Before St. Louis U. basketball games, Joshua Brown sits down in a folding chair courtside, and Billikens players, coaches and staff going through pregame preparations stop what they’re doing and come over to say hi and talk.
During games, he sits two rows in back of the SLU bench, prime seating to be sure, cheering on the Billikens.
After the game, he stops by the SLU locker room, chatting with players.
He sits in on practices. The players have pictures of him on their phones. Sometimes they go to visit him.
Joshua Brown is neither a powerful booster nor a prized recruit. He’s a 9-year-old from Belleville with a brain tumor who has been adopted by the Billikens. It’s supposed to be the Bills who brighten up his life as Joshua and his family go through an arduous time.
It turns out brightening up people’s lives is a two-way street.
“Seeing what he’s going through and what he has to deal with and his family puts our life in perspective,” forward Rob Loe said. “It’s nothing compared to what he has to deal with, having all those surgeries. A bad day at class, a hard test is nothing by comparison. Just seeing him smile is really cool. To go through all that pain and suffering and still smile is cool.”
“There’s so much more that’s important off the court,” said guard Jake Barnett, Joshua’s favorite player. “To see a kid in that situation fighting the way he has, it’s inspiring. I get a lot out of it. I know he does too. When we play basketball, he gets excited.”
“He’s just great inspiration,” said SLU interim coach Jim Crews. “Here’s a kid that’s really battling circumstances and the spirit within him is tremendous. He has that fighting spirit about himself and he’s such a warm-hearted kid. You see situations like that and it really puts things in perspective, to concentrate on the significance instead of the bombardment of the temporary.”
Joshua – the players call him Josh – is easy to spot on the sidelines. He’s the youngster with no hair thanks to radiation and chemotherapy, with pronounced scars on his scalp from the various operations.
But there is release for him in basketball, even though he’s not much of a player.
“I think he loves it,” said his mother, Rhonda. “This has become his thing.:
“It’s huge,” said his father, Doug, a project director for a design firm. “He’s at that age where he’s just starting to get into sports and he’s never really been exposed to very much of that. So to see it first-hand like this, it’s opened up a whole new world for him. This has allowed him to get involved. It’s a great distraction from everything else you’re dealing with.”
These are tough times for Joshua. His first brain tumor was when he was two months old. He had surgery to remove it, but he still had annual MRIs to see if it came back. He was fine through last year, when he started having headaches. His parents took him for his checkup ahead of schedule, which found his present tumor, which is much more aggressive.
Joshua, who’s in the third grade at Whiteside Elementary School, has a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), and, his mother says, if you Google it, it doesn’t sound good at all – only about 14 percent of GBM patients under the age of 50 live five years – though she says the prospects are much better for younger patients. Joshua has had chemotherapy and radiation – he’s only recently lost his thick red curly hair, revealing all his surgical scars – and started a new round of chemotherapy last week. “This is probably the hardest year he’s had in his nine years,” Doug said.
The SLU basketball team and Joshua came together through the Friends of Jaclyn Foundation, a group that connects children with brain tumors with local college sports teams. The foundation was started by the parents of Jaclyn Murphy, who as a 9-year-old in 2004 had taken inspiration during treatments for a malignant tumor by a poster in her room of a college lacrosse player celebrating a victory. She declared that she would play lacrosse again when well, and eventually, through friends, word of this desire got to the Northwestern lacrosse team, which made her part of the team and, in just its third year of competition, won the NCAA championship.
The Browns had read about the foundation and signed up. The group reached out to SLU and the request found its way to Mike Lepore, SLU’s director of basketball operations, who signed them up. While many college programs have welcomed patients through the program, SLU is one of the few Division I men’s basketball programs taking part. It’s easy to forget that college basketball players aren’t far removed from being kids themselves; the icebreaker between Joshua and the Billikens turned out to be the cartoon Phineas and Ferb. “It’s turned into something more than we expected,” Lepore said.
Now, the family, which includes Joshua’s 6-year-old sister Allison, is decked out in blue and white behind the SLU bench at most home games. Joshua does a dead-on impression of Crews’ mannerisms, and lately has taken to wearing ties, which makes an interesting fashion statement when he wears one with his SLU jersey (he wears No. 1) at games. Rhonda said Joshua once walked right past David Freese of the Cardinals on one trip to Cardinal Glennon Hospital, where he gets his treatments. “He said, I don’t like baseball, I only like SLU basketball,” she said. “I said, would you have stopped if it was a SLU player, (and he said) Yes!”
“The cool thing about Josh is he’s always got a smile on his face,” Barnett said. “If it was me sitting in the hospital for a couple days, I might grow to be bored and kind of bitter. Every time I came to visit, Josh was smiling. A lot of kids with circumstances will mold to what those circumstances are. For him, even being in the hospital for a few days as a kid, he’s taking it in stride. He doesn’t let circumstances dictate his attitude. It’s encouraging to me.”
“It’s such a positive experience for him and us,” Rhonda said. “It’s fun. The guys are great, the school, everybody is all welcoming. … His thing is going to games, being there. He’s their buddy, their pseudo team member. It’s a positive we can look forward to.”
Whether it’s coincidence or not, SLU has won every game he’s been to this season, and his parents aren’t sure how this passionate fan will handle a defeat. That’s one more thing about Joshua, as he battles a brain tumor. He doesn’t know how to lose.
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