Rich Hofmann: Birds rookie Graham thrived with the help of his family

DETROIT - An abandoned high school sits on one corner, tan brick on a sprawling property, a rusting baseball backstop protecting the street from imaginary foul balls. A corner store, a tire repair place, a paint store and a couple of restaurants are also arrayed around the intersection of Warren and Cadieux on the city's east side.

It is near the spot where Brandon Graham says his boyhood friend was killed.

"Where I grew up, a lot of stuff goes on - just from being out and with the wrong people," Graham says. "There were a lot of different cliques. I had friends, but they all had different friends. Some people had friends that were off into drugs. Some people had friends who were out looking to steal things. It was crazy. You start limiting your friends because you'd find yourself getting into situations you didn't want to deal with. I'd have a close call with somebody and it was like, 'OK, I don't want to deal with him anymore because he'll put my life in jeopardy.'

"It's what got my friend killed - one of his best friends got him killed. His friend ended up stealing some drugs from somebody, and they came looking for him. This friend, after stealing all of this stuff, he called my boy and asked him for help trying to get away. He told him to come pick him up somewhere, and then my friend got involved in it, and they ended up shooting up the car. They killed my boy and didn't even touch the other dude.

"The whole thing really affected me," he says. "It really motivated me. It happened when I was in college [at Michigan], and I just decided that when I came back home, I would just visit family and then go right back to school. That's the way it had to be."

Graham tells the story evenly - not matter-of-factly but not with a lot of emotion in his voice, either. It is simply the situation in which he grew up. It is the place to which the Eagles' first-round draft choice will return this Sunday for a game against the Detroit Lions.

A section of Ford Field will be filled with Graham's people. His mother, the person he says he admires most in the world, will be there. His high school - Crockett Technical High School, which he says helped turn him into a man - will be represented, too. Some might even be wearing the new purple uniform jerseys that Graham just bought for the team.

Detroit. It is a place that clearly shaped Brandon Graham, but it did not define him.

Graham, attempting to make a point, raises his hands to show off his forearms and rotates them slowly.

"No tattoos," he says. And then he grabs his earlobes and says, "No earrings."

"That's from my mom," he says. "She's very down to earth. She's always tried to tell me stuff before anyone else. She was a single mom growing up. It was just me, her and my sister. I was always the man of the house. She would always say, 'Just try to be different. Try to be a standout.' That's what I've been trying to do."

Tasha Graham, Brandon's mother, took a buyout a couple of years ago from Chrysler, where she worked in an auto plant. She has moved to a home in New Jersey, to keep an eye out for her son as he begins his professional football adventure, and to help out where she can.

The whole thing, she says, "is quite a ride." It is nothing like her struggles as the single mother of two children in a rough neighborhood on Detroit's east side.

"He knows where he came from," Tasha says. "He knows what I went through. I'm a cancer survivor - I had leukemia when I was younger. They told me I would never be able to have kids. So I cherish my kids because of that. And when I was working at Chrysler, working hard, trying to make ends meet, it was for them - and Brandon saw that."

According to figures compiled by the Detroit Police Department, in the 3 months ending this Sept. 3, there were 310 crimes reported within a 1-mile radius of the Graham house. Among others, there were 67 robberies, 60 assaults, 35 burglaries, six arsons and 46 home invasions, including one across the street from the corner property where Tasha raised her son and daughter, Brittany.

"Yes, it is a tough neighborhood," she says. "But as a parent, you just have to know what you have to keep your kids away from.

"I wouldn't let my kids walk to the corner store. I was not a carefree parent. I was strict. That's the way to do it, no matter the environment."

When you speak to Brandon, he is a habitually open and engaging young man, always available to talk, punctuating most statements with a smile and most interviews with a handshake for the reporter. There is no hint of the wariness he felt about choosing his friends or living where he did.

"He's a people person," Tasha says. "He loves to get along with everybody. He was like that even in high school. He wasn't a fighter, never was. He always wanted to keep the peace. He could have been the bully, too - he was always bigger than the rest of the kids his age. He easily could have been the bully, but he never was. It just wasn't in his nature."

