Love Always, Mom

When each of them lost the one who meant most, Rice seniors Jason McKrieth and Michael Harris did just what mom would have wanted: played on

Jason McKrieth is happy to talk about her. He'll walk you into his apartment, a generic threebedroom in a generic brick complex off I-59 in Houston, and down the gray-carpeted hall to his bedroom. He barely gestures to the dozens of Yankees caps mounted on the wall. But then he'll stop in front of a giant photo collage hanging next to his desk. This picture? he says. That's my mom as a baby. That's her as a kid in Massachusetts. There she is in her field-hockey skirt, there in her wedding dress. Don't we look alike? (They do: same light skin, almond eyes, easy smile.) And that's me, he boasts, pointing to yet another photo of his mother lifting up her T-shirt to show off a round, pregnant belly. McKrieth has hundreds of pictures. If you can stay long enough, he'll show them all.

Three steps down the hall, in Michael Harris' room, no pictures hang. There are a few remotecontrol cars on the floor, and a straw cowboy hat is perched in his closet. Harris leans his 6'6" frame way back in his one chair, legs splayed in front of him. He is glued to NBA Live 2005, willing the Heat to a few more buckets. Harris, unlike his roommate, is uncomfortable talking about his mother. She was tall like me, he says with quiet sadness, never looking away from the TV as Virtual Shaq nails a 10-footer. To tell you how tall, he'd have to check her driver's license. That, he keeps in his wallet.

Fate brought Harris and McKrieth, raised 1,700 miles apart, together. Fate and basketball-and two phone calls from two summer-league coaches who knew Rice coach Willis Wilson through friends of friends. When they met, neither Harris nor McKrieth could have known the similarities of their circumstance-or of their resilience. And nobody could have predicted what they would do for a perennially sub-.500 team. Because of them, the student section in Autry Court now overflows with signs and body painters who spell out "Mike Harris County" and "Fear the Curtain" (in mock homage to the drape that hides the rest of the gym on game nights). The fans cheer as McKrieth hits treys or works the floor before dishing to Harris, who abuses opposing big men with an assortment of post moves. And they see the two seniors point to each other in mutual appreciation. But the story of Harris and McKrieth is only marginally about what happens on the court. It is more about what fans don't see-the weights they carry, of death and anger, of secrets and words not easy to say.

SCHENECTADY, N.Y., is an industrial town of about 61,000 on the Mohawk River, 20 miles northwest of Albany. In 1995, Terry McKrieth and her children, Jason and Michel, started a new life there with her second husband, Kurby Jones. Jason, who was 11, liked Kurby, which was more than he could say about his real dad back in Massachusetts. Michael McKrieth left one day when his son was 5. "I don't remember much about him," says Jason, "other than he was big, like a bear." Kurby was big too, a 6'3", 200-pound construction worker who hit his share of jumpers back in the day. He taught Jason how to play the game and made Terry, alone for so long after her husband walked out, feel safe.

Jason made the varsity at Schenectady High as a freshman in 1997. Not long after, Kurby got sick. He was always tired and had a nasty cough. As he shuttled in and out of the hospital, they said it was cancer that was making his burly body waste away. On Dec. 10, 1997, the night Jason scored his first varsity points for the Patriots, Kurby died. He went from healthy to gone in a matter of weeks.

A new loneliness descended on her family, so Terry focused on keeping her children moving forward. She told Jason to do his homework and play basketball, in that order. She said she wanted him to do something special, to have an impact. "She was my rock," says Jason.

"Something special" began to take shape when Jason turned down a scholarship to Syracuse for a full ride to Rice. Terry wanted the best education for her son, and Jason wanted a team to make his own, not one that was already made. Rice was the perfect fit: in academic circles it's referred to as Princeton South, though in basketball circles it isn't referred to much at all. On a late-summer day in 2001, they pit-stopped at a Houston Marriott before dropping Jason off at school. That's where he met the big kid from Hillsboro, Texas, with a Ben Wallace Afro, starched jeans and a country drawl.

HILLSBORO ISN'T much more than a gas-up-andget-out stop between Dallas and Waco. The neighborhoods are bad, the drug scene is bad and, if you stick around too long, the things that happen to you are bad. For Cheryl Brooks, that bad thing was Wendell Harris, Michael's father. He was a construction worker too-but that's where the positive comparisons with Kurby Jones end. According to Michael, he was abusive, hitting Cheryl with an iron, a vacuum cleaner, whatever he could get his hands on. One day she took Michael, then 2, and moved in with her mother and a sister, Debra.

Michael thrived at Grandma's house. Cheryl didn't stand for nonsense: back-talking, skipping chores and coming in late all warranted a whupping. But the family attended church each Sunday and, as a treat, went on trail rides and to local hoedowns. When Michael was 8, his mom-who was 6'3" and had been a baller in high school-began to take him to a local blacktop. She showed him how to shoot and pass and dribble while they talked about life-about girls and being respectful and getting good grades, about not letting anyone get in the way of your dreams. "At first people made fun of me for being out there with my mom," says Michael. Then Cheryl would beat them all at around-theworld, and the jokes stopped.

