Despite Tragedy, This Laker Feels Charmed

When the telephone rang in Brian Shaw’s bedroom a little after 7:30 on the morning of June 26, 1993, he was not startled out of sleep. He had expected to be awakened by the phone. The last thing his father told him before he and the rest of the family began the drive late the night before from Oakland to Las Vegas was that he would call to let him know they had arrived safely.

Shaw picked up the receiver, expecting to hear his father’s voice.

Instead, it was a voice he didn’t recognize, belonging to someone who said he was from the Clark County, Nev., coroner’s office.

The conversation lasted seconds, minutes--Shaw doesn’t remember. He does remember that when it ended he thought it might have been a dream. He was momentarily relieved. Then he realized that his hand was still wrapped tightly around the receiver and knew that the call had been real.

His father, mother and sister were dead. His 11-month-old niece was in serious condition at a Las Vegas hospital and might not make it through the morning.

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I met Shaw about four years earlier, in the fall of ‘89, in Livorno, Italy. I had gone there to see Danny Ferry play in one of his first games for a Roman team, Il Messaggero. Shaw was the team’s other American.

Ferry, a star at Duke, had been the Clippers’ first-round draft choice that summer, the second player selected overall. But he had chosen to play in the Italian League that season as a ploy--probably devised by his father, then the general manger of the Washington Bullets--to persuade the Clippers to trade him, which they eventually did. Ferry has been an unspectacular though steady player ever since for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Shaw, out of UC Santa Barbara, had already played one season in the NBA with Boston, starting 54 games at point guard. When that season ended, the Celtics made him an offer of $225,000 for the next one. General Manager Jan Volk told him he should be proud to wear the Celtic green. Shaw had grown up in Oakland and didn’t even like the Celtics. He was more interested in another kind of green.

Il Messaggero, owned by a flamboyant newspaper publisher with an ambitious but short-lived strategy to elevate the Italian League by pursuing young American players on the way up instead of old ones on the way out, signed him for $1 million.

The Celtics reconsidered and gave Shaw the contract he wanted after that season. He has had a respectable NBA career, playing 11 seasons for seven teams.

The Lakers signed him because of an injury during the preseason to Kobe Bryant, who was an 11-year-old ballboy for his father’s Italian League team when Shaw first met him in 1989. At 34, he has been a valuable player off the bench, injecting energy and spontaneity into a triangle offense that sometimes seems programmed.

Shaw played with Larry Bird and Kevin McHale in Boston, went to the finals with Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway in Orlando and was standing next to P.J. Carlesimo on the court in Oakland when Latrell Sprewell choked the coach.

But Shaw has never had a season as interesting as the one in Italy.

The crowd in Livorno that night whistled and jeered at him and Ferry when they started slowly, then threw coins at them when they led an Il Messaggero comeback.

The young Americans acknowledged afterward that they weren’t sure what they had gotten themselves into, but I was impressed while spending the next two days with them in Rome by their eagerness to find out.

And although they were in Italy because of career decisions, both seemed determined not to limit their experience to basketball.

Shaw said his interest in the culture came from his parents. When I asked him to tell me about them, he described what he called a perfect family.

His mother, Barbara, was the sensitive one, a native of Guyana who became the director of a family development center in Oakland. She exposed Shaw and his younger sister, Monica, to the arts, taking them to the opera, ballet and theater. She had insisted that they take music lessons. He plays the piano, trumpet and drums.

His father, Charles, was a disciplinarian who believed that sports provided a straight and narrow path. A former junior college football player, he put up a basketball hoop in the driveway when Brian was 5. He also took him fishing in Alaska every summer, renting a remote cabin without electricity or running water.

Their neighborhood was depressed but not depressing. The Shaws made sure of that. Charles, known as Pops, was the block’s drill sergeant, taking calls almost daily from distressed single mothers when they needed assistance with their sons, and also the coach. He would load all the neighborhood kids into his station wagon to take them to baseball, basketball and soccer practices, rewarding them afterward at McDonald’s.

