Read An Uncomplicated Life Online
Authors: Paul Daugherty
From there, it was only a small leap of audacity for Jillian to assume the entire team would enjoy her talents as a rapper. Jillian was an enthusiastic rapper, honing her skills with Eminem and Snoop Dogg CDs she’d liberated from her brother. To put it politely, Jillian wasn’t especially polished with rhymes. Imagine Tupac doing Shakespeare at the Globe. At first, she practiced only in front of Danny. If she came up with a new rap at home, she’d call Danny. Sometimes, if Danny was with his family or girlfriend, he’d put Jillian on speakerphone so everyone could enjoy her rhymes. Jillian made Danny laugh, every time.
By January, Jillian apparently felt ready for the footlights. I say apparently because Kerry and I had no idea she’d been plotting her rapping debut until long after it happened. That was probably for the best because if we’d gotten wind of it, we might have stopped it. That’s probably why Jillian never gave us a clue.
She asked Coach Beez if she could rap for the team. Fortunately, Beez didn’t ask for a sample. If he had, Jillian would never have desecrated a rhyme in public. Instead, Bezold said, “Okay, but it better be good.”
“Oh, it will be,” Jillian said.
On the day of her first public rapping appearance, which would occur immediately after practice, Jillian spent most of practice in a luxury box on the second level of the Bank of Kentucky
Center, the 9,400-seat arena on the NKU campus. Players heard strange sounds coming from the box and wondered whose cat was being tortured. At the end of practice, at a time Bezold had approved in advance, Jillian yelled, “Yo!Yo!Yo! Listen up, y’all!”
The players looked up to see their new manager as she edged from the luxury box. Jillian’s basketball shorts rode low on her hips. She wore her ball cap sideways. She danced—the Dougie, perhaps—as she rolled down a very long flight of steps.
“Give it up for J-Dog!” she said.
What?
The players were amused—and some of them were snickering at her. Undeterred, Jillian busted a few Snoop-inspired rhymes. When she was done, the players applauded, sort of.
After that first excursion, there was no stopping her, and as the days and weeks rolled by, the players bought into this version of the Jillian Daugherty Show. They saw Jillian come to practice every day. They saw her fill their water bottles and keep their court dry as they practiced. They saw her passion during games. They felt her encouragement, no matter how well they played. They started to realize her support for them was unconditional and her work ethic was genuine. Jillian’s aim was true.
Soon enough, she had worked out an arrangement with Coach Beez. Each Friday after practice, she would get 35 seconds—a full shot clock—to address the team with a rap. When the buzzer sounded, she’d have to stop lest the rap session last all weekend.
Jillian became expert at mentioning individual players. She
knew their birthdays. She picked up on their unique traits, usually by listening to Bezold during practice. Tony Rack, for example, was a very good three-point shooter. Thus:
“There goes Tony, my three-point homey.”
She noticed the coaching staff’s practice exhortations: Box out. Stay tight. Rebound. If Bezold had gotten on a particular player during practice, she’d work that into the rhyme:
“Coach Beez mad, Malcolm sad. But it gonna be all right, yeah!”
Players were especially amused by those rhymes. Jocks aren’t sparing with the mutual ridicule. Jillian also knew who NKU’s next opponent was and would trash-talk that team. Soon the players dubbed Jillian’s shows Freestyle Friday. She’d begin working on that week’s rhymes a day in advance, then call Danny on Thursday nights to test them out. Poor Danny. He heard more bad tunes than the judges on
American Idol
.
The quality wasn’t important, of course. Jillian rapped with utter authenticity and transparency. She had no agenda beyond wanting to be one of the guys. The guys saw that, and the players who’d been uncomfortable initially with Jillian started asking her to feature them in that week’s rap.
By the time Jillian was a third-year manager, her rapping had become a highlight of Friday practices. The rhymes didn’t define Jillian’s role with the team though. They were her entry, but they didn’t allow for the whole Jillian Daugherty Show.
That first year, she became enamored with Tony Rack. He was a junior guard with a surpassing work ethic and desire to win. He was a crazy man. We say this in the nicest of ways. Jillian leaned on Danny Boehmker, but she worshipped Tony. Her relationship with all “my players,” as she called them, was important. Her affection for Rack was something more.
