Saving Grace

He is the light. I am the other side of the light.

He is the star. I am its reflection.

He is my little brother, but Sean is bigger than I will ever be, the Great Elliott.

I am Noel, the Other Elliott.

Sean plays basketball, I play in the marching band.

Sean is a pitcher, I’m a right fielder.

Sean is focused, I have trouble concentrating.

Sean was given all the heart, I was given the leftovers.

I am 15 years old, and my brother is only 15 months younger, so we do everything together, Sean and his sidekick.

At least he’s nice about it. He includes me in everything, makes me feel comfortable about where I am, about being on the other side.

Like the time his team beat our team to win that Boys Club basketball tournament. After we had picked up our awards, before doing anything else, he ran over to me and said, “Boy, your trophy really looks nice.”

He’s a good kid, he works hard, he earns everything he gets.

But darn it, he’s still just a kid, and I’m 15 and already forgotten, and it hurts.

So that’s why I’ve locked myself in this laundry room.

And that’s why I’m not coming out until I get some answers.

When will it be my turn? When will I feel some of that light on something other than my feet?

My family can bang on this door all night, but I’m not coming out. I don’t care if they hear me crying, either.

What, shadows can’t cry?

*

Eighteen years later . . .

The Great Elliott called the Other Elliott at work today.

Those pro basketball players must not realize how hard it is for us stock clerks to get to a phone.

The people at Sam’s Club called me down from the fork lift. I picked up the receiver. I heard a man with an accent.

“Hellooooo, meeester Elliott . . .”

That was Sean, always disguising his voice. It’s still funny. I laughed, then asked why he was calling in the middle of the day.

“The blood tests have come back. You’re almost a perfect match for a transplant. You’re my best chance.”

I paused a second, let the news run through me, chill me.

My famous little brother, the one with all the heart.

Telling me his future depends on whether I can give him a kidney.

*

Today. . .

Imagine awakening this Christmas morning, padding over to the tree, and suddenly being asked for a gift.

Not from a box, but from your body.

Not for a poor child, but for your vastly richer and more famous brother.

You ask, what would be the results of this gift?

You are told you will become weakened while your brother will become strengthened.

The shadow you have lived in will grow darker as your brother’s star will shine brighter.

It would be a gift that could contain much hardship, prolonged pain, and could you please decide by noon?

Would you give this gift?

This is a story of one man who did, and why.

This is supposed to be a story about basketball and comebacks and inspiration through sports, but it all comes back to the same thing.

It all comes back to the gift. Which pretty much makes it a story about love.

The San Antonio Spurs are in town today for a showdown with the Lakers, but something is missing that could make this a somewhat different game next spring.

That would be Sean Elliott, the Spurs’ veteran forward and inspirational leader who has been sidelined since helping them win the NBA title last season.

It was Elliott who made the three-point basket while falling out of bounds with nine seconds remaining--the Memorial Day Miracle--to beat the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals.

It was Elliott who set the emotional stage for a sweep of the Trail Blazers that eventually carried them to the league championship.

But it was Elliott who later made equally big news when, suffering from a degenerative kidney disease, he underwent a kidney transplant Aug. 16.

He hopes to make even bigger headlines this spring by becoming the first athlete in a major professional sport to return to action after a major organ transplant.

His recovery, which he had hoped would culminate in an early December return, was pushed back even further this week when he was hospitalized for several days because of a nagging flu compounded by a weakened immune system typical of kidney transplant recipients.

But with the kidney well guarded by his natural mechanisms, perhaps requiring only a piece of outer padding, doctors say he can still play again.

“I don’t see why not,” said Dr. Francis Wright, his surgeon at the Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital in San Antonio. “Sean played under much more stressful conditions last year when he was sick.”

Team officials are not so certain, repeatedly saying they will need approval of several doctors before allowing Elliott to step back on the court.

Elliott claims he’s unfazed.

“I’m coming back, not just for me, but for everybody out there who has had transplants like this, to give them hope,” he said.

What a spectacle that would be. Probably a national TV audience, and certainly hundreds of media members, would watch Elliott take the court as an example of courage and sacrifice.

Watching quietly from the stands with nobody watching, as he has done all his life, will be perhaps a greater example.

Sean’s new kidney once belonged to his brother Noel. The Other Elliott agreed to undergo an operation and painful recovery as the donor not for money, or a house, or anything you can get your hands around.

“I said all I wanted was a couple of tickets to his comeback game,” he said.

