Turning Loss into Life: A Pierre Curtis Story
March 1, 2010 • By Tim Chapman, The Breeze
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Part 4: Senior basketball player finds new perspective as proud father
(Part 5 will run in Thursday’s issue. Part 6 will run Thursday on breezejmu.org. Parts 1-3, originally published in 2007, can be found below this article.)
It is a cold Wednesday night in early February and an all-too-familiar scene for Pierre Curtis. As the clock winds down on an embarrassing defeat at home, he watches the lower sections of the Convocation Center empty.
Season-ticket holders, disgusted and disappointed, leave the dim arena as quickly as they can. A sense of emptiness, as ugly and as lonely as the vacant mustard-colored, plastic seats, fills the outdated venue.
Pierre grew accustomed to this result in his first two years at JMU. It feels like a morgue, he thinks.
He isn’t angry at the fan response. He is the first to admit that the Dukes played terribly in the 68-48 loss to conference foe Hofstra. Pierre has experienced countless double-digit losses in his career, but this year his responses to these moments are considerably different.
There’s no brooding as he trudges off the court. Pierre doesn’t speak to the press in the standoffish attitude of his early career. He is composed and contrite. He answers the by now familiar reporters’ questions with refreshing honesty, acknowledging there is no excuse for losing that poorly at home.
The pain of the loss will stop after the post-game press conference, at least for the rest of the night. Someone is waiting for Pierre, and her presence reminds him it is just a game.
His face glows as he makes his way along the concourse behind the home-end of the court. Waiting near the exits is an eight-month-old baby girl. She has wide eyes and adorably chubby cheeks. (Pierre doesn’t think she looks like anyone in particular, but she resembles every bit of her father from the lively eyes to the ear-to-ear grin.)
Sydney Denise Curtis half-smiles as Pierre bends down to give her kisses. She is sitting in the lap of her mother and Pierre’s girlfriend, Rashonda Roberson. Sydney’s smiles aren’t as big as her daddy’s. It is late and she wants a bottle, not kisses.
“We need to start putting you down earlier,” Pierre says to Sydney.
Even though he just finished his work — logging 32 minutes and providing almost all of JMU’s hustle — Sydney has more work for Pierre. As soon as the game ends, the parenting starts back up, and that means changing diapers, mixing formula, rocking the baby and waking up at all hours. For the 23-year-old father, basketball is no longer the priority.
Opening up
Pierre can be found the next morning back in the “Convo,” where he spends his last semester serving the women’s basketball program on an internship required for his sport management degree.
Labored by a stomach ailment that resulted in some weight loss this season, he lumbers down the stairs to court level. He gets comfortable at press row and calmly answers questions about the previous night’s loss, his role on the team and the slow maturation of the freshmen. When the conversation changes to fatherhood, the carefully modulated pose of the athlete being interviewed drops.
“Basketball… it’s not my whole life,” he gushes. “I wake up, eat and sleepin’ basketball… but my daughter is my main focus. Making sure she’s taken care of and she has everything she needs is my main focus, you know. She’s like 1A and basketball’s like 1B.”
Pierre gets so caught up thinking about her, that he is distracted from what he tries to say. He acknowledges that Sydney is always on his mind and that he can’t help but look into the stands before games to make sure she and Rashonda are there.
“That’s just to make sure they’re safe,” he says. “When you have a kid, more so a daughter, it’s like you always want to make sure she’s safe, and she’s exactly where she needs to be.”
When Rashonda and Sydney got stuck in a December snowstorm returning from Rashonda’s parents’ home in Virginia Beach, Pierre didn’t want to play in the game that night. The only person whose absence ever made it hard for Pierre to take the court was his mother, whom Sydney will never meet.
Carolyn Denise Curtis Rice died in September of 2007 when complications from her dialysis treatment led to heart failure.
“I was always worried about her, so if I had a game, and my mom wasn’t there, I wouldn’t want to play,” Pierre said in November 2007.
Like mother, like son
Pierre sat in the same building just a few rows back when he first discussed his mother’s death in November 2007. Today’s scene is near identical. He still has the boyish charm and youth he did as a sophomore. He is very different, yet very much the same. Back then he discussed the loss of his mother, his best friend. Now he discusses the addition of his daughter, his best friend. Carolyn never let her bout with diabetes hinder her ability to raise Pierre and give him the best she could offer. It is easy to see he hasn’t forgotten his upbringing and emulates his mother in his own parenting.
