University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Mismatched Meaning
December 28, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
I was sitting courtside in the Bahamas with Eric Montross when it happened.
This sounds like the setup to some sort of very strange joke—especially when you factor in that this is being written on the day Shane Battier was spotted in line for the Smith Center media room bathroom, so everything seems a little upside down right now—but it's the truth.
Carolina had just defeated UCLA in the Battle 4 Atlantis back in November, and the next game at the Imperial Arena featured UAB against Florida. As the Blazers came out for warmups, it soon became evident that each player was wearing two different shoes.
Being old and crotchety, I of course assumed this was a “kids these days” kind of fashion statement. Probably listened to their music too loud, the ruffians. And stay off my lawn.
Then UAB came to Chapel Hill to play Carolina on Saturday, and in the days leading up to the game, those young ruffians gave this old codger some education. The Tar Heels won the game, 89-58, getting some encouraging play from Justin Jackson and Marcus Paige, plus some highlight reel dunks from an assortment of players.
And they did most all of it with each player on both teams wearing two different shoes.
It's not a fashion statement. It's the brainchild of UAB coach Jerod Haase, the former Roy Williams player and longtime Williams assistant who is now the head coach of the Blazers. Three seasons ago, Haase's program adopted Elijah Serritt, a five-year-old fighting cancer who has since undergone 17 surgeries and multiple rounds of chemotherapy.
The mismatched shoes are Haase's way of bringing attention to Elijah and all the kids like him who are fighting pediatric cancer. UAB makes opponents aware of the meaning of the mismatched shoes, and Carolina chose to join the Blazers for one game.
It's easy to give it passing notice, consider it to be a nice gesture, and move on. After all, we wear pink for breast cancer and dump ice water on ourselves for ALS and now we're wearing mismatched shoes and tomorrow, well, who knows? Sometimes it's easy to fall victim to awareness fatigue.
But actions like this matter. They might seem weird to the old and crotchety or to the fan in the Smith Center stands who doesn't know the story, but to a kid in a bed at UNC Hospital, turning on ESPN2 on a Saturday afternoon and finding out a couple teams of college athletes care about them might be enough to get through today.
Eric Montross has been involved with the North Carolina Children's Hospital since he was an undergraduate, and founded his wildly successful Father's Day Basketball Camp as a way to give back to that facility. “A lot of people wonder what we can do for kids who are suffering, because medically there is nothing that those of us who are not doctors can do,” Montross said on Saturday afternoon. “But these kids in the hospital, they look up to the athletes and the teams and the coaches. It is a tremendous help to them to see that they are important enough for these athletes to focus on. It gives the kids a sense of empowerment, and makes them feel, 'I'm important too, and I can fight this.'”
It doesn't seem like you'd need any further reason to wear two different shoes. But just in case you do, you could've looked down to the basket just across from the Carolina bench--you know, the one where J.P. Tokoto rammed through his monstrous second-half dunk. That's where you would have found Reece Holbrook, who is best known these days as a 12-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina. Reece's dad just happens to be the head baseball coach at South Carolina and a close friend of Williams.
There was a time not too many years ago—at the same time it seems like a lifetime ago—that Reece was better known as the inspiration behind the Reece Holbrook Golf Classic, the best event of its kind that I've ever seen. Reece was two years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia and the greatest thing I can tell you today is not one single person in the crowd of 19,124 thought of him on Saturday as “the kid with cancer.”
They thought of him as a really lucky kid who got to be ballboy, as a kid who got to Chapel Hill nearly three hours before the game so he could shoot baskets on the Smith Center court. He took three-pointers and he took midcourt shots and he did pretty much exactly what you would do if you had an hour in the Smith Center to take as many shots as you wanted.
He and his parents, along with his younger brother Cooper, were driving to the Smith Center on Saturday.
“Do you remember this route when we used to go to the hospital?” his dad asked.
“I remember how bad the hospital smelled,” Reece said.
And that was it. Just a bad memory.
“I watched him run up and down the court earlier and I thought, 'How lucky are we?'” Chad said on Saturday. “We have really close friends whose kids never saw a day like this. Sometimes we get so caught up in who wins and who loses and what coach should be fired, and there are kids out there fighting for their lives.”
So, yes, Reece had on two different shoes on Saturday. On the way to the game, I asked my son, Asher, if he remembered Reece. Since they were going to be ballboys together, it seemed like a reasonable question.
His look made it obvious this was an elementary question. “Reece Holbrook?” he said. “Yes, I definitely do.”
Well, of course. I definitely do, too. I don't see how anyone could ever forget him. He was only two years old and he had to go through so much and Asher spent a lot of time around him as a toddler and so…
“I remember him from basketball camp this summer,” Asher said. “He's really cool.”
Yes, he is. And so are the people who bring attention to kids like he used to be, to allow them to turn into the cool kids they're meant to be.
For more information on the Holbrooks' Win Anyway Foundation, click here.
