My greatest fear," he said, "is losing control of me. Having someone have to take care of me. But that was at the beginning."
That was in January, after tests confirmed he had the disease, something he had suspected for a couple of months. He first noticed a recurring tremor in his left hand last summer while still living in Miami, where he played four seasons for the Heat. A neurologist attributed it to stress and expressed doubt that it was Parkinson's, a diagnosis Grant eagerly embraced. No one in his family had ever been afflicted, and he didn't know much more about it other than actor Michael J. Fox had it. That's all he wanted to know.
Besides, he was definitely stressed out. The bone-on-bone knee condition that ended his career kept him from working out. He was gaining weight and felt directionless. He'd never connected with people in Miami the way he had in the closer-knit, slower-paced city of Portland. So he moved his wife Gina and their four kids back last fall.
He felt instantly more connected. He helped coach his two sons' basketball teams. The Blazers and their cable telecast network reached out to him. But the tremors continued, so now the problem was, how to hide it?
"If I'm emotional for any reason, it's going to go," he said. "The sons and the boys on their team didn't really understand. So I'd start dribbling a ball or doing something to try to hide it."
...
Whatever doubts he might've still had were erased last week by three events -- an invitation from the Ali family to visit, a phone conversation with Fox and the cancer death of Wayman Tisdale, the man he succeeded as a rookie with the Sacramento Kings.
"Because I was coming in and he was leaving, it was always a good battle when we played after that," Grant said. "He was always encouraging back then. He had that smile and upbeat character until the end. When I got the message that he'd died, I looked at what he must've been going through and thought, 'What the hell do I have to get down about? Stand up, be a man and face this.'"
...
"He told me you have to rule it, you can't let it rule you," Grant said. "There's no saying, 'If it's going this way, then I'm going this way.' It's going to be with you. But instead of letting it control you and take you under, you've got to say, 'OK, I know you're going with me but you're going to be back there.'"
There's a certainty in his voice, the same tone he often used talking about his plan to neutralize a bigger, stronger player. He pantomimes -- telling his disease where to go by thrusting his left thumb over his right shoulder. As he does, the left hand that rarely stops shaking is still.