“If we need something, and Sydney needs something, we’re not the type of parents that are gonna [say], ‘Well, I need this, so Sydney doesn’t need these new clothes.’ Like, no. No. Whatever Sydney needs, Sydney gets. So, that’s how we are.”
Addendum – Curtis led JMU with 15 points and three assists Saturday in his senior night loss to Drexel. He is first all-time among Dukes in career games played (124), games started (122), assists (451) and steals (173). Correction: The original posting of this piece said Sydney Denise Curtis was eight months old in February. She was nine months old in February.
Part I: JMU sophomore guard grapples with the loss and memories of family
As the starting lineup boomed over the public address system at the JMU Convocation Center, the Dukes’ second-year starting point guard waited patiently for his name and number to be called.
It was the season opener against Siena College and the wide-eyed, 20-year-old bowed his head as his heart pounded in anticipation for the start of the 2007-08 season.
Finally P.A. announcer Jack Cavanaugh made the announcement.
“Sophomore point guard, number 51, Pierre Curtissss!”
Curtis bounded off the bench, slapping fives with his teammates as he made his way through the makeshift tunnel of reserves and cheerleaders. With the emotions of a tumultuous year racing through his mind all he could do was let out a scream to suppress the tears; tears stemming from three deaths in his family in just six months.
In April, Curtis lost his paternal grandfather Jimmy Bailey, 77, to natural causes. The connection was a deep one, as Pierre stayed close with his grandfather despite having a nearly estranged relationship with his own father, Bailey’s son.
In September, devastation struck two more times on consecutive days. On Sept. 7, Pierre’s mother, Carolyn Curtis Rice, 51, died of complications from her dialysis treatment which led to heart failure.
The following day Curtis was notified that his cousin and god-brother, Donnell Easterling, 27, died in a car accident as he was rushing home from Wisconsin to be with the family because of his Aunt Carolyn’s death.
Just two weeks into his third college semester, Pierre was at rock bottom.
Curtis and the basketball team had returned from a successful August trip to Spain and the program looked as promising as it had in a decade. The spindly Denver native returned as a reigning member of the Colonial Athletic Association All-Rookie team, and his second season was just two months away.
But basketball and school quickly became afterthoughts, wiped clean by the despair of losing the woman who raised him alone and the cousin who shared in those character-building years.
Fast-forward two months to Madison’s first game of the year. After 40 minutes of an emotion-filled 100-88 JMU win, the box score had Curtis down for 16 points on 7-for-9 shooting in 19 minutes.
How could he play so well in his first game after all of this? He couldn’t even go through his pregame routine of dialing his mom, whom he still considers his best friend. For the first time in his life, Curtis took the court without her words of encouragement ringing in his ears.
“After the game it was hard,” Curtis said the following week. “I cried for the simple fact that I couldn’t call her and tell her how I was and hear her excited voice.”
With a few reminders scrawled on his Nike game shoes, Curtis was able to feel like she was right there with him on the court. He also switched from jersey number 5 to 51, his mother’s age.
“On the bottom part of the shoes it says R.I.P Mama and then above it, it says C.C., which was her nickname.” Curtis explained while sitting in the empty, cavernous Convocation Center following a Tuesday practice. “It says BF [Best Friend] Forever underneath. Then on the other side is the initials DD, for my cousin Donnell, that was his nickname.”
The shoes also say ‘# 5’ because Carolyn was the fifth child in her family.
But it took more than just a sharpie to etch into his mind who he was playing for and why. For that a look into his past and his modest beginnings in the Chicago suburbs begins to paint the picture.
The Early Years
Pierre Jarrell Curtis was born on Jan. 29, 1987 at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. He was born the first and only son of Carolyn Curtis Rice and the only brother to three older sisters, Princine Williams, 25; Ryan Rice, 28; and Shaun Moody, 34.
For the first 10 years of his life Curtis grew up in the Chicago area community of Riverdale under the guidance of his mother and grandmother Norma Curtis. With kidney and heart problems, on top of diabetes and other personal reasons, Carolyn moved to Denver when Pierre was 10-years old.