“I love my man Tony,” she’d say. After her first game as a manager, Jillian brought Tony over to meet us. “This is Tony Rack,” she said. “He’s my best man.”
Rack was a local guy, raised in the Cincinnati suburbs. He had attended Moeller High School, just across the river in Montgomery, Ohio. He’d never known anyone with a disability, let alone someone like Jillian. It was an uneasy pairing at first. Jillian made a point of buying her new best man snacks and drinks, which she’d present to him before almost every practice. It made Rack uneasy to the point where he asked Danny and Bezold to talk to Jillian about it.
“I didn’t know how to handle it,” Rack recalled years later. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t want to take her money.”
Early on, Rack was the only player Jillian talked to. This embarrassed Tony who, despite his outgoing nature, was uncomfortable with the attention. Things changed eventually, as Jillian loosened up and other players became comfortable with her. But Jillian’s fondness for Tony never wavered, and she showed that by joking with him.
One game his junior year, Rack had just come off the floor after badly missing a three-pointer. It was late in a game NKU had well in hand. Jillian fulfilled her duties by fetching Tony a towel and a cup of water. But not without a dig:
“The way you’re shooting tonight,” she said, “you’re lucky I don’t pour this on you.”
Also in his junior season, Rack drilled a three-pointer at the buzzer to beat Kentucky Wesleyan in an NCAA Tournament game. It was among the biggest shots of his career. Just before the shot, during a timeout, Bezold walked to the far end of the bench where Jillian stood guard over the watercooler.
“You’re going to draw up a play for Tony to take the last shot, right?” she asked the coach.
But it was during the bad times that Jillian was most instructive. Rack injured his shoulder as a senior. The pain was so intense he took a cortisone injection to numb it, and eventually even that didn’t help. On Senior Night, the pain was such that Rack cried during warm-ups. He started the game, then took himself out 30 seconds into it. “The only time I’d ever done that,” he recalled.
He never left the bench after that, and NKU lost the game. Rack was inconsolable afterward. He didn’t feel much like talking, to anyone. As he walked down the hallway from the court to the locker room, Rack felt a basketball thump him in the rear.
What the . . . ? He wasn’t in the mood. He turned around quickly. This could be a problem.
“You’re still my home dawg, Tony Rack,” Jillian said. “Even if you’re hurt, I still got your back.”
JILLIAN TOOK LOSSES HARD
too. A few times in her first season, Kerry and I had to counsel her not to let her emotions flow during the game. “You have a job to do. You can’t be getting upset,” we’d say.
But the disappointment never lasted with her. Once the game was over, it was over. “With her, it’s in the moment,” Rack said. “That’s the way it should be.”
Jillian would get very concerned about how the players felt. That’s why she tossed the ball at Rack. It was why, before every
road game, Jillian figured when the team would be on the bus, from the hotel to the gym, and called Danny’s cell phone.
Jillian didn’t go with them for the roadies because everyone had a roommate, and she was the only female. That disappointed her more than anything. Still, she guessed the team needed her so she lent her support long distance, either with a pep talk or a rap. Danny put her on speakerphone. The bus got quiet whenever she called. On the rare occasions Jillian missed the timing for the call, players would wonder what happened. A few times, Danny called her from the back of the bus.
Not long ago, I asked Tony Rack what Jillian had taught him. They were together two years. Not a day passed when Jillian didn’t talk about her best man. Eventually, the feeling became mutual. “She gave me the realization that everyone is a role model,” Rack said. “No matter what I was doing, someone was watching. Like that cussing after I missed a shot.
“People always watched her, too,” partly, Rack allowed candidly, because of her disability. “She was always doing her best, on her best behavior. I think she felt the eyes on her.”
Kevin Schappell is an assistant coach. He attended Loveland High, where he was a local star, before Jillian got there. But he knew about her by the time she got to NKU. Assistants do the bulk of the recruiting of high school players. Teams that don’t recruit well don’t win, no matter the competence of their coaches.
“Any connection you can make with a recruit and his family helps,” Schappell said.
