Gary Trent's grandfather drank himself to death. His grandmother was convicted of killing a son. There were two other uncles who went to prison for robbery and murder. Trent's father, Dexter, received a life sentence at age 31 for dealing crack cocaine.
Said Gary: "My life was drugs, murder, bank robbery, kidnapping, the whole nine. It was generational dysfunction.
"That's when you get sucked into the pitfalls and the negativity of what came before you."
When he went to visit his father in prison, Dexter, would plead: "Don't be like me. Be better than me."
It's a message lost on too many young kids who grow up in neighborhoods just like "The Jungle" Trent knew as home in Columbus, Ohio. And save for the fact that Gary was 6-foot-8 and could put a basketball through a hoop like no other high school player in the country, he might have continued his childhood hobby as a $300-a-day crack dealer.
"The opportunity to play basketball surrounded me with good people," Trent said.
Now, Trent is surrounded by the children of Dayton's Bluff Elementary (East St. Paul, Min.) He's worked there as an assistant principal, with an official title of "Cultural Intervention Specialist" since last year. He'll sit in classrooms. He'll do lunch duty and after-school duty. Most of all, he'll talk with struggling students, many of which come from similar family backgrounds, and tell them their lives can be better than the men and women who came before them.
"I'm dealing with kiddie issues," Trent said. "But this is the point where you have a chance to turn them around. Once they hit eighth grade it's harder to turn them around. At this age, they're much easier to reach, easier to pull them back in, you know?"
Single-parent homes. Parents on drugs. Or both parents on drugs. Or domestic violence in the household.
"You're not going to be able to save them all. Some kids have no belief in their future, no belief in their life. Some have never met their father, or mom is in prison. Everyone will not be saved, but you don't give up on kids."
It's a message Trent has lived. As a high school and college player, his coaches and mentors helped him. They got him out of bed in the morning – 6 a.m. – to lift weights and work out. Out of a fear that the neighborhood would suck Trent back in, more than one of his coaches required daily study hall, then the gym, for workouts. In college, at Ohio University, a teammate was assigned to monitor him at night.
"It's a powerful thing," Trent said, "when you realize you have the ability to try and break generations of dysfunction."
Trent tried. But he wasn't always successful.
He played 506 NBA games, including three seasons (95-98) in Portland.
But Trent said he sometimes played angry, on and off court. There was a 1997 domestic violence charge for assaulting a girlfriend. That same year, Trent was involved in a fight in a Portland night club in which he hit a man over the head with a pool cue. There was a suspension and $10,000 fine while with the Mavericks in January 2000 after he stormed into the Golden State locker room and challenged Warriors guard Vonteego Cummings. His NBA career ended in 2004.
"I was like, 'Now what?'" Trent said.
An elementary school in Minnesota hired this man. Yep. It did. To counsel impressionable children on how to seize opportunity. To preach, "It can be done," if you seek the right mentors. To gather them around him, and explain the task of rebuilding his own broken relationship with a father who had that life sentence reduced to 60 years, then 12, and finally, a release in May 1994 after serving nearly seven years.
"I raised myself," Trent said. "But these guys don't have to."
Sometimes the children of Dayton's Bluff Elementary find themselves on a computer where they Google "Gary Trent." They read about their assistant principal still holding the national high school field-goal percentage record he set his senior season by shooting 81 percent from the floor. They read about his NBA career, too, but also some they read about suspensions, fights and arrests.
They come to "Mr. Trent" with questions.
"I tell them the truth," Trent said. "I tell them, 'if it happened to me now, here's how I would handle it.' There's a response for a person who is grown and mature. I tell them, 'Where y'all live at, sometimes trouble isn't going to be avoidable.' But a lot of these situations can be avoided."
Trent tells them the highlight of his NBA career, "was the opportunity to have that career."
Without it, he'd probably be in prison preaching the 'be better than me' message. Or worse, dead.
Trent said having the chance to be drafted by Portland in 1995 as a 20-year old with veteran teammates such as
Buck Williams, Cliff Robinson,
Chris Dudley and
Arvydas Sabonis was valuable. He made a point, he said, to go to dinner with different teammates on different nights during the season, because their life experiences were so varied and influential.
"I had a 35-year old Buck Williams as my teammate," Trent said, "who not only had 15 more years of basketball experience than me, but 15 more years of life experience. Dudley, Sabonis, those guys, they were so wise."
When he
campaigned for Oregon governor in 2010, Dudley frequently told an inspiring story about an unnamed teammate who had overcome his childhood circumstances and seized an opportunity to become an American success story. The candidate said, "Don't tell me everybody had the same upbringing..."
Dudley never named that teammate. That is, until Friday, when I asked Dudley about those dinners years ago with the rookie, Trent.
Said Dudley: "He came in pretty raw. He had a tough go of it. He looked to (older teammates) for guidance because he didn't have that growing up. I talked about Gary a lot during the campaign because it was such an important story."
Trent is 37 now.
His story has never felt more important, or powerful.
He's broken the cycle of dysfunction. He's found meaningful life after basketball. He has three sons of his own now. His oldest, 13, plays basketball on a team that Trent coaches.
There are other children, too, that the Trent family takes in. Most of them coming from broken homes, with terrible stories about generational dysfunction. And, then, there's that job at the elementary school with all those children to save.
His job now doesn't pay as well as his NBA career. But Trent believes the work he's doing is more important.
He keeps saying: "I can not give up on these kids."
He still tries, too, to reach through to some of his old teammates.
Trent said he recently talked with former Blazers teammate Isaiah Rider in a series of deep telephone conversations. Post-NBA career Rider's been sucked into a sad pattern of criminal activity, ranging from possession of narcotics to driving with a suspended license to evading police to a felony violation of his probation.
Without basketball, he's been lost.
"We talked three days in a row, four hours a day," Trent said. "Mostly we talked about how there's a lot some of these young NBA players aren't prepared for. What are you going to do when there's no more air in your ball?"
--John Canzano;
http://www.oregonlive.com/sports/or...f/2012/02/canzano_former_trail_blazer_ga.html
The top just blew off my bull dada meter.
