There are some things still worth supporting

It’s still early in the day, and Michael Vick, who is throwing away a 10-year, $130-million contract, is standing in front of a judge in his black and white prison garb.

There’s also a report that the Indiana Pacers’ Jamaal Tinsley, due to earn $6.3 million this season, was driving around at 3 in the morning in his Rolls-Royce -- shots being fired into the car.

You hear about it all the time now, folks who seemingly have it all only to risk throwing it away.

An hour or so later an e-mail arrives from someone who has it all and is fighting like crazy to keep it that way, Cliff Katab, waiting for MRI results to determine what’s going on inside his son’s brain.

“I read about Mattel’s and it’s great,” Cliff writes, “but I want people to also know the phenomenal work being done here at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.”

A few minutes pass, and another e-mail. “The report’s not good.”

Grayson Katab is 23 months old, and forget about Vick & Co., right now he’s just trying to get a grip on this Santa Claus character and the tube sticking out of his body.

A few months back Grayson was at the beach with his twin brother, Everett. He bumped his head, so his parents took him to the hospital, a doctor stopping by to say the bump had nothing to do with it, but one-quarter of their son’s brain is a tumor.

“The world comes to a screeching halt,” Cliff says, and right now an indicted Barry Bonds, who was paid $15.8 million last season, is probably saying the same thing.

“One day my son is at the beach and two days later he’s undergoing brain surgery,” Cliff says.

That was five surgeries and countless chemo treatments ago, and today Vick thinks he’s got it tough.

Grayson’s left kidney was removed because the tumor spread. He’s facing more brain surgery after Christmas. If successful, two weeks later he will go to Belgium where an experimental drug offers hope.

“As a parent, nothing could be worse,” Cliff says. “It’s one of the rarest types of brain cancer with a survivor rate in single digits, and he doesn’t understand any of it. He just wants to play with the other kids.”

Grayson has a tube sticking out of him because it’s too hard to find the vein needed for chemo, but if you have a tube sticking out of a 2-year-old, it’s going to be pulled -- which resulted in one more surgery.

“He’s so young, and he’s been poked and prodded so much. They’ve got to change the dressings, and here he is -- looking up into your eyes, like daddy, help me, and you’ve just got to pin him down. It rips your heart apart, and then you have to do it again the next day and the next. You just have to tell yourself it’s going to make him better.”

And so goes the agony every day for some kids and parents, until running into a smiling Dr. Noah Federman, who is walking down Mattel’s hallway without seemingly a care in the world -- bald kids crying to the right and to the left.

“I know most of these kids are going to get better,” he says, “and go home and have great lives.”

THAT’S WHAT makes today such a cool one, the annual Mattel Christmas party, which draws many of the kids who have been treated at the hospital in the past to the UCLA John Wooden Center to meet Santa Claus, otherwise known the rest of the year as Tom Lasorda.

There will be games, food and kids running everywhere, so many more stories of success than failure.

A long list of donors have contributed money for toys, newspaper reader Benita Fernandez, for example, donating $1 a day -- hitting the $100 mark this week -- since she learned some good news about her own health.

Maybe he’s not a headline maker like Vick and Bonds, but Michael Zuk is doing the good deed quietly behind the scenes, chidingly predicting doom for UCLA every week, and then making a $50 donation to Mattel’s every time he was wrong.

Ed Allred, who already donated the first $50,000 his horse, Kiddy Up, won at Los Alamitos, is spending more money to ready Kiddy Up for better results with the promise now of donating the first $50,000 the horse wins next year to Mattel’s.

A number of folks agreed to donate $100 to Mattel’s for every Dodgers win -- some even making good on their pledges.

It was Mark Verge’s idea, and Lava Man trainer Doug O’Neill’s willingness to help, to have the kids autograph baseball caps and give them to folks making big donations.

It was a painful experience, all right, local athletes, coaches and owners agreeing to be interviewed on the morning radio show, but in return Purpose Funding donated $50,000 in their names.

So many nice people doing what they can with what they have, and just imagine if there was a pool of money out there to draw on from the likes of Vick and Pacman Jones.

How about you get in trouble and we send the salary you blew to Mattel’s or CHLA -- the morning sports headlines now a lot more satisfying than upsetting.

No such luck for those who love Grayson Katab, taking it upon themselves to do what they can and raise $160,000 for CHLA.

“We understand things don’t happen overnight -- so worse-case scenario, this money is going to be given to the brain research department at CHLA,” Cliff says. “It’d be nice to help other kids down the road who face something rare like this.”

In a perfect world, which doesn’t exist as Cliff knows now, maybe a local athlete who isn’t making bad decisions and throwing away his good fortune, steps forward to match the $160,000 raised to help the next unfortunate child.

Maybe it’s a team making a Christmas donation in the name of its good players, or a corporation honoring its fine employees.

“I know it’s not right to ask such a thing. . . . “ Cliff says.

But then it’s not right that a kid gets brain cancer.

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.