But Charles, who was stationed in Germany while in the military, also wanted his son to be well-rounded, advising him to study the art, history and architecture in Italy.

“My father told me to make sure I didn’t come back and have nothing to talk about but basketball and beautiful women,” Shaw said. “He said this was an opportunity that most Americans can only dream about and that I should make the most of it.”

We had this conversation over dinner one night in Rome’s Piazza Navona, where children had followed him and Ferry to the door yelling their names and street artists had battled for position to sketch their profiles. Shaw’s life, it seemed, was charmed.

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Shaw’s family, going to Las Vegas to prepare his new house for him while he stayed in Oakland to take care of some business, planned to leave before dark.

But Charles, an auto mechanic, worked overtime and didn’t get home until after 9 p.m.

The one-car accident occurred about 5:15 a.m. south of the Strip on Interstate 15, 20 minutes from Shaw’s house. The Jeep Cherokee was traveling between 70 mph and 75 mph when it drifted into the median, spun out of control, overturned and skidded about 300 feet on its hood. Police guessed that Charles had fallen asleep at the wheel.

Barbara, 51, and Monica, 24, were pronounced dead at the scene. Charles, 52, was taken by helicopter to University Medical Center, where he died an hour later. Brianna, Monica’s daughter, had a ruptured spleen and scrapes and cuts on virtually every part of her body after having skidded on concrete for hundreds of feet.

None of the adults wore a seat belt. Brianna’s car seat was improperly fastened.

More than 2,000 packed Oakland’s Taylor Memorial United Methodist Church--capacity 600--for the funeral. They came for the deceased, who had been pillars of the community. They also came for Brian. The Miami Heat, his team at the time, chartered a plane. Many of his former teammates attended, including Reggie Lewis, who himself would be dead of a heart condition less than a month later.

Brian delivered the eulogy, a 10-minute collection of anecdotes about his father, mother and sister that had the audience crying, laughing and applauding.

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Within minutes after Shaw called him with the tragic news on that morning in 1993, Shaw’s agent, Jerome Stanley of Los Angeles, was preparing to go to Las Vegas to make arrangements for his client to receive temporary custody of Brianna. Shaw was there by that afternoon, in time to see her condition upgraded to stable.

That was the beginning of a four-year legal battle with the girl’s natural father, who, according to Shaw, was not very involved in the child’s life while Monica was alive. The result was that Shaw became his niece’s legal guardian.

During a decade in which several NBA players would be vilified for failing to take responsibility for their illegitimate children, Shaw fought in court to become a single father.

“That’s part of my parents’ legacy,” Shaw said last week after a practice at the Lakers’ El Segundo training facility. “They taught me that family comes first, that you take care of your own.”

Shaw, who is married to longtime girlfriend Nikki and has a 1-year-old son, Brian Jr., with her, has pictures of his mother, father and sister throughout their Manhattan Beach home.

Brianna, who will turn 8 in July, has begun to ask what her mother was like.

“I tell her that her mother was just like she is,” Shaw said. “She was very, very blunt. She called things like she saw them. She was also real dramatic when it came to getting what she wanted. She knew how to play the game with my father. There was a big difference in what we could get away with. The way Brianna works me sometimes, I just have to shake my head.”

Shaw is trying to get to the NBA finals for the second time. For years after his parents died, he said he would look into the stands out of habit to see if they were there. They always had been. They went to Italy five times during the season he played there.

“I know they would be proud of the success I’m having with the Lakers,” he said.

More important to him, he said, they would be proud of his family.

“I just hope that I can be half the parent that they were,” he said. “They taught me what’s important. You know after people die, you hear their relatives say, ‘I wish I had done this or that,’ or, ‘I wish I had said this or that.’ Everything we should have done together, we did. Everything we should have said, we said.

“I meant what I said at the funeral. I mourned their deaths, but every day since I’ve celebrated their lives.”

His life, he said, is charmed.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com