Dad – I Wish!

He stands next to the makeshift tape measure, eyeing the shrinking space between his head and the end line.

“Wow,” Irving says, tracing his path with his right index finger. “Came a long way.”

Forever measuring himself against Drederick, his father, Kyrie, who stands 6-foot-3-1/2, surpassed his dad, a 45-year-old bond analyst at Thomson Reuters, on the court two years ago. In a game of one-on-one at a South Orange, N.J. park, he extended a string of made baskets into a 16-0 stretch, elevating over his father or faking, then finishing with duck-under layups. Unable to compete, the father, the former all-time scorer at Boston University and Rucker MVP, flailed futilely, their genetic sequence reversed.

“I would have paid good money to see Dred that day!” says Tyrone Joye, a life-long friend of the father and retired corrections officer with a gap-tooth smile. “Drederick used to be merciless when he was on top. One day after the movie “He Got Game” came out, I was like, I get it, Kyrie is Jesus and Dred is Jake, the dad riding him all the time.”

On Thursday night, the father and son will be at the Prudential Center in Newark as Kyrie, a celebrated 19-year-old guard whose name translates to “Lord” in Greek, is expected to be the top pick in the NBA draft. Their journeys, which range from the shores of Melbourne, Australia, to the Mitchel Houses of the South Bronx, are intertwined as tightly as the DNA they share, alternating harrowing tragedy with hard-earned success.

“It’s like that LeBron James advertisement,” says Jeremiah Green, Kyrie’s best friend. “We’re all witnesses to Kyrie’s path.”

Absent from the celebrations, will be Kyrie’s mother and Drederick’s wife, Elizabeth Irving, the slender, light-skinned woman they lost 15 years ago. According to her death certificate, issued by the state of Washington‘s Health Department, the contributing factors to her death were Sepsis Syndrome, and a multisystem organ failure. She was 29. Her memory still melts both men.

“My baby,” Drederick says, holding a photograph of Elizabeth at his kitchen table.

Through love and loss, basketball remains their sanctuary. Both adapt on the court by finishing at the rim with either hand while absorbing contact from counterparts. Attracted to his father’s flair, Kyrie mimicked his motions and mannerisms, from over-head free throws to facial gestures, going so far as to forge Drederick’s name to get out of band class in elementary school. The father imparted lessons learned along the way, including maintaining a matter-of-fact demeanor under all circumstances.

“You’re watching Drederick to some degree when you look at Kyrie,” says former NBA guard Rod Strickland, Kyrie’s godfather. “No one knows how good Drederick was. His game’s very familiar if you watch tape of them side by side.”

Kyrie separated himself on the national stage last winter. Limited to 11 games his lone season at Duke due to a ligament injury in his right foot, he still managed to establish himself as the nation’s best player. He broke down crying in coach Mike Krzyzewski‘s office when he was informed in December that his season was most likely over, but made a private agreement with the team’s trainers to return in 12 weeks. Krzyzewski allowed him to stay home for three weeks around the holidays, but he hurried back, played in the NCAA Tournament and again proved himself ready for the NBA.

“He’s got the knife, the bazooka and the rifle – a whole arsenal,” Drederick says. “Sometimes he just has to remember he has them all at his disposal.”

Talk of the future triggers memories for the father. Past midnight on Friday, he ascended into his attic above the family bedrooms to sift through old report cards, arts-and-crafts projects and boxes overflowing with honors. In one, he found a piece of paper glued to a manila envelope. It was a Father’s Day card, written in pencil, from June of 2002 when his son was in the fourth grade. Wearing his glasses, Drederick read it aloud.

Dear Dad,Thanks for taking care of me because I know without you I would not be me. Thanks for teaching me basketball. I have a long way to go. I want to follow you.I love you and always will.

***

Apartment 16J in the brick building at 352 E. 137th St. in the Mitchel Houses, a raggedy stretch of 20-story project units lining Alexander Ave. in the Bronx, is a three-bedroom space, considered the mansion to denizens for its surrounding vistas. To the north stands Yankee Stadium. On a clear night, the Twin Towers were visible to Drederick Irving and his five siblings when they were growing up.

“We shared clothes and took groceries on credit,” he says. “At least we had a view.”

Missed meals motivated him. His father, Frederick, delivered oil but abandoned the family when Drederick was 6, dropping off $50 each Christmas thereafter. His mother, Lillian, a fair-but-firm woman who gave birth to four children before turning 20, raised six children on welfare, bussed tables, earned a GED, took classes at Hostos Community College, mixing and matching paychecks to maintain a semblance of sufficiency.

“Drederick was always his own man,” Strickland says. “He was going to make the most of what he had been given, but he really followed his mother’s influence.”

He found a father figure in Dave McCollin, a 56-year-old court officer with a holstered gun on his hip and a raspy voice that high school talent evaluator Tom Konchalski calls “nails against a chalkboard.” Irving, Joye and Strickland met McCollin for 6:30 a.m. practices at the Mitchel Community Center, arriving as early as 5:45 to learn the game on bent rims and frayed nets beneath flickering fluorescent lights.