Mike learned well. In middle school, he showed off straight A's, perfect attendance and a pretty jumper. All the while, though, he, like everyone else, wasn't privy to his mother's secret. "Nobody knew Cheryl was sick," says Castylle Brooks, another of her sisters. "She was in a lot more pain than she let on." In the beginning, Cheryl was just lethargic and didn't have much of an appetite. But she spent much of the summer of 1997 at Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center in Waco. Her weight loss continued and, by the fall, she had trouble sitting up on her own. Michael continued to go to school and to play ball, because she didn't want him hanging around the hospital.

One night in October, Aunt Debra found Michael at a football game and hustled him into her car. They drove the half-hour to Waco in silence; Debra didn't tell him until they got to the hospital that his mom had died. "I was the only one who wasn't there," Michael says. "I didn't get to say goodbye."

The next day, Michael, a freshman at Hillsboro High, was back in class. He asked for no more details of his mom's illness-and hasn't to this day. Instead, he focused on what she'd told him back on that blacktop. It's why he went right back to school, and why Jason McKrieth, when he popped his head into Michael's hotel room four years later, found Michael's extended family--grandmother, aunts and uncles, half-brothers and sisters, cousins and friends--ready to see him off to his own new life.

HARRIS AND MCKRIETH arrived at Rice ready to rule. "They came into a struggling program and wanted to take over," says Coach Wilson. "They wanted to play right away." And right away they bonded, despite the cultural gap between the brash Easterner and the laid-back Texan. Eventually, they figured out that McKrieth's yells of "money" and Harris' cries of "turkey water" meant the same thing. They competed for most free throws made and lowest minigolf score. "They get on each other's nerves, but they love each other," says Wilson. "They're like husband and wife."

That first year, McKrieth was the only freshman starter in Rice's season-opener against Navy. He scored 12 points, and the Owls won. After the game, he was in Coach Wilson's office, still wearing his sweat-soaked uniform, when he got a call. Jason, said his younger sister Michel, you need to come home. Mom's sick, and it's looking a lot like Kurby. Jason hopped the next flight to New York.

McKrieth had been getting periodic updates about his mother from his sister since he got to school. Mom took another day off from work. Mom is really tired. Mom is complaining about allergies. Jason never thought it was serious. But by the time he walked into the ICU at St. Clare's Hospital in Schenectady, Terry was hooked to a ventilator. She could communicate only by writing on a dry-erase board, and even that wore her out.

The doctor took Jason and some of his family into a room down the hall. Your mom has double pneumonia, he said. Okay, Jason thought, pneumonia isn't too bad. But the doctor wasn't finished. We see this type of pneumonia in a lot of HIV cases. HIV? Jason freaked. "For four years, I thought Kurby died of cancer," he says. "I was mad at him, and mad at my mom for keeping it from me."

But when the shock wore off, Jason came to realize the reason for the secrets. His mom wanted him to live his life. She knew he'd feel obligated to care for her if he knew the seriousness of her illness, that he wouldn't have gone away to school. He recalled how thrilled she was when she'd dropped him off at Rice just three months ago.

So day in and day out, as the machines pumped her lungs and her body failed her, Jason held his mother's hand. When her heart stopped on Dec. 7, 2001, three weeks after she'd entered the hospital, Jason was holding on to her still.

Right after the funeral, he too went back: back to school, back to practice, back to Michael Harris. For the first time, Harris and McKrieth really talked. "Mike told me our moms passed away the same way," says McKrieth. What he meant stays between them, a secret that's brought them closer. Michael's family won't talk about the cause of Cheryl's death because, unlike McKrieth, who has always demanded answers, Michael doesn't want any. He is satisfied with his memories. Sometimes, when no one else is listening, he shares them with Jason.

On an Athletes in Action trip to China in 2004, amid the curves of the Great Wall, Michael told Jason of the solace he finds in the Bible. Jason was baptized soon after. They talk of their fathers; Jason couldn't care less if he never sees his again, but Harris drops by Wendell's place on holidays to be a role model to his half-brothers and sisters. "I like to show my dad I'm not going to be like he was," says Harris. And they talk of the tears they fight back when they see a mom buy popcorn for her son at the movies, or when a dad walks through campus with his daughter, or when they hear a teammate call a parent for a long-distance hug. Wilson often sees McKrieth rub the cross tattooed on his right arm, the one with "my fear is my courage" written underneath. And on bad days, like his mom's birthday or the anniversary of her death, a vehemence overtakes Harris' game. "He plays like he's trying to tear the rim down," Wilson says.

Most of the time, McKrieth and Harris put up a cheerful front, all yes-ma'ams, no-sirs and smiles. The court is the only place they allow their fury to erupt, and the happy side effect for the Rice Owls is a rare respectability. Last season, Harris and McKrieth were first and second on the team in scoring and led Rice to a 23—11 record and its first NIT spot in 11 years. This season Harris put up 20 double-doubles despite being double-teamed every night. McKrieth averages 14 ppg and on Dec. 30 earned the WAC's first triple-double in three years. For the first time in a generation, NBA scouts are milling around Autry Court.

Of course, there is a possibility neither Harris nor McKrieth will be selected in June's NBA draft. But it is a certainty that their families will soon gather to see each of them graduate from college.

That was always first on Mom's list, anyway.

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