Nba Moms Are Network Of Support League Of Women Help Give Guidance To High-Priced Athletes
When NBA players need a mom’s guidance, Charlotte Brandon’s organization is ready to help. After doctors discovered death’s fingerprints on Brandon’s liver, she made up her mind that until the cancerous spots spread to her lymph nodes she’d dole out pieces of her heart.
That was four years ago. Much to her doctors’ amazement, the cancer has retreated. The NBA has been one of the beneficiaries of Brandon’s new lease on life. Her benevolence blankets the league like a hand-stitched patchwork quilt.
Cleveland guard Terrell Brandon is Charlotte’s flesh and blood, but everyone in the NBA is her brood. The founder of Mothers of Professional Basketball Players, she is the league’s den mother. On the day set aside for pampering those who devote their lives to nurturing, one of Brandon’s surrogate sons sent along this bouquet:
“I’d just like to say thank you to Mama B.,” said Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal. “She’s a nice, genuine person.”
The Mothers opened their arms and their hearts to the family of Toronto forward Carlos Rogers earlier this year after his sister died. O’Neal is also among those who have found comfort in Brandon’s brainchild, a coast-to-coast outreach program that offers NBA (and now, WNBA) players a reassuring voice, a motherly hug or a home-cooked meal.
For the nomadic professional basketball player, Brandon and more than two dozen other networking mothers are only a phone call away. They are the broken-down player’s AAA: Accessible, Assuring Adults.
“Some of the guys don’t have two-parent homes,” Brandon said from her home in Portland. “The thought was that if we could band together, we could create an extended family that reaches out to players who perhaps don’t have a family of their own.”
Terrell Brandon, 27, and sister Tracy, 31, grew up privileged but certainly not rich. They were showered with love and attention. Charlotte Brandon and her husband, Charles, an assistant pastor in a Pentecostal church, taught their children the three R’s - respect, resiliency and restraint - and have practiced what they preached, weathering 31 years of matrimony.
“So you see where I’m coming from,” Brandon said.
Her family rallied to Brandon’s side after she was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1993. She is convinced the prayers of those closest to her chased the disease into remission. She had a lifeline to cling to when times were tough. Why shouldn’t others?
“The doctors told my husband that if the cancer got into my lymph nodes, that could be it for me,” Brandon said. “I feel like God blessed me. He raised me up, and for this reason I’m trying to do all the good I can. I’m on a mission.”
Brandon, 51, was in San Antonio last year to watch her son play in his first NBA All-Star game when she found her calling. In the course of mingling with mothers of other players, Brandon realized she wasn’t alone in feeling like an alien in her son’s world.
She was relieved, too, to discover she wasn’t the only one who worried that her child’s newfound riches might lead to his spiritual and emotional ruin; who wondered if the players appreciated how much good they could do in their communities; who winced at the thought of an increasing number of teenagers stepping into a world that’s even less neat and tidy than the bedrooms at the homes they left behind.
As the mothers compared notes, Brandon wondered: If this is all so unnerving for the adults, what must it be like for the children? And so the food-and-phone network was born.
“I know it’s not a materialistic need,” Brandon said. “Sometimes these players just need a motherly touch. I’ll have players call me up and say, ‘Mama B., I woke up, I don’t feel good today.’ I just talk common sense to them. I’ll ask them things like, ‘What’d you have for breakfast? Are you eating right?’
“With so many of the players, you can tell when things aren’t going well on the court. It eats away at them. I just try to give them assurances that they’re OK, that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’ll have a little prayer with them. I tell them, ‘This too shall pass.”’
Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, who at 18 is the youngest player in the league, applauds what Brandon is doing.
“People don’t realize it, but it’s kind of difficult out here,” said Bryant, whose mother moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to help him in his transition. “It’s nice to have that mother-type influence.”
xxxx Signing up Mothers of Professional Basketball Players will hold its second convention in Las Vegas in August. Fifty mothers and 15 players already have registered for the long weekend of fellowship intermingled with casino chips.