His sisters, Princine and Ryan, also lived in the single-family home on the southwest side of the city in what Ryan described as a “family atmosphere.”
“[Pierre] actually got a chance to grow up in a better part [of Chicago],” Ryan said in a phone interview from Chicago. “He got a chance to experience the good part of being a kid.”
Although Carolyn wasn’t always in their physical presence she kept keen eyes and sharp ears on her children and visited Chicago as often as she could.
“Pierre was always under the guidance of my mother,” Ryan said. “She did not play games. Everyone had to bring home the grades to get the rewards. She made it a point to always tell us how she felt.”
But like many young kids, the elementary-aged Pierre was wily and sometimes found himself in trouble. He needed a motherly guidance especially as his grandmother grew ill.
Part II: From ‘Chi-Town’ to the Rockies — “The best day of my life.” (Originally published Dec. 3, 2007)
As quickly as times began to shift from childhood to pre-adolescence, so did the scenery. Only in fourth grade, Pierre had to pack up his things for Denver, CO and leave his friends and family behind in Chicago.
The move was not only to a rockier landscape, but to rockier realities.
Pierre’s mother was ill with kidney failure and was bussed to the hospital three times a week for four-hour dialysis treatments.
“They basically take all the blood out of your system and clean it and then they put it back in,” Pierre said. “She [came] home out of it and tired. When I was nine, they told her she was gonna live five years on dialysis without a transplant.”
Carolyn refused to let her condition hinder her ability to raise Pierre and gave him the best she could offer. The two quickly grew closer than just a mother and a son; they became best friends.
They did everything together from gaming to eating to arts and crafts and simply just talking.
“When I got to live with my mom it was the best day of my life,” Pierre said as he cracked his first smile of the interview. “We did everything together. My mom liked to play games, so we went to arcades together and she always challenged me to air hockey or playing basketball on the little hoops.
“She always wanted to be a major part of my life. Since the beginning she was there for me, just not as much as she wanted to be.”
Despite now being a Division I basketball player, the sport didn’t play a major role in his pre-high school days. Carolyn stressed dabbling in books over the dribbling the ball and Pierre had to learn this the hard way.
“I played four games in fifth grade and my mom took me off the team because she said I wasn’t doing good enough in school,” Pierre said. “Granted I had all Bs, but she just wanted all As, and I didn’t play [organized] again ’til eighth grade.”
His sister, Ryan Rice, noticed a change in Pierre as he settled into life with his mother in Denver.
“School-wise he soared to the top,” Ryan said. “He went from being the ‘bad boy’ getting in trouble to the getting all the accolades.”
Basketball or the streets
After a three-year hiatus, Pierre got back on the court in eighth grade. But he didn’t begin taking basketball seriously until he began high school at Denver East.
“I wasn’t good at all,” Pierre said of his basketball renaissance. “I honestly just played to keep me out of trouble.”
By his sophomore year, the Denver East coaches began noticing Pierre’s potential and assistant coach Warren Harding liked what he saw.
“Since his freshman year he was one of the leaders in the program on and off the court,” Harding said over the phone from Denver. “He wasn’t that big, but he got in the weight room and really dedicated himself.
“From day one he really had that floor generalship and I knew he was gonna be one of the best players to come out of East.”
Harding and head coach Rudy Carey pushed Pierre to excel in the classroom as much as on court, letting him know that he could one day play Division I college basketball.
Like in any city, gang activity provided a kinship for some of the students at East High. Harding, a probation officer by day, gave Curtis an ultimatum: focus on basketball or end up a product of the streets and behind bars.
“When Pierre was in school at East, we had gang problems,” Harding said. “There were gangs trying to get him to go steal things from people. He would shy away and they’d call him soft.
“A lot of the people trying to pull Pierre down are in jail or not doing anything with themselves. He told me about it, and three days later he came back and said that he was gonna dedicate himself to basketball and not hang around them.”
The decision was a wise one for Curtis, as he continued to excel on the basketball court and in the classroom. But he admitted that his mother’s illness was far more of a distraction than the pressures of being a teen.
“Denver wasn’t really bad, I was just doing stupid things with the wrong people,” Curtis said. “When I was young, my mom being sick was a real distraction. I was always worried about her so if I had a game and my mom wasn’t there I wouldn’t really want to play.”