One year, the mother of NKU’s most coveted recruit had a nephew with Down syndrome. Schappell got Jillian to help
with the recruiting process. The family met her, and she talked about her job, her classes and the life she had on campus. “The mother broke down in tears,” Schappell said. And the player signed with Northern Kentucky.
Kindness builds. Respect is established. Jillian becomes part of the team, and the human transaction Bezold hoped would happen did occur.
“Open your eyes and you will see the good in everybody,” Bezold said. “Jillian shows my players that everyone has something to contribute. They need to know the importance of taking care of people. I can tell them that. But I’m a 45-year-old guy. For them to experience it is irreplaceable. That’s what college is, a place to give these kids as many experiences as possible. That’s how they grow. We have all kinds of kids here. Country kids, inner-city kids. Kids who’ve never seen anyone that doesn’t look like them. They need that exposure. Basketball is basketball.”
Jillian gave the players another prism through which to see the world. Her optimism and agenda-free friendship let them know that while basketball was temporary, how they chose to live their lives was indelible.
Jillian’s duties expanded with her confidence. She went from filling water bottles and folding towels to washing practice uniforms. She learned the codes to all the locker-room doors. During practice, she’d slip over her arms what looked like a big foam shield. As players dribbled, she’d whack them with the shield to simulate a persistent defender, albeit one that was a full two feet shorter than they were.
“Box out!” she’d yell, sometimes too zealously. Bezold would rein that in on occasion, especially if the team was practicing fast breaks. “Stay tight!” “Rebound!”
On most school days, Jillian was in Bezold’s office by noon, after her classes had concluded, studying or reading on his couch, waiting for practice to start. She’d have a Ryan story, or a tale of something that had happened at home. Dave Bezold knew more about our family than we did.
As the players grew to enjoy her, they embraced and protected her. They sang “Happy Birthday” to her. She invited them to a summer picnic at our house. Several made it. A year after Rack graduated, he called her to wish her happy birthday. Upperclassmen would break in the newcomers: “That’s J-Dawg. Treat her with respect.”
“She never fails to do something enjoyable,” Boehmker decided. I’d asked him too, what does Jillian teach?
“Just to slow down sometimes,” Danny said. “She’s a reminder that today is here. Let’s not waste it.”
We meet in our lives any number of people who profess to love us and care about us. Some might actually mean it. With Jillian, there’s never a doubt. The players knew that. Eventually. All of them.
Jillian validated Bezold’s belief in helping others to the betterment of ourselves. If you love someone, Jillian said, they’ll love you back.
A few weeks after Tony Rack’s final game at Northern Kentucky, I got an e-mail from his parents:
When NKU lost its basketball game in the NCAA tournament, it brought an end to their season. It was also the end of our son Tony’s basketball career. A career that lasted 14 years.
After the loss, our family and friends were sitting in
the empty bleachers with Tony. It was a very emotional time for all of us. Then a small little angel came walking across the gym floor. It was your Jillian.
She told him she enjoyed being on the team with him and she was glad they became good friends. Jillian turned to me and said, “Don’t be sad about today, be proud of the way Tony Rack played. He always tried his best.”
She turned back to Tony and said “Tony Rack, I am going to miss you.” Tony was still sitting in the bleachers and looked almost level to her and said, “Jillian, I am going to miss you a lot, too. You worked as hard as anyone on this team. Your encouragement inspired me in ways you will never know.”
Jillian said, “Tony, our bus is waiting to take the team back to NKU. Are you ready?” He looked over at us and said, “I am now. Let’s get on the bus together.”
I cannot tell you how much her words meant to us. Sometimes God sends a little angel to get you through the hard times. I cannot even remember the score of that last game, but I will never forget Jillian’s kindness.
Back at the arena, Jillian is tossing dirty practice uniforms into an industrial-size washing machine. “I can’t wait for Friday,” she says to Danny. “It’s going to be my best rap ever.”
Danny smiles, knowing what he knows. Today is here. Let’s not waste it. “I’m sure it will be, J-Dog,” he says.
A love that takes us out of ourselves and binds us to
something larger. We know that’s what matters.
—
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, AT A MEMORIAL
SERVICE FOR THE FAMILIES OF THE SLAIN
CHILDREN OF NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT