An hour and a half before the start of Game 3 of the NBA Finals this past Sunday, and a week before Father's Day, Joe Dumars Jr. died.
Ninety minutes later, Joe Dumars III had one of the best basketball games of his life, scoring 33 points to lead the Detroit Pistons past the Portland Trail Blazers in the Portland Memorial Coliseum, giving the Pistons a 2-1 advantage in the best-of-seven se ries at a time when they were supposed to be on dangerous ground.There was one critical factor.
Joe didn't know.
They took him aside after the game and told him.
For much of the NBA playoffs, as the Pistons eliminated teams from Indiana and New York and Chicago, Dumars knew that his father wasn't having as good of a month as he was. He was in and out of the hospital in Alexandria, La., being treated for chronic diabetes and faltering blood pressure. He lost his legs a couple of years ago, due to the diabetes, and that didn't help his respiration, either.
Almost daily the past month, Joe would talk to his dad, sometimes from a cellular phone in the Pistons' bus as the team returned from practice.
Knowing what might happen, Joe and his wife, Debbie, agreed that if Joe Jr. died on a game day, Joe III wouldn't be told until after the game.
Not because it would mean 33 undistracted points and another chance at the NBA Finals MVP award Dumars won a year ago.
But because that's the way Joe Dumars Jr. would have wanted it.
Joe wasn't available to talk about his father after Sunday's game. But he talked about him in an article published in Parade Magazine two months ago, on April 22, just before the playoffs began.
"He always told us, `As hard as I had it growing up, as hard as your mother had it growing up, we made it. You kids have got it great today, so don't sit there complaining about what you don't have and the reason this didn't work out. Just get it done and don't say anything about it,' " said Joe in the interview.
"That has been instilled into me all my life. Don't complain. Just get it done. Those are the best things my parents gave me - teaching me about hard work and learning to accept things as they are."
Joe Dumars Jr., 65 when he died, was a self-made man. Abandoned by his father (the original Joe Dumars, who gave him his name and nothing else) and by his mother at an early age, he was raised by relatives. The abandonment gave him a deep appreciation for family, which became obvious by the way he and his wife Ophelia raised their seven children, all of whom went to college.
Joe Jr. had only gone through the seventh grade. Then he went to work driving a truck. He built his own house in Natchitoches, and when Joe III came along with enough money to buy him a new one, he said thanks but no thanks. He lived in the old one until he died.
Spending 12 to 14 hours a day driving truck, he never saw his son play basketball in person - not as he starred in high school and, after that, at McNeese State in nearby Lake Charles, La.
The first time he saw him play at all was on television, in a Pistons game against the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan.
The Pistons won and Joe III had a terrific game.
Back home in Natchitoches, Joe Jr. got this big grin on his face.
He called Joe in Detroit.
"Son," he told him. "I've got to eat crow. You can play."
It had been the elder Dumars' suspicion that his son, even if he was 6-foot-3 and 195 pounds, was in over his head playing professional basketball. As he said in the Parade article, "I just didn't think he could hold his own. I told him, `Some of those big boys are going to hit you upside the head and you're going to be back on the bench crying."'
Spoken with a true father's confidence.
After that Pistons-Bulls game, Joe and Ophelia went out and bought a satellite dish, turning Natchitoches into Detroit South. Till the day he died, Joe Jr. watched Joe III play.
The diabetes hit late but it hit hard. Heart trouble followed, and both legs had to be amputated. That was almost two years ago, when Joe Jr. was 63. It was hard to take for a working man.
"If anybody had told me I'd be in the shape I'm in today," he said. "They'd have had a big argument on their hands. I thought if I ever had to stop working, I'd die. But you don't. Not me. If a situation comes up that you have no control over, why go into a depression? What are you to going to do, lay down and die? No. You go on."
As long as you can.
They said Joe III took it hard. They said he left the arena Sunday without a word. They said they didn't know if he'd be play in Game 4 on Tuesday.
He'll play. He's Joe's son, isn't he?