A onetime golden boy lost to the grip of mental illness | Frank's Place

Early in the onset of the disease that thoroughly transformed him, Mike McCloskey wandered into Duke's locked Cameron Indoor Stadium. He meant no harm. He just wanted to shoot some hoops and experience that peace again.

I'd like to believe that before Durham police arrested him for vagrancy that day in the mid-1970s, my old friend found some respite in the familiar touch of a basketball, in the way it echoed rhythmically in the empty gym, in the welcome release of his deadly jumper.

McCloskey, who'd won an academic scholarship to Duke and graduated in 1972, had played at Cameron as a Blue Devils freshman. But that was before schizophrenia began digging its talons into his brain.

Molly McCloskey now sees that gym intrusion as one of many efforts by her troubled older brother "to go back to what was known."

"Maybe that's what the early stages of mental illness are like," she said last week. "It's as if you're trying to find your way home again."

Home now for Mike is with an Oregon foster-care family. He is 66 and his life continues to be an odyssey through terrifying psychic terrain. Over the years he has disappeared often from his family's radar, moved in and out of institutions and jails, isolated himself.

"Mike," his grandmother once said, "is the most lonesome person I have ever known."

In sports, like life, the gap between youthful promise and adult success is sometimes too wide. Mike McCloskey's failure to bridge it was particularly cruel. He'd always seemed touched by the gods.

"That's the scary thing about schizophrenia," said Molly, an award-winning author whose 2011 memoir, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, focuses on Mike's struggle. "It swoops down on people who are perfectly fine, high-functioning, high-achieving."

Mike grew up in Broomall. He and I were fellow sports nuts at St. Pius X and later Cardinal O'Hara High. We were friends but definitely not equals.

He was blond, great-looking, a brilliant student, a devoted altar boy, a gifted athlete. His mother was stunningly beautiful; his father, Jack McCloskey, Penn's basketball coach, our parish idol.

Somehow, in Mike, the potentially volatile combination of exceptional attributes and youth never ignited. Self-contained and poised, he was remarkably comfortable in his skin.

"He was a good guy," recalled Gary Raisl, his closest boyhood friend. "Modest, reserved, a rule-follower."

I marveled at his baseball and basketball abilities, his easy grasp of altar-boy Latin, his proximity to fame, his flawlessness. If I had no idea where I was headed, I knew Mike's future was as bright as his smile.

"It is more than a mere expression," Molly wrote of that smile. "It is the sum of him. An inner light that breaks through, hinting that underneath that strange gravity is a secret reservoir of joy."

At 15, while at O'Hara, Mike moved to North Carolina, when his father, a future NBA coach and general manager of the two-time league-champion Pistons, was hired by Wake Forest.

I'd rarely thought of him since, until last week, when, on an unrelated Google search, I discovered his sister's poignant reflection on Mike's unimaginable fate.

"Most people I contacted for the book had no idea," Molly said. "A few might have known he had rocky years, but like a lot of people in the '70s, they assumed he came through it and went on to live a normal life."

A 1986 graduate of St. Joseph's, where she played basketball on scholarship, Molly lived for years in Ireland. The novels she wrote there were critically acclaimed. The Sunday Times of London named Circles, her first nonfiction work, 2011's best memoir.

After two years back in Philadelphia, she lives now in Washington. Her five siblings are scattered. Her mother, 90, is in Florida. Her father, long since retired from the NBA, is 91 and in declining health in Georgia.

Fourteen years younger than Mike, Molly now views an illness she witnessed only peripherally as a turning point.

"I associate the onset of Mike's illness with the end of our family's golden age," she said in a telephone interview. "It always seemed emblematic of an end of innocence. And in fact it was the end of my parents' marriage."

Years later, in researching the book, she found no clue to Mike's troubled future in family albums. In fact, in many photos - like the one of the Broomall Little League's 1962 all-star team - he looks unusually self-assured, in control.

"Like his dad, Mike had a very strong competitive streak, which he controlled very well," Raisl said.

His childhood was typical postwar suburban - movies, barbecues, Wiffle ball, basketball with friends outside the McCloskeys' Ferguson Avenue split-level.

In North Carolina, his body elongated and his jumper perfected, he led Bishop McGuinness to a state championship game. When the '60s exploded around him, he seemed unaffected - National Honor Society member, student-body vice president, basketball co-captain.

He played freshman basketball at Duke, but, as the disease slowly manifested itself, he slipped away from the game. His increasingly erratic behavior included experiments with LSD. By graduation, his mother did not "see much trace of the boy they brought here four years ago."

What followed were decades of mental and physical deterioration for Mike, pain, worry, and separation for his family.

In Circles, Molly described a 1990s meeting with her brother at an Oregon diner.

"His face is a distortion of his youthful features," she wrote, " His eyes - once animated by a youthful, reckless glee or narrowed into something cool, detached, superior - are now flat and emotionless."

But a few years ago, after the book's publication, the six McCloskey children reunited for the first time in 30 years, providing the author with "a slightly more upbeat coda to the book."

"He re-engaged with the family," Molly said. "He is still a person with a chronic mental illness, very disabled. But he was laughing and cracking jokes in a way I hadn't seen in, oh, forever.

"He's got a routine - going to a local diner, outings with the foster family. He walks. He doesn't read. He never watched TV. I can sort of see exactly who he'd be now if not for the illness - probably a climate-change scientist."

I can't see that Mike. The one in my head is the serene little blond kid who, shooting baskets in the cramped and cold St. Pius gym, will always be at peace.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz