Ja’Quan Newton said he didn’t know much about the disease, he just thought it would go away.

His mother, Lisa Brown, was diagnosed with breast cancer in Newton’s sophomore year of high school. She went through chemotherapy for three years, still attending all of her son’s basketball games and still considered “team mom” by Newton’s teammates.

As her health deteriorated, the basketball court became Newton’s sanctuary.

“When I played basketball I knew this was the place where I could get all my problems out of the way,” Newton said. “It was the place that with all the other things I’m going through, I don’t have to think about because I’m just playing basketball.”

Brown passed away the morning before Newton and his Neumann-Goretti (Pennsylvania) High School teammates were going to take the floor in the PIAA Class AAA championship game.

He scored 33 points in the final and it would be the last game he suited up for before beginning the next chapter of his basketball career with Miami. Newton has appeared in all but one game for the Hurricanes (12-5, 2-2 Atlantic Coast), which will visit Syracuse (14-5, 5-1) on Saturday at 4 p.m.

His new coach, Jim Larranaga, said he had his eye on Newton since before his junior year and knows the success Newton is capable of while dealing with personal hardships.

“Ja’Quan is a very, very good basketball player,” Larranaga said. “He’s got good size, good ball-handling skills and he’s very good at taking the ball to the basket.”

While picking up the tactical aspects of basketball from his father, Newton said it was his mother who shaped him into the competitor he is as a Division I basketball player, and the leader he was as a captain for Neumann-Goretti.

Brown always told her son to respect others because big things would happen if he stuck to that. With that in mind, Newton knew the best way he could pay respect to his mom.

“I knew I had to play in that game because that’s what she would’ve wanted,” Newton said. “She wouldn’t have wanted me to not play.”

Newton told his head coach Carl Arrigale the day his mother passed that he needed to go to practice and be with his teammates. Arrigale assured him he should stay home with his family; he said he didn’t think basketball should take precedent.

But it did, and in the hours leading up to the game the next day, Arrigale said he decided it would be Newton’s day and that he would run the show.

Newton tried, at least, right from the start.

“Ja’Quan went right up and took one of the first shots of the game,” Arrigale said. “It was a mid-range jump shot from the left or right wing and it wasn’t even close.”

But after the early gaffe, Newton went on a roll to score 27 points in regulation — including the game-tying free throw with 1:19 left.

As the moment grows, so does Newton, Arrigale said. He sank four free throws and his team’s only basket in overtime to seal a 64-57 win. Newton checked out of the game in the final seconds, and as he sank back in the folding chair on the sidelines, he broke down to tears.

The rest of his team and his family consoled him and were brought to tears themselves as the final seconds wound down. Regardless, if Brown missed the championship game or the game before, when he became the all-time leading scorer at Neumann-Goretti, everyone knew they’d give their former “team mom” exactly what she wanted: a win.

“Everything that unfolded was like a movie. It gave me the chills,” Arrigale said. “It’s still giving me the chills.”

Published on January 23, 2015 at 1:14 am

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