Life and Stuff

If you are a sports fan, or a fan of such schmaltzy garbage as Extreme Makeover Home Edition, you've seen it all before. In the context of athletics, a child is dieing from a debilitating disease, and his one wish before he passes is to meet his athletic hero, or see his athletic hero in action live. While these cases are all uplifting to the spirit, they're so numerous that you begin to grow tired of them quite easily. So many children stricken with a debilitating disease have had their athletic dreams come true that it has become a tired cliche. But every once in while, a story likes this comes along and provides a twist so shocking that it must be documented in the national media. Such was the case in the February 11th issue of ESPN Magazine. In it, writer Eric Adelson profiled a young 12 year old boy named Braxton Davis. His story is just like any other in the endless stream of dream come true stories. Young boy dieing of rare disease asks for a chance to see his favorite team play in person and meet his favorite player, and so it goes. What makes this story interesting however is how it ended, leaving one organization and its star player to believe that they had been had.

Braxton Davis was born to Karrie and Brant Davis in Salt Lake City Utah in March of 1995. Soon after he was born, doctors discovered that there was a problem with Braxton's eyes. It seemed that one of his pupils was larger than the other. After running several different kinds of tests, doctors gave the Davis's some horrifying news. Braxton had a rare nerve disease called neuroblastoma, which is a cancer of the nerves in your eyes. Many specialists gave the young only a short time to live. Brant was determined to make the most of the time he had his son. Being a big hockey fan, Brant gave Braxton a small Vic hockey stick made of wood to symbolize a bond between Father and son. Braxton made it to his first birthday, but soon afterwards his parents divorced with Karrie gaining custody and Brant visitation rights, Soon afterwards, Mother and son moved from Salt Lake City to Denver, with Father close behind in order to be closer to doctors. It was then that the Davis men developed a loyal bond with the Detroit Red Wings, Biter rivals of the city's beloved Avalanche. Brant claimed he liked to stand out in a crowd and be different and he passed the same trait along to his son. As it turned out, Brant had another trait within him that almost got him in big trouble.

In March of 2001, Brant wrote an e-mail to the Wings community relations department that stated he was living with a 6 year old boy with cancer who was loyal to the Wings in a sea of Avalanche fans, and who loved Steve Yzerman. The request was simple, the Wings were coming to town and he asked if they so kind to set aside tickets for a Father and his ill son. Within hours, Brant got a phone call with a blocked number on his caller ID. Deciding to take a chance on who might be on the line, Brant picked it up. It was Yzerman. The Wing legend not only invited them to the game but also invited them to the team's private morning skate. Once there, they met with the team's director of community relations and then with Yzerman himself who was classy enough not to ask about the disease, a point which will become relevant later on. Brant was savvy enough to stay in touch with the Wings over the next five years and eventually Yzerman invited them to Detroit for a playoff game and a visit in the Red Wings locker room. By then, Braxton had turned eleven, which is considered remarkable for a child with cancer. Yzerman also paid for them to stay at the tallest hotel in Michigan, all out of his own pocket. It was during the locker room visit that Yzerman gave the youngster an autographed stick as a memento for him to remember him by. An article was written by the same writer who wrote this one in which Brant talked about the rising hospital costs and they grueling bouts of chemo his little boy endured. Braxton was consider courageous, Yzerman was considered a hero, but in the blink of an eye, it all changed.

Fast forward a year back to Salt Lake City, where Karrie Nash-Hanberg produced for Adelson a manila folder containing a letter written by the director of pediatric oncology at the University of Utah. Within the letter's context it was written that Braxton had received his final check-up in January 1998, when he was two. The doctor also mentioned that the chance of a recurrence was extremely low. This meant that Brant Davis had suceeded in duping the Red Wings into thinking that his son was dieing of a rare form of cancer, when in essence he was perfectly healthy. According to his ex wife, this was not the first time he had a run-in with the law. In 1994. he used a stolen check to pay for baseball card at a collectables show. Soon afterwards, he was in an argument with a cop over a traffic incident. When the cop ran his name, Brant turned up an outstanding warrant, and Karrie divorced him. Brant was given visitation rights once a week and every other weekend. Every time Karrie has moved her son, Brant has followed and she has not tried to get the visitation rights revoked because she still feels that Brant has a right to be in her son's life and that she would not want to deprive her son of a chance to see his Father. Karrie said she grew suspicious of what Brant was doing when she saw that her son had shaved his head, but Brant would always tell her it was none of her business. When a personal friend e-mailed Karrie the original article, Braxton admitted that his Father had forced him to lie to Yzerman even though what he was saying wasn't the truth. Nor was the fact that Yzerman has actually made that first phone call to Brant, it was actually John Hahn, Red Wings director of community relations who made the call. Hahn admitted in the article that when he sees a lot of Fathers and kids with cancer, the Fathers are usually exhausted when they're with their kids because of the work involved. Hahn said that he spent too much time looking at Braxton and not enough looking at Brant to realize that he had been duped. And then there's Yzerman, the man who paid for tickets for Brant and Braxton every time they came to Denver out of his own pocket. Classy Stevie Y said that he's not going to stop helping kids or ask for the money to be repaid to him. He still has a fondness for Braxton, but he hopes that Braxton realizes he was manipulated to lie and that there's still time for his life to be turned around.

In conclusion, all I have to say is this. Brant Davis is a sick and twisted individual. Maybe this is a little far fetched, but Davis belongs in prison for defrauding the good charity of a professional sports organization. This moron even the gall to tell Eric Adelson that he still believes his son has cancer even after medical have proved the contrary. if Prison is not an option, a psychiatric examination should be done to give this guy a sense of reality and make him realize that what he did was wrong and immoral. Hopefully he'll see the light.