“They were my Three Musketeers,” McCollin says.

Drederick refused to take the building’s elevator and instead ran the 16 flights of stairs each day. He stayed out so late on the playground basketball courts that a neighbor once threw a firecracker down from a window because he wouldn’t stop dribbling past the posted curfew. It exploded on Irving’s leg.

“Shoulda gotten stitches,” he says, rolling up his pant leg to show the scar. “They got tired of me playing in the wee hours.”

McCollin molded him, taking on a greater responsibility in his life. For high school, Irving’s mother transferred the role of legal guardian to McCollin, allowing him to attend Stevenson High, McCollin’s alma mater, in a different section of the Bronx. Irving excelled, earning All-City honors and a scholarship to Boston University, where he earned a degree in economics and scored 1,931 points.

“I knew every teacher in those halls and Drederick knew that,” McCollin says. “It could have been so easy for him to fall off his path, but he persevered.”

Irving instilled McCollin’s lessons in his own son. He moved his family into Mitchel for a short while when his children were tagalong toddlers. At 13 months, Kyrie dribbled on the same Mitchel asphalt as his father. Recording the moment with a hand-held video camera, the father expressed amazement. The image remains sharp on screen.

“Wow,” the father says. “Look at him.”

On a Sunday afternoon last month, under gunmetal gray skies, the father drove up in front of the community center, parked his silver Volvo with a “Duke Class of 2014” bumper sticker and walked his childhood area.

“I’ve seen shootings, stabbings, robberies, beatings by bat,” he says. “I’ve seen dead people. I just decided young that that wasn’t going to be me.”

Nothing leveled him like Sept. 11, 2001. When he took a PATH train from Newark into the underground station at the World Trade Center, he exited to an escalator leading to the shopping concourse above. Upon walking off the escalator, he heard a loud boom and recognized a change in the air.

“You could tell something was going to happen,” he says.

Glass shards exploded from windows, revolving doors blew open. A wind gust knocked him backward and he rolled over two times before regaining balance. Trapped inside, Irving, known to friends as “Ice” for his steely composure, rushed out, dodging debris, dust and ash falling from American Airlines Flight 11, the jet airliner that crashed into the North Tower’s upper reaches.

“It looked like it was snowing,” Irving says. “It was like a dream.”

Bodies fell around him. He stopped at the corner of Church and Barclay and looked up, amazed by the massive, fiery hole in the building.

“I ran for my life,” he says. “Everything happened in slow motion.”

A single father who had lost his college-sweetheart-turned-wife just shy of five years earlier, Irving, then 35, trained his mind on 9-year-old Kyrie and daughter Asia, then 10. He walked 11 miles over six hours to Mitchel; his children, meanwhile, had no one come pick them up at school in West Orange. They walked home, uncertain of his fate.

“I had no idea where he was,” Kyrie says of his father.

Once able to obtain cell-phone reception, the father reached his children, sent a friend to the house to baby-sit them and stayed the night in the Bronx with a high school teammate due to the bridge and tunnel closures.

Typically stiff-lipped, Drederick let slip his emotions when his boss checked in.

“I was like ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’” he says. “But as I described what I saw, I became overwhelmed. I cried. I was just happy to see my kids.”

***

She lulled her children to sleep with religious lyrics learned inside the Lutheran churches that her father ministered in from Mitchell, S.D., to the Puget Sound. A classically trained pianist, Elizabeth Irving, able to read music or play by ear, crooned gospel-choir hymns while she cradled her children in her arms.

A friend of Jesus! O what bliss?That one so vile as I?Should ever have a Friend like thisTo lead me to the sky!

She was born on Aug. 13, 1967, and was matched with George and Norma Larson, a Lutheran minister and his wife, who worked in health care, 13 days later by an adoption agency. She was spirited from the start, her stated goal as a child was to become the first woman President of the United States and she developed informed, outspoken views. She studied political science at Boston University and walked into Drederick’s world one day in the first semester of her freshman year. He was a sophomore. She was in a convenience store on Commonwealth Ave. talking to a friend when he saw her.

“The world just stopped for about 30 seconds,” he says.

They were mutually smitten and she smoothed out his rough edges. Unable to land a position with an NBA team, he trailed her to the Northwest, where they settled in an apartment in Puyallup, Wash., near her parents. He worked as a financial analyst at an insurance company, but did not receive an offer to play professionally until the Bulleen Boomers called about going to Melbourne. One of two Americans on his team, he averaged 32.5 points per game using his left hand to “boogie” on defenders. While there, Kyrie was born.

“I wouldn’t miss my kids’ births for the world,” Drederick says.

Off the court, they experienced growing pains as a 20-something married couple, and his world stopped again on Sept. 8, 1996. Back stateside and living outside Seattle in Tacoma, Elizabeth died suddenly from Sepsis Syndrome, a complex inflammatory condition associated with infection. She died at Tacoma General Hospital after a two-day stay, and was cremated. Her ashes are buried in Mitchell, S.D.

