A Player With Promise

March Madness carries Michael Schnyder out of the pregame huddle, to a place only he can visit, for a prayer only he can understand.

Before the Glendale College basketball team begins its state tournament quarterfinal game tonight in Stockton, their best player will not gather with his teammates in front of the bench.

He will, as usual, walk to an empty spot near a foul line. Once there, with head bowed, he will speak to the father who left him, on behalf of the mother who will not.

“Daddy,” he will pray, “you know what I’m going through . . .”

Surely his father knows. It was his father who told Michael, in that steady handyman’s voice, that his mother should never be put in a nursing home.

Even when her multiple sclerosis became so bad she couldn’t hold her gaunt head up, his father told him this.

Even when she moved into a hospital-style bed in their tiny south Los Angeles home, barely able to speak, eating only through a tube, his father told him this.

His father told him this until last June, when Leo Schnyder crawled underneath an ailing car in their backyard and never crawled out.

Died of a heart attack. Left his youngest son to remember his mother and the promise.

“Daddy,” he’ll pray tonight, nine months later, “I’m doing what you said . . .”

As he prays, Annie Slaughter will still be in that stucco house, behind those barred windows, still in her bed.

Michael Schnyder, age 20, is her primary caregiver. He is the one who pays the bills, gives the injections, figures the insurance, changes the sheets.

He is also his conference’s most valuable player, a high-jumping, tough-shooting guard who is one of the best junior college players in the state and a national Division I prospect.

A prospect who doesn’t even open recruiting letters from out of town.

Because he is the one who must come running when his mother calls, and how can he do that from a big city in Texas or a small town in Utah?

In remembering the promise, he has forgotten himself. He has missed practices, nearly left games at halftime, rushed from the court on countless occasions to either drive or phone home.

He has played with no sleep. He has played distracted. He has played in tears.

“I’ve seen a lot of things here,” says his coach, Brian Beauchemin, a 22-year Glendale veteran. “But what this kid is doing, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

This time of year, most college basketball players ask for victory.

Michael Schnyder asks only for peace.

“Please, Daddy,” he’ll pray tonight. “Let my pager stay quiet until we finish this game.”

*

March Madness carries Michael Schnyder hurriedly out of a Glendale gym still filled with his teammates, into a bouncy old Chrysler, down the Harbor Freeway to the promise.

It is three days before the state quarterfinals. Practice is scheduled to last another hour.

“We need him here today,” Beauchemin says.

But the nurse who watches his mother during the day has to leave suddenly with a family emergency.

His blue pager beeps. Schnyder runs from the gym without even taking a shower.

Forty-five minutes later, he walks into a yellow two-bedroom house on a cluttered block, into antiseptic-smelling air filled with a familiar cry.

“Michaeeeeel!”

It’s his mother. She wants Schnyder to move her head.

He walks into her bedroom. The lights are off, the curtains drawn. A silent television flickers from the opposite wall.

She is propped up against the pillows, a brightly colored blanket pulled up toward vacant eyes.

Her son, whose beard stubble cannot disguise his young face, smiles as if walking into a suite at the Ritz.

“I’m here, Momma, I’m here,” he says gently, adjusting her shoulders, kissing her cheek.

“My boy,” she groans.

With the exception of school and basketball, her boy is always here.

“I told my father I would never let anyone take Momma,” he says. “And I won’t.”

The state-funded nurse works eight hours a day, six days a week. Schnyder is responsible for everything else.

“I think back to when I had both parents here, and how great it was,” he says. “I thought it would always be like that.”

Once a pampered child, he now sleeps either on a couch outside his mother’s room, or in a recliner next to her bed. He awakens every two hours to move her. He awakens every time the 54-year-old woman cries.

Once a squeamish child, he feeds her every four hours through a tube in her stomach. He dissolves her six bottles of pills into water, and pours them down the same tube. Every other day he mixes medicine in a syringe and injects her hip.

“Used to be, I couldn’t even look at a needle,” he says.

He also never knew how a washing machine worked. Now, he changes and washes her sheets at least once a day. Because the dryer broke, he sometimes hangs the wet linens on an inside heater.

“She used to change my diaper,” he says. “Now, it’s only fair that I do it for her.”

He had never even seen a bill. Now he pays all of the bills, running to the market to fill out money orders because he has no checking account.

If she has a seizure, which is happening more frequently, he accompanies her to the hospital and stays by her side until she is discharged.

He is always thinking what, perhaps, you are thinking.

“I want everybody at the hospital to know that somebody loves this woman, and cares for this woman,” he says. “I want them to know that I am not too young to be that person.”

Officials from a social service agency have visited once, and were initially skeptical. He says they checked her medicine, and discovered that she did not have enough to last until the next doctor visit.

“I was one pill short,” he says. “I was so scared they were going to put her in a home. I have never been one pill short again.”

He says he has nightmares that somebody is going to take her for good.

“I hear ambulances coming, and I see her get taken away, and then they never bring her back,” he says.

The day after the nightmares, he says he hugs his mother and reassures her.

“I say, ‘Momma, as long as I’m alive and you’re alive, we’re going to be together,’ ” he says.

He says she complains when she goes to the hospital, and smiles when she comes home.

“I know she is happier here,” he says. “This is what my father wanted, this is what she wants. I have to step up and be a man and do this for them.”

Beauchemin fits his practices around Schnyder’s schedule. On night games, Schnyder either contracts the nurse to work overtime, or relies on friends and extended family members for care.

