With Brand, It’s Nice and Warm

A year or two after Elton Brand had led Peekskill High to consecutive state basketball championships a decade ago, another prominent Peekskill alum, George Pataki, attended a game.

The four-term New York governor is wildly popular in his hometown, and his arrival at the gym was met with a raucous roar from the crowd.

The fevered greeting paled by comparison, however, when Brand walked into the gym a few minutes later.

“The crowd nearly tore the roof off the place,” said a prominent Peekskill attorney, Phil Hersh, whose family firm has represented Pataki and once employed Brand as an intern. “I remember George saying to me afterward, ‘That’s the last time I’m ever going anywhere with him.’ ”

In Peekskill, apparently, nobody upstages Elton Brand.

The All-Star Clipper forward, reared by a no-nonsense mother in a single-parent home in a low-income housing project known as Dunbar Heights, was a favorite son in Peekskill long before he posted MVP-type numbers this season and helped the Clippers to only their second winning season in more than a quarter-century.

The Clippers, in the playoffs for the first time since 1997, play the Denver Nuggets in an opening-round series starting tonight at Staples Center.

In Peekskill, an economically depressed, blue-collar town of about 20,000 on the east bank of the Hudson River, about an hour’s drive north of midtown Manhattan, many fans probably will be pulling for them.

That’s because Brand, the Clippers’ 6-foot-8, 265-pound leader, is recalled affectionately in his hometown, where his warm and friendly nature was valued at least as much as his considerable on-court ability, presaging his emergence as one of the NBA’s most affable, congenial and approachable big-name talents.

His effect in the community still reverberates, mostly through an annual free basketball clinic and an after-school learning center he helped bankroll.

He is remembered as quietly confident, personable and polite, the kind of guy who “everybody claims as their own, almost as if he were one of their children,” said Jane Solnick, events and membership coordinator at the Hudson Valley Gateway Chamber of Commerce, headquartered in downtown Peekskill.

Hersh, at first reluctant when Brand walked into his downtown law office as one of the first high school students to initiate a pilot internship program, said Brand instantly won him over. In terms of treating people right and respecting their opinions, Hersh said, “I ended up learning more from him than he did from me.” Because of Brand, he said, the program has flourished.

And Lou Panzanaro, Brand’s high school basketball coach, might be less widely known for winning state championships -- he’s won four in all -- than for his well-traveled comment of a few years ago, when the veteran coach told a reporter, “One day, I’d like to be as mature as Elton was when he was 14.”

Panzanaro has coached other great players. His Red Devils, in fact, are again two-time defending state champions, as they were 10 years ago, and their best player, sophomore forward Mookie Jones, is drawing the same kind of attention from college recruiters that Brand once did. Another Peekskill alum, Hilton Armstrong of Connecticut, is expected to be taken in the NBA draft this spring.

But whenever he is asked about other players, Panzanaro says, he inevitably turns the conversation back to Brand.

“I’ve never had anybody like Elton,” Panzanaro said this week, biting into a chicken sandwich and surveying a picturesque midday scene at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the Hudson. “He was totally unique. He had such maturity at such a young age, that ability to think so clearly and have a direction....

“He made everything happen with his work ethic. It wasn’t like he was one of these kids you see flying through the air with all this wonderful athletic ability. He made himself the best. He had the size, the God-given talents, but it was the cerebral part that has taken him where he’s gone. He was relentless.”

Though Brand once had scored 52 points in a recreation league game in junior high, Panzanaro assigned him to the junior varsity as a freshman.

That didn’t last long.

Refereeing a JV scrimmage one day about three weeks into fall practice, Panzanaro said, “I threw the ball up, Elton won the tap and he ran to the block. They threw him an entry pass and he jumped up and dunked the ball with two hands. He had 38 points, twenty-something rebounds.”

And his JV days were over.

Later that season, the Red Devils were playing for the sectional championship when Brand ran past Panzanaro and told him he had lost a tooth. Frantically scrambling to arrange a ride to the dentist for his starting center while also continuing to coach, Panzanaro was taken aback moments later when Brand tapped him on the shoulder, told him he had found the tooth lodged in the roof of his mouth and had jammed it back into place. He continued to play, finishing with 21 points and 16 rebounds.

“And that’s his freshman year,” Panzanaro said. “He’s 14 years old. I knew then, ‘This is a special kid.’ And from then it just got better and better.”

Brand added to his growing legend as a sophomore, when, on a dunk, he tore down a backboard, sending glass flying all over the court.

“I’ve still got the glass,” said Edward Peterson, a security guard who had befriended Brand, often drove him around town and was rewarded in December when Brand drove a brand-new hybrid SUV onto campus and handed him the keys.

“Not many can say they shattered a backboard, but he did it legitimately.”

Brand’s teams, which won state championships during his sophomore and junior seasons, were such a joy to coach, Panzanaro said, that they helped ease him through a difficult stretch in his life. The coach’s 21-year-old son had recently been killed in a traffic accident and his first marriage was crumbling.

