A Brotherly Bond That Beat the Odds

He was so small. Expecting to meet a little boy, I had just been introduced to a stick figure.

His jeans hung loosely around dental-floss legs. His T-shirt swallowed the rest.

I reached for his hand, and grabbed him clear up to his elbow. I had just agreed to be Andrew’s “Big Brother,” yet there was nothing there.

A commitment of three hours a week, each week, for the next year?

What could an active 22-year-old man possibly do with a 7-year-old shadow?

What could we ever share besides an awkward stare?

I had been told that Andrew was suffering from cystic fibrosis, a genetic predator that kills young. But an overeager counselor whispered, “Don’t worry, you can’t tell.”

One look at Andrew’s stunted growth and I could tell. One ugly cough, and I could hear.

I had just met a boy to whom I was morally bound for the next year, yet I couldn’t figure out how to spend the first minute.

“So, um, what do you like?” I finally asked this little thing hugging his mother’s legs.

It was then I realized I had missed something: two eyes, flickering under a mop of blond hair, eyes now bigger than all of him.

“Sports,” he said, his small voice booming, and I’ll remember this as long as I remember anything. “I like sports.”

*

We like it, hate it, embrace it, denounce it, talk about it for hours, watch it for weekends, rip it for days. We teach with it, blame it, try fruitlessly to play it and hopelessly to understand it.

The one thing we never do, it seems, is pause and be thankful for it.

For me, for sports, this day works as well as any.

This is trying to be a Thanksgiving sports story, but not about sports as names and numbers, winners and losers.

It’s about sports as language, as one of this country’s most important means of communication, spanning generations, crossing economic classes, giving our diverse people something in common.

It’s about how sports connected me with Andrew.

I wasn’t trying to save the world. I was trying to save myself.

I had just graduated from college and was working in the swamp bureau for a newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. I was covering bowling and shuffleboard and hoping for the day when somebody would consider me good enough to cover high school football.

I lived in a one-room apartment with a bed in the wall and roaches on the ceiling. My life lacked any sense of order or importance. I figured the Big Brothers & Sisters program would give that to me.

I met Andrew Fishbein at a Christmas party in 1980.

He said he liked sports.

“What do you know?” I said. “So do I.”

On our second visit, I tentatively dumped a pile of baseball cards on the floor. He dropped to his knees and ran them through his hands like money.

“Do you know how to play?” I asked.

He didn’t, so I taught him a game I had learned when I was young. Soon we were sprawled out on the carpet, shouting together at little pieces of cardboard, big and little now shoulder to shoulder.

And so the language of our relationship had been established, the currency set.

We played soccer as long as his clogged little lungs could handle it. We pitched baseball until it was time to go home for his medicine.

I was promoted to covering high school basketball, so he attended his first live sports event, Boyd Anderson High versus Dillard High, sitting next to me in the stands, cheering as if it were the Bulls and the Jazz.

Sports was like this for us. A language of laughter and lessons, a bridge between distant lives.

A year passed, my formal commitment to Andrew ended, but our visits continued. Sports had given us a new world--big enough for only two--that neither was willing to leave. There was always another miniature golf course to play, another pretend Super Bowl to enact with a rubber football on the scrubby field behind his townhouse.

Then in the fall of 1983, I landed a job as far from that world as Andrew thought possible. I was going to cover the Seattle Mariners, 3,500 miles away.

I still remember watching Andrew collapse in tears on the floor of his mother’s townhouse. To him, I was just another man who had come and gone.

“You’ll come see me, I’ll stay in touch, I promise,” I said quickly. “I’m covering baseball, remember?”

I’m sure he didn’t believe it. I don’t know if I believed it.

But it was baseball, remember? Within a year, Andrew, by then 10, had worked up the courage to fly cross-country by himself to spend long summer days with me and my wife.

Or, more to the point, to spend an afternoon with the Mariners, running the outfield during batting practice, hanging out in the clubhouse, chaperoned by an unforgettable pitcher named Roy Thomas.

As we grew older, through vastly different situations on different sides of the country, it was sports that gave us both the incentive to keep our relationship strong.

At least three times a year, we would get together, seemingly always to watch a sporting event or to hang out near a sporting event I was covering. Our reunions were, therefore, usually marked by big happy crowds, and our separations usually occurred against the echoes of cheers.

When Andrew was 13, a basketball assignment took me close enough to Florida so I could give the toast at his bar mitzvah, a wonderful celebration of manhood for a child not expected to live long past his 18th birthday.

When Andrew graduated from high school, another milestone for a kid whose lungs and digestive system were weakening by the day, he received a congratulatory phone call from Orel Hershiser.

I’ve never asked an athlete for anything like that before or since. But Hershiser never held it over my head because he understood the death sentence hanging over Andrew’s.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic, terminal disease affecting about 30,000 children and adults. It causes the body to produce an abnormally thick mucus that clogs the lungs and obstructs the pancreas, affecting everything from breathing to digesting.

The language of sports, of course, includes none of those words. It’s about life, and I privately rejoiced that the topic of Andrew’s prognosis never came up. We were too busy arguing who was better, the Dolphins or Seahawks, the Heat or Lakers.

Many times, for a boy who underwent daily chest-pounding therapies and biannual lengthy hospital stays, sports was also the language of healing.

Despondent over his situation as a freshman at the University of Florida, Andrew once swallowed enough pills to kill himself. Fortunately, a fraternity brother found him in time.

When I was finished being furious, I bought him World Series tickets, and we stayed up all night in Atlanta, talking about comebacks.

It was his first of three World Series games, one baseball All-Star game, one Super Bowl, one national college football championship, one NCAA regional basketball championship.

He has been with me everywhere from Seattle to St. Petersburg, with stops in places like Cincinnati, New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., and even Dodgertown.

He has survived two major surgeries--half of his lungs have been removed--with that same language.

Sitting at his hospital bedside, I would read him the sports pages.

Phoning his room from across the country, I would ask which game he was watching, and turn my TV to the same game, and we would shout at it together, even if he couldn’t always shout.

The years passed, and I became a balding middle-ager, and the stick figure became a strong, handsome adult. Yet we stayed together until, at some point, it stopped being all about sports and started being somewhat about us.

That point was reached this fall, when I was scheduled to fly to Boston to cover what became one of the most dramatic Ryder Cup golf tournaments in history.

I flew to Jamaica instead. It was there, on a beach, that his mother and I gave Andrew away at his wedding.

On Wednesday, he flew to join me for this Thanksgiving with his new bride, Sigrid. Sure enough, the little guy has finally rumbled his way out of the corner and back up field.

Andrew is 26. He is a successful real estate agent. He undergoes countless daily therapies and painstaking hospital stays, but he works out at a gym, and is cut like a body builder. Scientific advancements have pushed the median age of an individual with CF to 31, and here’s betting he doubles it.

Today he will hug my wife as if she is his second mother, which she is. He will roll around the floor with my three children like one of their favorite uncles, which he is.

And with me? What do you think?

Today we’ll watch football, eat turkey, watch football, watch more football, then fall asleep in front of the TV while watching everything replayed in 30-second video bites on the highlight show.

Some might call us lazy sports nuts. We just call ourselves brothers.

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