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MANRAM!
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: NORCAL
Age: 24
Posts: 18,070
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Francisco García overcomes adversity, grief to create his golden opportunity
A King's American dream
Quote:
"His confidence is high," Kings assistant Elston Turner said. "If he misses two or three shots, he's going to take the fourth and fifth ones. And that's better than missing four, then going and hiding for the rest of the day like so many guys do."
But there's bouncing back from hard times in hoops, and then there's real recovery, the kind that comes slower and with far more pain and puts basketball in a whole different light.
It has been almost two years since García lost his brother. García was in his sophomore season at Louisville, adjusting away from home while his mother, Vicente Miguelina, and brother, Hector Lopez, lived in the South Bronx.
About 11 o'clock on a cold December night, 19-year-old Lopez was in the lobby of a Grand Concourse building with friends when two men charged in with guns. They shot Lopez in the neck and the chest at point-blank range. He died 15 minutes later.
Later that night, the cell phone García and his brother had talked on the day before rang. It was his mother, calling with the awful news.
Family and friends say it was a case of mistaken identity, that Lopez was too beloved by too many to have someone take his life on purpose. The killers have since been caught. García wishes he could have taken his family members out of the Bronx before one of them was gone.
"We were tight," García said of he and Lopez. "He played basketball, but he wasn't serious about it. He was going to (high) school, wanted to go to college."
But he couldn't, so the older brother moved on in the younger brother's honor. Two nights after Lopez died, Louisville played at Seton Hall. Pitino planned to sit García, but García wouldn't let him.
"I had said, 'Take a game or two off, get your thoughts together,' " Pitino said. "He said, 'No, I'm going to play because he would want me to play and my mother wants me to play.' "
And play he did. García scored 24 points as Louisville won. He started a ritual that continues, tapping his heart twice and pointing toward the sky at the free-throw line in respect for Lopez. After the game, he flew home for the funeral not far from his Bronx home.
"There were so many people there that they had to take up two different rooms, because he was so loved," said Luis Flores, a longtime friend of García's who was playing at Manhattan College at the time. "It took me 10 minutes to get all the way inside and see Francisco."
When García returned to Louisville, he never slowed down, earning first-team All-Conference USA honors and leading the Cardinals in scoring and assists. He had a tattoo of his brother inked on his chest, "In memory of Hector Lopez, Dec. 8, 2003," across his left pectoral muscle. He learned from loss.
"From a standpoint of what it did to him, it just made him stronger," said Flores, who was in the Kings' training camp until being released last week. "It made him realize that we're here today and gone tomorrow, so he plays like that. He gives his all on the floor because he never knows when he'll play again."
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Francisco García overcomes adversity, grief to create his golden opportunity
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