Life, death and basketball

The two men who inspired Villa Park's Jamie Glover to dribble a ball are no longer here, but the lessons learned are

This story is about a rock - the rubber kind that gets dribbled, passed around and shot through a hoop. And the flesh-and-bones kind that helps keep a family intact through adversity.

Jamie Glover, a junior guard on the Villa Park girls basketball team, probably could not have been one if it were not for the other.

"Basketball is my love," she says.

Her fascination with the sport began at age 6 in the same Villa Park gymnasium she now frequents as a player, though it was from the bleachers where she felt that initial tug from the game. With wide eyes she watched her half-brother, 18-year-old Justin Willson, handle the basketball like a poet weaving his words.

"I wanted to be like him," Glover recalls of the varsity standout.

Within a matter of days, she found herself where so many children do: standing in the driveway, daughter and father, a basketball hoop hanging over the garage and hovering over them both.

Jamie's father, Robert Glover, put the rock in her tiny hands for the first time.

Dribbling was Lesson No.1.

***

At 18, Justin Willson had become what most teenage boys aspire to be: a handsome, popular star athlete. Less than a year after that magical night when he unknowingly had inspired his younger, half-sister to learn the game of basketball, he walked across the Villa Park stage in cap and gown, a high school graduate.

But just when it seemed the world was at his feet, a brain aneurysm intervened.

Justin was at a friend's summer party when he inexplicably collapsed and slipped into a coma. He clung to life for five weeks, but then he was gone.

For Jamie, then 7, death was still a very mysterious thing. And for her mind's eye, the immediate days after Justin's death remain mostly a blur. She remembers only a quiet house that was "crammed, calm and sad," and a mother who rarely smiled, rarely did much of anything except cry.

Justin was Nancy Willson's first-born son, one of three children from a previous marriage. Willson eventually had three children with Robert Glover, including Jamie, and she would help raise Glover's three children from his previous marriage.

But in the two years after Justin's death, Jamie would watch her mother lay on the couch for days at a time and gain a hefty amount of weight. Meanwhile, the lessons from Dad - passing, shooting, defending - continued just outside on the driveway. But sport could only take Jamie's mind off so much. Her mom wasn't doing well.

"She went into a big depression for the next couple of years," Jamie says of her mother.

Jamie has a twin brother, Jon, but Nancy Willson says it was Jamie who took on most of the added responsibility around the house while she battled depression, particularly when it came to caring for her younger brother, Matthew, now 13.

And with Jamie's help, things began to improve, the mood inside the Willson/Glover home gradually improving along with Jamie's jump shot. Three years after Justin's death, Nancy Willson had climbed out of her depression, and Jamie found herself playing basketball with the boys - she was the only girl on an All-Net junior team.

Her brother, Jon, was a teammate, and her father was the coach.

Finally, everything inJamie's world seemed right again.

The current lesson from Dad was learning to use the left hand.

***

Robert Glover was, by all accounts, a man's man. During his adult life, he stood 6-foot-5, weighed about 225 pounds, played football at St.Mary's College and in 1976 and '77 he went to training camp with the Oakland Raiders as a wide receiver.

To Jamie, he was Superman.

But in 1998, Superman discovered his kryptonite. It was terminal lung cancer.

Jamie's father told her what to do: Take care of the family, do well in school, and, of course, keep playing ball.

During Robert Glover's final months, it was Jamie who arrived at his apartment (Jamie's parents had split many years before, though Jamie's father remained close) every day after school. She would wash his sheets and clean his clothes, cook him spaghetti and bring him his medication, rub his shoulders and massage his feet, and apply peroxide and bandages to the sores that continually formed on his legs.

On March 5, 1999, Robert Glover, 52, died.

A day later, Jamie Glover, 11, retired to her bedroom and, in neat cursive, wrote a two-page letter addressed to no one in particular. In it, she described some of her father's final symptoms, along with some of his final dreams.

She wrote: "He would always talk about how I could get a good scholarship in college and then make it to the WNBA. I just have to work hard to make it there. I know I could get a scholarship and make it there. And if I am doing that I'm doing it for my dad."

Somewhere, sometime, Dad's lesson had turned from basketball to life.

***

Jamie Glover, 16, with brown eyes and an olive complexion, now lives with four others - mother Nancy, brothers Jon and Matthew and half-brother Brandon Willson, 22. She helps with all household chores, often cooks dinner for the family and is frequently driving her little brother around to wherever he needs to go in the Chevy truck that she pays for through her weekend babysitting jobs.

On the court, Jamie Glover, the 5-foot-8 point guard, handles the ball well, is good with her left hand. She can hit from anywhere, though she usually looks to spread the floor with a good pass.

She's a three-year starter and the assists leader on a Villa Park team that has gone from winning just six games during her freshman year to being ranked No.9 in Orange County.

In the classroom, Jamie earns only A's and B's, that college scholarship always on her mind.

She is a gym rat, a bookworm and, as Nancy Willson will tell you, "a model child, the perfect daughter."

And it is the contents of a little tin box that Jamie keeps in her room that has kept her from veering off course, from letting the pain of the past or the added familial responsibilities break her.

In the box she keeps a color photo of her father, the five gold and silver coins he gave to her just before he died, a note he once wrote to her on Valentine's Day ("To my Jamie, God couldn't have given me a better gift than you. I love you, Dad.") and two pages of her writing, the cursive heavily faded but the meaning of the words still perfectly clear:

"I'm doing it for my dad."

Her brother Justin would undoubtedly be just as proud.

"She's an unbelievable picture of strength," Villa Park coach Kim Cram-Torres says.

And so the lessons continue, only now it's Jamie with the rock in her hand, the wisdom at her disposal.

© Orange County Register, January 5, 2005