A front-row seat for the day he returns to the shadows.

*

To reach Sean Elliott, you call a publicist, and he calls Sean, and they check a schedule, and finally you show up in a giant sparkling San Antonio arena where you sit with him in a back hallway on a metal bench.

To reach Noel Elliott, you call him at home, meet him at a crowded bodybuilding gym in a quiet Tucson neighborhood, then drive to Boston Market for sandwiches.

Sean was a star at one of America’s best-known schools, the University of Arizona.

Noel went to Pima Community College.

Sean has had a successful 10-year professional basketball career.

Noel works in the stock room for an aerospace company.

When working, Sean’s name can be found on his back.

When working, Noel’s name can be found on his front breast pocket.

Sean lives in a wealthy San Antonio neighborhood.

Noel lives in his 1,200-square-foot childhood townhouse.

“Our lives couldn’t be more different,” said Noel, 33, smiling. “But that’s him. This is me. I’m very happy.”

Both men are tall--Sean is 6 feet 8, Noel is 6-5--but any similarities end there.

Noel wears glasses, Sean doesn’t.

Noel seems more serious and deliberate, while Sean is quicker to smile and laugh.

But in Noel there is a depth, both in stories and philosophies, that spotlighted athletes like Sean often have little time to mine.

Two hours with Noel is like two days with somebody else. He remembers many of the tiny details of his life. He has evaluated most of it. He has figured out where it all fits.

“I live in a reality-based world,” Noel said. “I know that Sean excelled in sports because he had all the heart. I know I didn’t excel because I didn’t want it as bad as he did.”

Noel remembers the first time he knew this.

They were still children, the younger two of three boys who grew up in the modest household of Odie and Robert Elliott of Tucson.

For 18 years, the two younger Elliott boys shared a room, often sleeping on bunk beds. For at least that long, they shared a life.

“Sean would challenge me to a race to the park, then say he didn’t feel like running,” Noel recalled. “So I took off thinking I would win easily . . . and here would come Sean, passing me up.”

So began another performance of that strange dance between brothers, that lifelong movement filled with steps of friendship and rivalry, of war and peace, a dance ending in either estrangement or embrace.

Early on, with Noel and Sean, it could have gone either way.

Sean would take Noel’s Flintstone lunch box to school, and they’d fight about it on the playground.

Sean would show up wearing Noel’s favorite patched pants, and they would wrestle during recess.

“We’d fight right there, in front of everybody,” Sean said. “They would say, ‘Look at the Elliott boys.’ We didn’t care.”

The boys grew, and only the reasons for the fighting changed. One of them would leave their baseball glove on the wrong bed. The other would stay on the phone too long.

It was quickly clear that they were different, that one was physically anointed, that the other would have to find it somewhere else.

The day 15-year-old Noel came home and locked himself in the laundry room, he felt his entire life could be wrapped up in one word.

“I was the middle child in the family, yet I was the runt,” he said. “The runt.”

Odie, a nurse who raised the boys as a single mom during their formative years, finally persuaded him to open the door. She embraced him and told him that everybody in the family was equally valuable, even if they didn’t yet know just how.

“I didn’t think it up in advance, I just told him what came from my heart,” she recalled.

It is around such humble statements that complicated families are bound.

“I didn’t listen to her at the time,” Noel said. “But I later realized, she was right.”

And he knew that an older brother would always have the very important job of being an older brother.

“It wasn’t about just me, or just Sean,” Noel said. “It was about family.”

Besides her talk, Odie relied on something that proved just as valuable--her furniture.

“I’ve never wanted anything in my house that everybody couldn’t sit on, and be comfortable on,” she said. “As a single working mother, I needed to trust my children. So I wanted to create a place where the boys wouldn’t want to leave.”

So she bought giant soft couches for their small townhome--”I still remember the Green Monster,” said Noel--and the boys grew into them and closer through them.

It was to these couches that the boys slinked after underage Sean scraped his mother’s Chevy Citation against the side of the garage after a joy ride. Noel took the rap for him that day, keeping the truth from Odie for the next decade.

“Sean had been in more trouble than me at the time, and I knew his punishment would be worse, so I just said I did it,” he said.

It was on these couches that the boys gathered on nights when Sean would act as Noel’s high school basketball tutor.

It was Noel’s senior season. He had finally made the team as the last player on the bench after somebody else quit.

