How Marcus Smart’s support for cancer patients transformed children’s hospitals
The Athletic.com Oct 24, 2022
(excerpt)
BOSTON — Marcus Smart of the Celtics has spent far too much of his life sitting beside a hospital bed. He endured years watching his brother Todd battle Leukemia when Marcus was in elementary school in Texas. He held his mother, Camellia, as she faced bone marrow cancer a few years ago. He is all too familiar with the last place most people want to be.
And yet, he keeps going back.
When he arrived in Boston as a rookie in 2014, he began making hospital visits quietly — no cameras, no media, no tweets. Smart wanted to spend time with kids who needed a friend and a distraction. Doctors and nurses would introduce him to those who had chemotherapy treatments that morning. They would explain to him how rough the past few days had been for their patients, hoping he could make their day a little easier.
“Then I get there and everything that the doctor just told me goes out the window,” Smart said as a smile finally began to peek through. “The kid has the biggest smile on her face. They’re getting up, they’re talking, they’re getting out of bed and that right there is what it’s all about for me.”
Katie Devine, the associate director of donor relations for Boston Children’s Hospital Trust, gets emotional telling the story of the day Smart walked into the room of a young girl undergoing chemotherapy and was immediately pelted by a Nerf gun. Smart took on the foam friendly-fire and asked, “Well, where’s mine?” He was instead gifted a bracelet and some pink extensions the patient was given after her hair loss, which he wore proudly.
Years later, when Smart was being honored by the Celtics as their community hero, he invited the patient to the gala as his guest. As he stepped on stage donning a bracelet she had given him, he pulled those same hair extensions from his pocket. “It was just such a poignant reminder of the impact he can have on people, but also the impact that these patients have on their special visitors,” said Devine.
When visiting a patient’s room, Smart gets deja vu. The beeping equipment, IV drips, the linoleum floors, it’s all familiar. He remembers how it felt when his family was in the same situation, so he tries to be the shoulder he needed to lean on when he was younger.
“When you go to the hospital, you see how the treatments are being done and how it’s making the patients feel, how it’s affecting not only their lives, but their families and their loved ones’ lives,” Smart said. “That really clicked, because I’ve been in that situation and I understand what it feels like to be just looking and wishing for anything.”
Smart goes about things quietly, spending one-on-one time with the patients he visits so he can establish a real connection. After his mother died in September 2018, he hosted a private dinner for families staying in Boston Children’s Hospital’s patient housing and sat down with each and every person there.
“I think it’s so personal to him and it’s a very emotional time for him, going through flashbacks and reliving some of that as he sees kids with their parents,” longtime friend Phillip Forte said. “He knows exactly what they’re going through and the conversations they’re having with those doctors. He understands how personal it is to those families and he doesn’t want it to seem like he’s doing it for attention.”
Kenny Boren, his longtime confidant who helps manage his foundation YounGameChanger (YGC), sometimes doesn’t find out about Smart’s trips until weeks later. Boren and YGC director Bill Wilk have had to convince Smart to do even the most basic promotion for the foundation and his Smart Carts program. “If no one knows what’s going on, then no one knows what’s going on,” Boren said.
Smart explained that he was taught that if he is going to genuinely do something for somebody, he shouldn’t expect anything back.
“As long as you can change one person’s life, put a smile on one person, then I’ve done my job,” he said. “Some of them go through it alone and it’s just really tough and people don’t really understand that. We get so caught up in our own lives that we forget that there’s somebody out there fighting and battling something way worse than what we’re going through here. And maybe just saying hello is all they needed to keep going.”
