All You Need To Know About Brandon Roy

Much has been written and said the past two days about Brandon Roy, and I’ll have a column in Sunday’s paper. But the definitive Brandon Roy profile remains the one written by Brian Hendrickson in 2007. It’s long, but it’s worth a read if you’re interested in where Roy came from.

My favorite part is when Roy is struggling to pass the SAT and become eligible for college basketball:

The pressure weighed on him as Roy lived life with one foot in each world on which he teetered. He would rise in the early dawn darkness each morning, arrive at the Port of Seattle at 7 a.m. and start hosing out shipping containers that reeked of hell’s sewage after carrying untold goods from the corners of the globe.

Roy would emerge from his $11-an-hour job covered in muck and freezing from the autumn chill and rain. Then he would sit down with filthy hands to eat the lunch he packed, hop back in his car — the aroma of his work leaping out whenever the door was opened — and drive off for tutoring.

But the dock workers kept Roy focused.

“Man, you go to college, make the most of that opportunity,” Roy remembers his co-workers saying. “You don’t want to be doing this your whole life.”