But there was a problem, the same problem Noel suffered from in school because of what was later diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder. He had trouble concentrating long enough to remember the plays.

“So Sean would take the time to teach them to me, go over them again and again, so I would know them in practice,” Noel said.

It was to these couches they also bounced with late-night stories after Noel found a date, rented a car, rented Sean a tux, and drove him to his senior prom even though Noel had graduated a year earlier.

“Noel was cool, he was always cool,” Sean said. “I got all the attention, and it was hard for Noel, and it wasn’t fair, but he always hung in there.”

But the older the boys grew, the more the shadow over Noel Elliott lengthened.

“For Noel, everywhere he went, it was always, ‘You’re Sean’s brother,’ ” recalled Gabe Quiroz, a longtime family friend. “But never once did Noel complain.”

Because by then, the boys had been raised to understand that this dance was something brothers must ultimately do together.

One weekend late in his senior season at Arizona, Sean Elliott needed 34 points against UCLA to break the Pacific 10 Conference’s all-time scoring record in front of home fans.

He felt so pressured, the day before the game he left the dorms and headed to the townhouse to hang out on the couches with Noel and oldest brother Bobby.

A day later, he scored precisely that many points.

A decade later, more relevant numbers were these:

There are about 44,000 people in the United States awaiting kidney transplants.

Only a third of those transplants come from live donors.

Every transplant center has stories of matching family members too scared to undergo the surgery, or steered clear of it by worried spouses.

“This is a big deal,” said Wright, Elliott’s surgeon. “You’re asking a healthy person to undergo a few hours of surgery that will immediately make them miserable. This is always a big deal.”

More than 30 years of dancing stopped momentarily on that late July day when the Great Elliott phoned the Other Elliott to find out just how big of a deal.

*

Last summer . . .

I asked him, “When?”

When my famous little brother said that I had tested as a near-perfect match for his kidney, I didn’t say yes or no.

I asked him, “When?”

He said, “Right away.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

I never said yes because I never thought about saying no.

He never said thank you because he knew I didn’t need to hear it.

I’ve never thought much about the definition of family, but maybe that’s it.

People ask me, when you heard the news, were you scared? I tell them no, I was relieved. My brother was facing dialysis by the end of the year. I was going to be able to help him.

Sean said he had been really tired during the playoffs, as tired as he had ever been in his life, but you couldn’t tell.

Of course, I wasn’t always watching that close. I had gotten married that summer. Kathy and I were walking into our honeymoon hotel when we saw his famous three-pointer against Portland on a TV in the bar.

It would be understandable if Kathy didn’t like the idea of me being a donor. But she told me she couldn’t imagine me doing anything else. She’s a wonderful woman. But then, I already knew that.

People say, you could have gotten anything from Sean for that kidney. I say, what for? That’s not me, and that’s not Sean.

I missed eight weeks of work, and he paid for that, minus taxes, a fair deal. He paid for my flights to San Antonio, even flew me first class once, the first time in my life, better than fair.

But other than that, what else would I need? Sean says I would have been insulted by any offers. And he is right.

Besides, my life is back to normal now. I can’t smoke, but I never smoked, so that doesn’t matter. I have a couple of tiny scars on my stomach, but no big deal. I feel great.

The only bad thing was the procedure itself. Sean said he was terrified. As the time approached, I was also scared. It started when I went to the hospital for all these tests a week before the operation.

One test was really bad, lying motionless on your back for six hours while fluid runs through you, a tube in your crotch, making you feel like you got kicked down there.

I started praying then. I knew I was doing the right thing. I just wanted to be calm while I was doing it.

Sean was with me most of that day, bringing me lunch and dinner. Then when we both went in for the transplant, they gave us rooms across the hall from each other.

I went in for my surgery first. Sean came out and grabbed my hand as they pushed my gurney toward the operating room. He didn’t say anything. He just grabbed it and looked at me, and I looked back at him. I’ll remember that handshake forever.

After the surgery, back in my room, I was lying there in pain, one of Sean’s teammates walked in, Avery Johnson, his eyes all wide.

“Don’t say a word,” he said. “I just came in here to touch you.”

*

Today . . .

And all this for what, courtside tickets?

Sean Elliott heard about his brother’s request and laughed.

Why does Noel need tickets for the comeback game? He’s already going to be there.

“Sometimes I just stop and think, my brother is living inside of me now,” Sean Elliott said. “It’s overwhelming.”

Gifts can be like that. So, too, can love.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.