Woody; the repeated visits to the Ronald McDonald House in a Hummer full of food; the funeral he paid for for a murdered foster child.
Reyes didn’t know Grant, 28, grew up poor in small Georgetown, Ohio, laying sticks in tobacco fields for $3 per hour, watching his father and uncle weld boxcars, learning about charity. He didn’t know that a young Grant had spent several weeks in the hospital with pneumonia, or that he now had three children of his own.
Reyes knows it now, though, knows all about this selfless man. And South Florida will soon know him, too. * What is the real purpose of organized sport? Community pride? And what brings each community more pride, wins or relationships?
It is quite possible that the Trail Blazers improved themselves in a basketball sense in the three-team deal that will send Grant, who was hobbled last season, to Miami, the Heat’s Clarence Weatherspoon and Chris Gatling to Cleveland, and the Cavaliers’ Shawn Kemp to Portland. The trade will bring yet another big-name player to the Heat, which earlier this summer acquired All-Star Eddie Jones and Anthony Mason.
The basketball effect of this latest deal remains to be seen. What is certain is that Portland, the community, is pained to lose Grant after three years.
“It’s a shame to me that the organization would not be more concerned with the influence of their players than with just getting a ring,” said Pastor Steven Holt of Fellowship Church, to which Grant belongs. “What they don’t seem to understand is fan loyalty, fan involvement, city concerns. Who cares if our church has the greatest music program? If we don’t care about the people in our congregation, our church is going to be empty. Brian did a lot to change the attitude about the Trail Blazers.”
This is why Reyes says the Blazers’ owners have “it all mixed up,” that this Northwest city didn’t need a championship to be happy, that it was satisfied knowing a quality person was on the team. Perhaps some see that as naive, inconsistent with society’s conception of professional sport, in which winning games is paramount and philanthropy is an occasional benefit. Perhaps some would even say Reyes’ opinion is self-serving, because of Grant’s benefit to him.
Yet there is so much consensus about Grant’s value among those who care for hurting, dying kids. “We are going to sadly, dearly miss Brian,” said Tom Soma, executive director of the Ronald McDonald Houses of Portland.
Grant doesn’t seek attention, and doesn’t like talking about his charitable work. Jon Ulsh, executive director of the Doernbecher Foundation for children, says, “He does good deeds and goes to some pain to avoid attention.”
Grant’s publicist, Brian Berger, calls him “secretive to an extreme,” which can leave Berger rather conflicted. Try being a publicist for someone who was disappointed he won the league’s J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award in 1999, because people might think he wanted publicity. Berger figures that doctors and nurses and families spread the good will for him, and they do.
There are just so many stories, one wonders how Grant has enough time.
Putting on a Thanksgiving dinner at a local restaurant. Serving as a spokesman for the “Kids Making Miracles” video. Organizing the match drive for Woody’s bone marrow transplant, in which more people showed up to get checked than there were African-Africans on the state’s bone marrow registry (Woody ultimately found a donor, though not from that drive). Visiting Dash Thomas over and over in not-so-close Sublimity, Ore., until the boy died in February 1999 and Grant dedicated the season to him by scribbling his name on his basketball shoes.
Holt speaks of how Grant befriended a boy in his congregation who was acting out because his parents were squabbling. “Without anyone knowing, without anyone asking, Brian took him to his house, spent a weekend with him, watched some movies,” Holt said. “Imagine a 10-year-old riding around with an NBA star in his Hummer.”
Soma is taken with how soft-spoken, sympathetic and careful Grant is. Grant left his mark at the Ronald McDonald House, literally, and not just with a golf tournament that raised about $225,000. A 13-year-old named Jason had asked Grant to sign his head, bald after chemotherapy for his bone cancer. Grant looked at Soma a bit baffled, wondering what he should do. He signed Jason’s wheelchair. Jason had hair the next time Grant saw him, and when Jason asked him to sign his artificial leg, Grant thought it appropriate. “He makes himself unimposing,” Soma said. “And he always looks people in the eye.”
When he can. Sometimes, the littlest kids are scared by Grant’s size and hide behind their parents, who have come from all over Oregon to meet him at RMH.
Linda White, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club of Portland, recalls the first time Grant was in her office. He looked at her wall and saw photos of Jerome Kersey and Terry Porter, former Trail Blazers who also were community-conscious. Grant asked how he could get on her wall. Now it’s a shrine to him. “It’s a big loss to us,” White said. “He wouldn’t just walk in for a few minutes and walk out. He stays for hours, and signs everything.”
Said Ulsh: “What has been so amazing has been his consistency over time. Day in, day out. And with all the examples I know, there are others I’m sure I don’t.”
But word gets out. That’s why Grant felt the need in 1998 to form a foundation, to narrow his focus to seriously ill and underprivileged kids. Shortly after the trade to Miami was agreed upon earlier this month, Grant went to RMH and Doernbecher’s Hospital during lunch breaks of his basketball camp. Lauren Forman, who heads Grant’s foundation, says Grant was teary when reading banners made by RMH families, some coming from far away to see him off.
Grant was even more shaken at Doernbecher’s, where he is known to slip into the rooms of the sleeping kids so they have a photo with him waiting when they awake. On this day, Grant saw a 6-year-old girl who had her leg amputated. He checked in on a 3-year-old girl with incurable bone cancer.
“Brian was just crying,” Forman said. “The only day tougher was when Dash died. Because here is a family that we’ve visited, and he gets to know them and sees their good days and bad days.”
Grant is keeping his house in Portland and will return there in the summer. Still, he won’t be there year-round, and that’s why these are difficult days for many. Forman is used to taking calls from Grant, when he would check in on road trips to see how “little Trent” or others were doing. Now she’s getting them from local citizens, venting about the loss of everything about Grant except the 7.3 points he contributed on the court last season.
No one seems to blame Grant, just the Blazers.
“I hope your city realizes what you are getting,” Reyes said of Miami. “He will plant trees of hope wherever he goes.”
The Rasta Monsta is coming to South Florida, to play power forward, fish for marlin, help people in secret, while staying linked to Forman and Berger. Reyes, never much of an NBA fan, says he’s “going back to watching wrestling.” He has tried to explain this trade business to Jovita, who is doing better but still at risk, and to Ramon, while understanding that Grant needs control of his career. He wishes the Blazers saw this as he does.
“Talking about this is hard,” Reyes said last week as he reflected on the man Jovita calls uncle. “September is coming soon.”