Her death proved difficult to digest.

“There were things out of that experience that were so difficult,” Norma Larson says. “But we were so thankful for Drederick. He’s like a son to us.”

The children visited their grandparents for six weeks in subsequent summers. George Larson involved them in church services, designating Kyrie as his “little deacon” and brought him along for house visits to the homebound for communion delivery. Like his mother, he took an interest in music, learning to harmonize and adjust octaves.

“I’m just glad she was athletic,” he says. “Happy she helped make me.”

Their mother’s memory is indelible. Inked into Kyrie’s skin over his left pectoral is her name, written in script and bookended by angel wings. A halo hovers above. Her birthday, Aug. 13, is etched on his wrists with an eight on the left and 13 on the right.

On his mom’s birthday in 2001, Kyrie wrote a message on a piece of red notepad paper and attached it to a ribbon hanging from a balloon. From the deck at the back of the house, he let go, allowing the wind to carry the balloon until the sky swallowed it. His grandfather mentioned that the suddenness of the balloon’s disappearance seemed inexplicable.

“No,” Kyrie said. “Mom grabbed it.”

***

Beneath a white shelf and behind the chrome clothes rod inside Kyrie’s bedroom closet is the faded handwriting of a fourth grader.

I’m going to the NBA

Promise

The last word in his grade-school guarantee is underlined multiple times. It was a private pact, made with himself in 2002 and witnessed by his sister Asia, until he revealed it to his father last month when he returned home from Duke. He called his father into the room, pulled back clothes hangers and said, “Look!”

“What do you want more than for your kid to do better than you?” Drederick says.

Both remember the road bumps behind them.

“Do you remember my first shot in high school?” asks Kyrie, dressed in a navy sport coat and spinning a basketball on his right index finger at the end of the driveway.

His father laughs.

“How could I forget?” the elder Irving says.

Kyrie, who took acting classes at Duke last year, dramatically recreates the possession as a freshman at Montclair Kimberley Academy, a small private school with $28,000-per-year tuition. He pretends to receive a pass rounding off a curl on the right side of the court, pivots into a three-point attempt and exaggerates a follow-through.

“I was shooting from dead on and I still hit the side of the backboard,” Kyrie says.

The Newark Academy crowd chanted, “Over-rated! Over-rated!”

“Part of the process,” the father says.

Kyrie found his range in time. After two seasons of excelling at that level, he transferred to St. Patrick in Elizabeth, a basketball power in a run-down seaport city. During his first gym class, he was taken to a playground a few blocks away. Jeremiah Green, a classmate, checked the ball with him at the top of the key, motioning for Irving to attack. He did, disrupting a double-team with a crossover and finished aggressively.

“He embarrassed me over and over again,” Green says. “I just wanted it to end.”

AAU teammates labeled him “League Bound”. Ever explosive, he took one pass on the break, spun away from a hard-charging defender and finished elegantly at the rim.

“The refs would have aneurysms trying to decide what they were going to call,” says Kevin Boyle Jr., a guard.

He gave Duke players as many headaches when he moved to Durham last summer, deconstructing traps with deceptive speed and toying with big men in the paint.

“I would go up for a block on the baseline, and I was like, ‘I got this, I got this,’” Duke forward Josh Hairston says. “Then he’d switch hands or just disappear from sight.”

The ebbs and flows of freshman year allowed the son time to reflect. By December, he was dubbed the nation’s best player, ripping off 31 points, six rebounds, two steals and two blocks against Michigan State at Cameron Indoor Stadium. That was the high. He gave up chronicling his down time in a journal because of dark hours away from the court, but he reclaimed his role in the NCAAs, improving his draft stock as well.

“Makes me think maybe I should have signed on for the Cleveland Cavaliers job (if they draft him),” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo says. “Remembering what he did to us is ruining my summer.”

Though he has 4,912 fans on Facebook and his account is frozen to any future requests until the volume recedes, Irving insists his circle will remain family-centered. One of the first prep prospects to engage fans on Twitter and Skype, he has embraced his fans and absorbed the ill wishes, ranging from those wishing another injury upon him to the ugly words that Twitter user DukeLvr1989 wrote in March.

“Kyrie can go to the league and make millions thats so great for him … too bad it wont bring his mother back SHES DEAD DEAD DEAD,” the poster wrote.

“It’s really not about people trying to tarnish my image, it’s about me achieving my dream,” he says. “I want to stay in the league as long as I can.”

The father, who remarried four years ago and now has a 3-year-old daughter named London, leaves his office on Broadway nearing sunset on a recent evening. He walks in the shadows of cranes constructing the new World Trade Center en route to the PATH station. He speaks of the future his son is building, who will sit in the green room when his name is called on Thursday night in Newark, the night club they are renting out nearby and discusses his post-draft plans.

“I’m taking Friday off,” he says.