Teen-agers have a strong sense of what is right. When something is not, they know in a flash.
“That’s not FAIR you hear them protest, as if life is supposed to dole out to everyone the same amount of weekly allowance, pats on the head and lucky breaks.
But what is happening right now to young Wilcox High School athletes Franchon and Deshawn Butler and their mother Shantee is so wrong, it blows the concept of fairness to smithereens.
BAD NEWS
Shantee, 48, was diagnosed late last summer with stage 4 lung cancer. The disease has since been ravaging her lungs and body and has spread to her brain. It’s to the point where the 15-year-old, non-identical twins have left the Wilcox High basketball team to spend more time with their mom as she battles the illness and endures the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that go with it.
The twin-less Chargers were 9-5 overall heading into tonight's game at Los Altos.
“One of the saddest moments was when she lost all of hair,” said Monique Butler, Shantee’s sister-in-law. “It wasn’t about vanity. The boys like to sit right beside her and before she lost her hair, twirl it around their fingers. Then all in one swoop, it was gone.”
Franchon and Deshawn soldiered on. The duo was on varsity to start the season and was doing fine for sophomores, averaging seven and 3.4 points, respectively. Franchon was grabbing rebounds in bunches and Deshawn showed his range by making four 3-pointers in one game. Then shortly before the holidays it all got to be too much and they made the difficult decision to leave the team.
“It was hard,” Deshawn said. “I’m not a quitter and I don’t like to quit something I love, but family has to come first.”
Said Franchon: "We were playing on the team, but it was getting harder and harder for my mom because she'd get tired easily and she was getting nauseous. We didn't want her to have to pick us up late from practice and have to wait in the parking lot, so we just made the decision on our own to help her.”
Supporters of the family have established a gofundme.com account to help with medical and living expenses. Recently the Wilcox team invited Shantee to the gym, formed a half-circle around her and presented her with gift cards to ease the burden. There will also be a fundraising effort at Friday night’s 7:45 p.m. game against visiting Fremont.
HARD TIMES
There are some things money cannot solve. Shantee, after one exploratory surgery, was told she might have just a few weeks to live. That was more than a month ago. Monique said that doctor is “no longer on the team” and her mother-in-law is now in someone else’s care.
Wilcox coach Robert Toloy said he first learned of the situation the second day of practice. Toloy, concerned the twins had missed too much pre-seasoning conditioning, sent texts to the boys and mentioned commitment. Not long after, Shantee was poking her head in the gym door with her two young teens in tow.
“I thought she was maybe upset about the texts,” Toloy said. “She said she wanted to tell me in person why her sons were not at workouts, that she’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I was floored. One of the boys (teared up). Until then they’d been pretty steady and able to maintain.”
The boys already knew all about the short end of the stick. Dad? He was just a rumor, a man they never even met. There was an uncle – Kenneth Davis -- who taught them to ride a bike, fish and ride rollercoasters, but he died when they were just in grade school.
Gramps? That would be Shantee’s father, Bass Butler. He passed on too, just a few years after their beloved uncle. Again, cancer was the culprit. That dreaded C word.
Still in the mix is grandmother Dorothy, living with mom and the boys, but also not in the best of health.
PULLING TOGETHER
Recently, Monique sat at the Santa Clara law office where she works, painfully composing a message to place on the gofundme.com account created to give the beleaguered family a boost.
“I was on my lunch break and it was difficult,” Monique said. “I was typing through tears.”
“The boys are so polite and jump at any request of their mother and grandmother,” she wrote. “You will never see either of them sit by and watch a woman carry the groceries or carry anything more than their purse. They carefully watch over their mother. Right now they are her rock through these trying times as Shantee battles this challenge of cancer.”
Franchon and Deshawn, both 6-foot-4, show promise on the hardwood. It’s been their goal to earn college basketball scholarships. Posters and stickers of their beloved Oklahoma City Thunder fill their room along with jerseys they’ve worn and medals they’ve won.
When Toloy took over the program last summer, the talented duo intrigued him. He dreamed of building a team around them.
“When I first came on board, all I heard about was ‘The twins, the twins,’” he said. “They wanted to play at the next level, but then all this stuff started to muck it up.”
Toloy was stumped. In all of his years of coaching he had never run across such a situation. He didn’t know how to act, or what to say. So he poked around on the Internet and found cancercare.com which stresses there is not a right or wrong thing to do except to “show you care and how much love you have in your heart.”
Friday night Wilcox fans can do just that. It only seems fair.
John Murphy is the Web Content Manager of Prep2Prep. Contact him at jmurphy@prep2prep.com and follow on Twitter @PrepCat