Carolyn kept busy despite the persistent pain and tri-weekly trips to the hospital. She helped run an after-school program and volunteered at churches. While at home she kept busy with arts and crafts.
One thing she always had time for was watching Pierre play basketball.
“She did anything she could to help me,” Pierre said. “She paid for me to play on travel teams and was always there. She would get mad because sometimes I’d forget to tell her I had a game.
Pierre struggled to remember her missing any games that didn’t interfere with her dialysis. She would even try to schedule appointments as early as dawn so as to not miss her son play.
“They had a different type of friendship,” Ryan said. “Nobody could top mom. In any home video you could always here my mama’s voice. She became the team mom of anything [Pierre] was involved in. He was never ashamed to say, ‘She’s my mom,’ as crazy and as loud as she was.”
JMU sophomore center Dazzmond Thornton who played with Pierre at East High — a bond that helped the Dukes corral the transfer from Texas Tech — echoed the sentiments of Carolyn’s connectedness to Pierre and his endeavors.
“She was like my second mom,” Thornton said. “She was so proud of him when he decided to come here and then when I made my decision and we had the opportunity to play together again she was just ecstatic to see that.
“She wanted the best for all of us. She was like the unannounced team mom, we knew if we didn’t play good we were gonna have to hear it from Pierre’s mom.”
With the support of his mother and the persistent drilling of his coaches Pierre excelled at East.
He was a two-year starter and ran point guard for the 24-0 team that won the 5A State Championship. In his senior campaign he averaged 21 points and six assists helping to garner a McDonald’s All-America nomination.
Despite being runner-up for the state’s Mr. Basketball award, Pierre didn’t create much of a buzz around the Division I programs. He decided to spend a year at Charis Prep in Goldsboro, N.C. He upped his scoring average to 22 points and led Charis to a 26-11 record and No. 14 national ranking among prep schools.
The extra year helped and schools started talking. Curtis settled on James Madison hoping to make an immediate impact.
Part III: From the Rockies to the Valley — JMU basketball player deals with mother’s death (Originally published Dec. 6, 2007)
JMU basketball coach Dean Keener was coming off his second losing season in as many years at the helm and needed a true point guard to help lead the Dukes in a winning direction.
With the help of assistant coach Michael Kelly, Keener convinced Pierre Curtis to make an official visit to the school.
Convincing the young and eager-to-play Curtis was only half of the project. Keener would have to impress upon Pierre’s mother, Carolyn Curtis Rice that traveling over 1,595 miles to rural Virginia was the best thing for her son.
“She was so happy for him that we were recruiting him,” Kelly said. “And then when he actually picked JMU, I think she was relieved because she knew Pierre was happy.
“It was almost like an insurance policy for Pierre to bounce it off his mom that JMU was okay and once she said go ahead, I think he felt relieved that he could just go ahead and focus on school.”
Not one to miss Pierre play basketball, Carolyn made it to Harrisonburg as soon as she could. The week of Pierre’s birthday — Jan. 29, 1987 — she flew to JMU and saw him play against Towson and George Mason.
Pierre played an average of 36 minutes in the two games and averaged 8.5 points when the Dukes lost to Mason but beat Towson.
Upon further contact with Carolyn during her trip, Keener grew even fonder of the woman who helped groom his star guard.
“[She was] a wonderful lady,” Keener said. “One of those people that you would say, ‘If you had a problem with her, then you had a problem.’ She always had a smile on her face. You would never know when you met her that she was on dialysis.”
Carolyn was resilient through her illness and lived six years longer than the five predicted by doctors when Pierre was only nine.
But Pierre knew she wasn’t well and knew he had to be prepared for the worst. He had no idea the worst would be multiplied by three.
Life through Loss
In April, Curtis lost his grandfather to natural causes. Jimmy Bailey died at the age of 77, leaving Pierre without the strongest tie on his father’s side of the family.
Despite having virtually no relationship with his father, Pierre was “real, real close” with his paternal grandfather and would make it a point to see him whenever he visited Chicago.
“He would never miss a birthday,” Pierre said. “Even if my dad didn’t call, my grandfather always called. He always sent something no matter where he was.”
It was painful for the loving grandson to have to bury one of his mentors, but he continued to let his grandfather motivate him.