Brandon says it was possible to go out at night in his neighborhood, but that he always feared the gathering of friends without an agenda. He says he always was concerned about the conversation that would ensue as they tried to figure out something to do. He worried that all it took was the initial suggestion from a person in the group of something mischievous, or worse. Then, he says, "All you need is a couple of 'OKs,' and that's the plan."

The neighborhood weighed on him in some ways, he says, as did the prospect of attending the local public high school. Then, at a youth football all-star game, he was approached by Steven McGhee, the football coach at Crockett. And, Brandon says, "I made a big decision in my life."

Football practice is about to begin and fewer than three dozen players are pulling on their equipment. The athletic facilities are meager but the physical plant is an improvement over when Graham first came to the school, which he described as a series of glorified trailers. It is a place where the parents would ring the field in their cars and turn on their headlights so that football practice might extend past sundown.

Crockett is a "school of choice," which means there is an entrance examination and other requirements for admittance.

"This is a really tough neighborhood as far as Detroit neighborhoods go," said Rod Oden, who is now the Crockett head coach and who was an assistant for Graham's first few years. "Football is definitely a deterrent to violence. Brandon and those guys spent a lot of time here, time when they weren't out in the neighborhood, time when they weren't in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"You hear a lot of things about Detroit, and some of them are not necessarily true. Most often, the guys we have are here because they want to be here. We have one of the highest graduation rates. Our team GPA is over 3.0. But when they leave here, they still have to go home and deal with the rest of it."

When Graham arrived, Oden said the coaches knew he would be special. He was already 6-foot tall and a solid 205 pounds as a freshman. He played defensive end and linebacker - and volunteered as a junior to play offensive guard because the team needed help. And he always had a huge cheering section at his games wearing No. 55 jerseys, including his father, Darrick Walton.

"People don't know this - as a junior, Brandon was all-state as a kicker and a punter," Oden said. "He was probably the only punter in history who had six touchdowns off of fake punts because nobody wanted to tackle him.

"And he was an absolute leader. The entire school would follow Brandon. He's a leader in demonstration. We say, 'Leadership is demonstrated, it's not announced.' And he walks in a room and his presence commands respect. People see him put in the extra hours. They see him run the extra sprints, lift the extra weights, and they follow. Now we have kids who want to be the next Brandon. They're still following."

Graham clearly loves the school. He says that it matured him, and that it was a great honor when the school used him as a recruiting speaker at local middle schools while he was still a student. After going to Michigan, he still went back during the summer to work out there, saying he didn't need a million-dollar weight room to succeed.

"He's all about Crockett," Oden said. "Brandon was on the student council, he was on the debate team, he's a three-sport all-stater. From season to season, he was involved. Honor society, everything - and he was our best recruiter at the middle schools.

"He's the poster child for Crockett athletics, but most people forget that Brandon had a 3.5 GPA and a 24 ACT. He could have gotten into Michigan without the athletics. It was his ticket and it paid the bill, but he was going to be successful anyway and he is going to be successful long after football is done."

Why? Simple.

"My mom - I admire her," Brandon says. "I saw her struggle plenty of nights. I didn't want to be like that and I didn't want her to have to feel that way for the rest of her life. I knew I had to do something to change that. I knew I was going to make it, if it was football or if it was school. Keep the GPA up, play hard on the field - but I knew I was going to make it somehow."

"You've got to see this - the boxes just got here 2 hours ago," Oden says, leading me through a door propped open with a shoe, into the dark gym and then to his tiny office (which features at least three pictures of Graham on the crowded walls).

In the boxes are new, purple uniforms for the team - courtesy of Brandon Graham. The players would get them the next day, just before their season opener.

It is a nice gesture - one that Graham says is only the beginning. But it is more than that, too, a kind of affirmation of his life growing up in Detroit, of what is real and what is possible.

"For them to make me into what I am, I just appreciate it," Graham said. "I know where I came from."

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