“That group was so special to me because that was a period of turmoil for me,” he said. “They were my comfort. I guess it was just the warmth I felt being around those kids and the way they responded. It was something I needed at that time, probably more than they needed me.”

During his high school summers, Brand regularly rode the train into Manhattan to play for the nationally recognized AAU team at Riverside Church. Others who have suited up for the Hawks include more than 60 NBA players, among them Chris Mullin, Mark Jackson, Stephon Marbury, Jerry Stackhouse, Ron Artest and Lamar Odom.

Brand played with Odom and Artest -- one summer, a team featuring Brand and Artest went 64-1 -- but managed not to adopt their big-city flightiness.

He was “the same way he is now: real intensive pace, pay attention to detail, smart player, great teammate, outwork everybody in front of him,” Odom said this week. “He’s book smart, and he’s from New York so he’s street smart.”

Street-wary too.

“Just being perceptive, you can see who wins and loses,” Brand said. “Some bad things happened around the neighborhood, but some good things too.”

Brand remained grounded in Peekskill, where he lived with his mother, Daisy, and stepbrother Artie McGriff, nine years older than Brand.

They were poor -- Daisy worked with mentally challenged children and as a security guard at night -- but Brand said he never realized it until he enrolled in school. There, others asked him, wide-eyed, about living at Dunbar Heights, where bars protected the windows in the two-story brick buildings.

At first he denied living there, saying his home was around the corner, but he felt so ashamed for lying about it that he vowed never to deny it again.

Dunbar was a “nurturing place,” he said. More than a dozen other boys around his age lived in the sprawling complex, providing plenty of competition. The two tiny basketball courts weren’t much -- cracked slabs of asphalt stretching out only about 18 feet from the basket -- but they were where Brand learned to play.

He never knew his father, who left when he was 2, and until he was in grade school, Brand believed that his grandfather, John Timms, was his father.

Timms, who suffered a stroke four years ago and will turn 74 in June, shuffled to the door with the aid of a cane this week, greeting a visitor to the tiny apartment in the senior citizens’ building he now calls home. Inside his living room, a life-size cutout of his grandson loomed over a desk and autographed basketballs, a framed jersey and bobble-head dolls lined the shelves and walls.

Tearfully, he recalled Brand as something of a golden child.

“You couldn’t beat him,” he said. “No trouble, no nothing....

“I caught him one time with some kids who were drinking liquor. I said, ‘What’s you doing?’ He said, ‘I ain’t doing nothing.’ Kids were shooting dice. I said, ‘What did I tell you? When you see something bad, keep walking.’ ”

Mostly, though, Timms told Brand to obey his mother. It was a lesson his grandson took to heart.

Brand, engaged to be married this summer to former Duke student Shahara Simmons, is rarely far from his mother, who took an apartment in Durham, N.C., during her son’s two years at Duke, followed him to Chicago after he was drafted by the Bulls in 1999 and has attended nearly every one of his games, home and away, in his seven NBA seasons.

Daisy Brand, who lives in Los Angeles during the season, returns to Peekskill every summer to live in the half-million-dollar home her son bought her.

Shy and uninterested in drawing attention to herself, she won’t sit for interviews, but her influence on her youngest son is plain to see.

“She’s a very strong woman and she keeps everybody grounded,” said McGriff, Brand’s stepbrother, a married father of four and the director of athletics at a boys’ and girls’ club in Gary, Ind. “She wouldn’t tolerate anything like being disrespectful or not being polite to people. That was one of the first things we learned: to be polite and respectful, especially to women.”

It was Daisy’s idea to open CAMP Inc., Comprehensive Action Model for Peekskill, a fully equipped learning center in a modest brick building in the heart of Peekskill. She persuaded Panzanaro to run the operation, which offers free academic tutoring, access to computers, and music and art instruction, among several other programs, to disadvantaged and at-risk youth.

Her son’s $400,000 in contributions have helped it flourish.

But Daisy’s lasting legacy just might be Elton himself.

Through all of his accomplishments -- college player of the year at Duke, No. 1 pick in the draft, two-time NBA All-Star, career averages of more than 20 points and 10 rebounds, an $82.2-million contract -- nothing has changed him.

Brand has worn his good-guy image as a badge of honor and something to take great pride in maintaining, at least as long as others don’t take it too far.

“On the court, there are a lot of guys with a lot of bruises, maybe a concussion or two, because of me,” he said, laughing. “It’s not like I’m soft. Far from soft. But off the court, I try to be honest with myself. I’m a nice guy. That’s who I am.

“I understand, ‘OK, I’ve got a good job.’ But that doesn’t make me better than the next guy. I might have more money or I might have more notoriety, but I try to treat everybody like I’d want to be treated. I learned that early.”

And he learned it in Peekskill.

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Times staff writer Mike Bresnahan contributed to this report.