A random one is Brian Grant, the former NBA player. One year, Mrs. W and I were visiting Miami over Christmas week and we saw him (in his Heat warmups) talking to a couple of homeless people outside a gas station in Miami. He didn't just hand them money, but had bought them food and was sitting and talking with them.
Pretty good lead for
this article. Grant, by the way, has early-onset Parkinson's ...
Suddenly, here he is, this dreadlocked, tattooed revelation that has burst upon the postseason stage fully formed, as admirable a person as he is a player. How did Brian Grant crash this party, and why didn't we know he was coming? These aren't just the playoffs, these are the conference finals: The pretenders have been banished, and the teams that remain are supposed to have All-Stars and MVP candidates as their foundations, players whose stories America knows intimately. The driving forces are supposed to be Patrick and Reggie, Tim and the Admiral, not someone who has spent most of his career in relative obscurity and in Sacramento--which, until recently, were more or less the same thing.
But here's Grant, the Portland Trail Blazers' power forward and the rock upon which they stand. Rasheed Wallace may be more athletic, Isaiah Rider and Damon Stoudamire more explosive, but Grant is the Blazers' most consistent player. He may look like a bulked-up Bob Marley, but his peers know that he's closer to being the James Brown of the NBA. "He's the hardest-working guy in the league," says Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs. "You've got to respect that cat."
If we had known him better, that cat surely would have had our respect long before now. Had we realized that Grant was a man of such substance, we might have expected his noble postseason performance, in which he has been matched against three All-Stars and has suffered two bell-ringing blows to his face, one of which opened a six-stitch gash over his right eye. We would have known that his struggles against Duncan and the Spurs in last Saturday's Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, an 80-76 Blazers loss in which Grant had only eight points and seven rebounds, wouldn't discourage him. Nor would Monday's heartbreaking 86-85 defeat, as Grant scored 10 points and again grabbed seven boards. The losses only served to inspire him to get his hands dirtier as the series shifted to Portland where a friendlier crowd will greet the Blazers for Friday's Game 3. "Hard work comes naturally to me," Grant says.
Why wouldn't it? While other kids were playing at basketball camps and in AAU leagues, Grant spent many of his teenage summers cutting tobacco in the fields around Georgetown, Ohio, which was considerably more taxing than establishing low-post position. "We hacked away from morning to night, on our knees most of the time, in the heat and humidity," he says. "We'd have to jump snakes. I hate snakes. And there was this stuff that came from the plants--tobacco gum, we called it. It would get in the creases of your hands and in your fingernails. It would be almost a year before you could get it all out."
Grant is 27 years old and has been in the league for five years, and we really should have been paying attention to him. Then we would have known it was completely in character for him to spend the idle months during the NBA lockout regularly making the two-hour round-trip from Portland to Sublimity, Ore., to visit terminally ill 12-year-old Dash Thomas, a brain cancer victim to whom he dedicated this season after Dash died in February. We already would have known the reason why Grant has become the type of guy who will buy a Santa hat and toys at Christmastime and make spur-of-the-moment visits to children's hospitals, which is the kind of philanthropy that earned him the NBA's J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award this year. When he was in second grade, Brian contracted double pneumonia and was in the hospital for weeks. "They had me in this tent, this bubble," he says. "Knowing that your mom was coming when she got off work or your uncles were going to come see you didn't keep you from feeling lonely all the time. I'll always remember that feeling. That's why I go see kids in the hospital a lot."
Maybe now you're beginning to understand what Blazers forward Walt Williams means when he says solemnly, "Brian Grant is a man." Maybe you can see why Grant, who had never advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs before this season, hasn't wilted under playoff pressure, why the brutal elbows to his head from Karl Malone during the Blazers' second-round series against the Utah Jazz left him only momentarily rattled. When Grant wasn't cutting tobacco, baling hay or playing basketball, he often watched his father and uncles work at a factory welding boxcars. He saw the way they sliced potatoes in half and placed them over their eyes to soothe the pain of the flash burns they got when the flame passed too close to their faces. One night Grant's father came home from work with a patch over his eye from having been hit by an errant piece of hot metal. "A cut on my eyebrow?" Grant says. "I mean, stitch it up and let's play."
Earl Anthony