“I knew I had to make him proud,” Pierre said. “ I was one of the only grandkids that wasn’t in trouble. I was actually doing something, with my life.”
He had no idea he would have to do it all again early in the fall semester.
He spent the summer with his mom in Denver and visited family in Chicago. Although he knew his mother’s condition wasn’t going to improve, her overall attitude was always comforting. Pierre was always aware that she would tell him what she wanted him to hear.
“I would ask her if she’s okay and she’d tell me she just had a cold when she had pneumonia,” Pierre said. “So it was kind of hard, ’cause I had to weed out the truth.”
He later found out that Carolyn told her sister during a summer vacation in Chicago that she wouldn’t be coming back.
As proudly as she went through life raising Pierre, she really just wanted to go out peacefully, knowing that her only son was now a man and could be on his own.
On Sept. 7, Carolyn passed away when complications with her dialysis led to heart failure.
The hospital initially called Pierre — who had just finished a preseason practice — and told him they were trying to save his mother’s life and that they had stabilized her in the Intensive Care Unit.
Pierre remembered frantically calling his sisters to inform them of the hospital call, although his voice was barely comprehensible through his fear.
“The hospital calls my sister and says my mom is fine,” Pierre said. “My sister calls me and tells me mom is fine, so I eased [up] a little bit.”
Pierre was in his Chandler Hall dorm room and had called his girlfriend, JMU junior Rashonda Roberson, to come over when the hospital called back.
“They said we’re sorry, your mom is gone,” Pierre retold in heavy breaths. “I said what the hell do you mean, ‘my mom is gone?’
“From then on I was kind of out of it, I didn’t know what to do or what to expect. It was always me and my mom.”
Pierre’s roommate, JMU junior Juwann James was one of the first people to have contact with Pierre that night. James, a starting forward on the basketball team, quickly took on a more brotherly relationship with his teammate.
“I was one of the only people he was talking to besides his girl,” James said. “So every day I talked to him and let him know I was there. You know, I can’t feel his pain and know exactly what he’s going through, but I know how it is to lose someone. I was just making sure I was that person that was gonna comfort him if he needed that.”
James and Roberson didn’t support Pierre alone. Within minutes of receiving the news the basketball program responded and made its point guard the number one priority.
“When I received the call that Friday night it took me about 10 minutes to get from my home to Chandler,” Keener said. “And every team member was standing out in that bus stop area. There was a moment where I kind of knew we had a team that cared about each other.”
A day later the team was shocked and heart-broken again to hear that yet another family member of Pierre’s had passed.
Pierre’s cousin and Godbrother Donnell Easterling, 27, had been in a fatal car accident as he rushed home to be with his family following his Aunt Caroline’s death.
“I lived with him for a long time,” Pierre said. “He even moved out to Denver to live with us. We were closer than cousins. He was really my brother.”
Pierre returned to Chicago, leaving basketball and school behind to tend to his family — a challenge that forced the 20-year-old to transform and mature.
“At that point he wasn’t the man I know he is,” Pierre’s sister Ryan Rice said. “He was just my little brother.”
Pierre’s sisters had little doubt that Pierre would recover and return to basketball and school.
He returned to JMU in late September and began practicing and attending classes again. Pierre had fallen considerably behind before mid-terms but carried on with a smile just like his mother always had.
“She died with a smirk on her face knowing that her son was okay and that I could take care of myself,” Pierre said with a vintage smile of his own. “That was probably the thing that helped me the most through this whole process.”
Ryan keeps in touch with Keener and is expecting her younger brother to finish the semester with a Grade Point Average above 3.0.
On the court, Curtis is averaging 11 points, 3.2 rebounds and 3.3 assists through six games and is ninth in the conference in field goal percentage at 53.8 percent.
Keener attributes Pierre’s ability to bounce back to the characteristics he picked up from Carolyn.
“She was always very appreciative to us as a staff for what we were doing, but we were more appreciative for what she had done,” Keener said.
At 5-1, JMU’s best start since the 1986-87 season, CAA opponents may want to take a close look at the lanky guard wearing the No. 51 because he’s playing for more than just himself and his team.
“I have no worries,” Ryan said. “He knows she’s watching and he can’t mess up.”
10 interviews were conducted over two weeks for the first three parts of this series either in person or over the phone.
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