He has a developmentally challenged older brother, Kenyatta, who recently moved back home. He has four half-brothers--they had a different mother--who are also in town.

All the brothers will be working with the nurse while Schnyder is in Stockton.

“There is so much pressure on him, everything falls on him,” says Derek Schnyder, one of his half-brothers. “He’s become a real man.”

If the Vaqueros have success, they could be in Stockton through the weekend, with the state championship game scheduled for Saturday night. If not, they could be home Friday morning.

As usual, Schnyder is torn.

“I want to win the state championship more than anything,” he says. “But, you know, I will be thinking about home.”

It is a home that, while once bursting with the richness of a two-parent home, now sits on the edge of chilled poverty.

Schnyder lives on his mother’s monthly Social Security check of $721. Because the home belongs to a relative, he pays about $300 a month in rent.

The rest he uses to pay bills and buy supplies, although there’s barely enough.

His phone has been turned off. He once recycled bottles for money for bus fare to school. While he is the perfect candidate for a cellular phone, he cannot afford one.

His parents used to cook him a hot breakfast every morning, and had dinner waiting for him when he returned from school. Now he eats out of a refrigerator filled with tinfoil cafeteria leftovers donated by Beauchemin’s family.

Schnyder remembers a time when his doting mother would bake him a chocolate cake and pumpkin pie on his birthday.

Last year, he didn’t even celebrate his birthday.

He remembers when his parents gave him $150 basketball shoes and electronic equipment for Christmas.

Last Christmas, he says, he received nothing.

He celebrated by lifting his mother into the front seat of that old Chrysler and driving her around the neighborhood. Friends would come to the window and say hello and grab her hand.

“A good Christmas,” Schnyder says.

“A 20-year-old kid,” Beauchemin says. “Think about it.”

*

March Madness carries Michael Schnyder through the air, spinning above the rim, into a reverse dunk that turns a passing drill into a highlight reel.

This is his favorite time of day, the time when the squeaking of shoes and echoing of bouncing balls overwhelm a certain beep-beep-beep.

That pager sits on the sideline at practice, and on the bench during games.

But sometimes he can get lost in the noise and pretend it doesn’t exist.

“I think his personal situation has actually made him a better player,” teammate DeJon Lee says. “I think it’s given him more focus. In the tougher games, he comes alive.”

He didn’t begin playing high school basketball until his junior season at Fremont High. Then his mother was diagnosed with MS, and he began missing classes.

He didn’t play his senior season because he flunked out of school. He passed his equivalency exam and entered Glendale for a second chance.

The 6-foot-1 leaper was voted the team’s top freshman last season, but he was still the pampered child.

There were times he would yell at Beauchemin from the court. Once, after being taken out of a game, he stormed off the bench and into the locker room.

“I don’t think I understood what it took,” he says.

Then his father died suddenly, and he had no choice but to understand.

“When I first heard about his father dying, I thought, that’s it, he’s finished here,” Beauchemin says. “He would have to get a job and spend all his time taking care of his mother.”

That was Schnyder’s original idea, until relatives reminded him of something else his father had said.

“My Dad always told me that I was going to be his little NBA player, that I was going to be the one to get them to a better neighborhood,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t stop playing.”

It was hard, then it got harder.

The team played a holiday tournament in San Diego, but Schnyder couldn’t stay overnight, so an assistant coach drove him back and forth twice until he was carsick.

At halftime of a game against College of the Canyons, his beeper went off and he phoned home. A friend told him that something must be wrong because his mother was frantically calling for him.

Schnyder got dressed and left the locker room, stopping to phone home one more time. The friend answered and said that his mom was fine, and that he should finish the game.

He undressed again, put back on his uniform, and scored 22 second-half points to lead the Vaqueros to victory.

“One minute he’s standing there dressed in his regular clothes and in tears, the next minute he’s back on the court scoring,” Lee recalls. “It’s been a strange season.”

But, beginning with that game, an inspired season.

The team was struggling with a 14-9 record before winning nine of its last 10, including an upset of the state’s top-ranked team--L.A. City College--in a playoff game last weekend.

Those who voted him MVP of the Western State Conference’s Southern Division obviously believed that Schnyder’s 18 points, four rebounds, six assists and two steals a game were a big reason.

His appearance at the team’s opening playoff game against Cerritos was another reason.

He didn’t want to play. He had taken his mother to the hospital the previous night with a seizure and waited five hours until she was checked into a room. Then he stayed by her side until nearly game time, when he arrived at Glendale, exhausted.

“He said he couldn’t make it,” Beauchemin recalls. “I told him that as badly as we needed him, I understood.”

But his teammates didn’t. They talked him into playing on no sleep. He scored only 11 points, but the Vaqueros needed all of them in a one-point victory.

“You have to remember something about Mike,” Beauchemin says. “To him, his mother is the last living thing he has on this earth.”

*

March Madness . . . but is it?

Sitting in the middle of his house, Michael Schnyder can pick up his feet and see a grease stain in the middle of a worn blue carpet. It is the mark made by his father’s work shirt when they brought him inside after his fatal heart attack.

Facing him is the photo that accompanied his father’s casket, plus the silk flowers that surrounded it.

Behind him is his mother’s room, the door always open, so he can hear every sound.

He is sitting there on a recent night in basketball shoes, sweat rolling down his face, his teammates still back in Glendale, doing what he should be doing, a promising man crumbling under a promise.

You say, “This is crazy.”

He says, “This is family.”

*

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