The Terry Rozier Story

Terry Rozier nearly fell prey to tough ’hood himself as kid
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Photo by: Angela Rowlings
Terry Rozier
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Sunday, July 12, 2015 PrintEmail1 Comments
By:
Mark Murphy
The year had been even crueler than usual when Amanda Tucker took her 10-year-old grandson to a basketball clinic at Cleveland’s Zelma Watson George Recreation Center.

Terry Rozier spent that summer with his father, who had just been released from prison following a 10-year sentence. They had three months together — their first shared time since the night Terry was born — but it took only that smidgen of time before Terry Sr. was arrested again and charged with involuntary manslaughter for his involvement in a robbery and kidnapping that led to the accidental death of an accomplice.

The elder Rozier went back to prison on a 13-year sentence, and Terry glumly returned to his grandmother’s house in suburban Cleveland, his home since he was 6. Amanda Tucker, over the strident protests of her daughter Gina and her angry grandson, won custody. She insisted that violent Youngstown was no place for children, and forced him out of that hazardous environment.

His grandmother made sure he played organized sports, and his first love was football. But basketball took hold, and on this day in late 2003 at the clinic, he was one of approximately 200 kids listening to a coach share some tough wisdom.

“You all have a better chance of being hit by lightning than playing in the NBA,” the coach said.

“Terry came back to me after it was over and he was kind of moved by the speech,” Amanda Tucker said last week. “He said, ‘I don’t want to get hit by lightning, but I still want to play for an NBA team. That’s what I’m going to do.’ ”

The lightning bolt missed when Rozier was drafted by the Celtics last month. Amanda’s willingness to be the unpopular grandmother and mother was central to the event.

“There were a whole lot of times he’d do things just because,” she said. “He thought I would get tired and send him back to Youngstown. He’d throw things, act out. But I’d just tell him, ‘We’re going to tough this out.’ ”

When Terry was 6, he told his grandmother he hated her. She dug in, said she loved him, and promised that he would eventually admit the same. He refused to believe her for the longest time.

Weapons of choice

Lots of cities have been called the murder capital of the United States, and around the time Rozier was pulled out of the deteriorating Rust Belt city, Youngstown contended for the title. It had the highest murder rate in Ohio.

“Living in Youngstown, violence is second nature,” said Gina Tucker. “There’s no getting away from it. You have to deal with it, and pray nothing happens to you.”

Gina’s response, like that of other relatives living in the house, was to stock up on arms. Her oldest child, daughter Tre’Dasia, had cerebral palsy. Terry, the middle child, was an uncommonly active kid who would eventually be treated for ADHD.

He was walking at eight months old, and before long began surveying the upper cabinets.

“He could climb up on the fridge, climb the walls, just very hyper,” Gina said of Terry.

As Terry Rozier explored, he discovered parts of the family arsenal.

“I would get into the cabinets. I ended up picking up guns plenty of times,” he said. “I found a shotgun once under the couch. They would try to put (the guns) up and out of my reach, but I would find them.

“It was just something I was brought up around. (But) I wouldn’t change anything. It was just my environment. It’s not like my mom was a bad person. It’s what she was around, and she always had the same friends when she came up. My mom is amazing now, one of my biggest supporters. I wouldn’t change anything that I saw.”

Neither would Gina, looking back.

“There were actually a lot of guns around our house, and it was all for protection,” she said.

Rozier’s father’s presence was abstract at best. Anything more ended the night he was born on St. Patrick’s Day 1994.

“From the time I was born my mom and dad were never together. Most of my life my dad was locked up,” he said. “He was there to hold me when I was born, and he went to prison when I was 3. He was young. And then when he got out I was 10, and I moved in with him. That’s when he got charged with the murder and kidnapping. He went back in.”

The environment chewed up lives. Tre’Dasia Tucker’s father was murdered when she was 4, and Gina, who had Terry when she was 18, had just seen another one go off the rails.

Much later, during his senior year at Shaker Heights High just outside Cleveland, Rozier heard that a cousin named Shannell Jackson and an old friend named R’amel Hayes had been murdered in unrelated incidents in Youngstown.

“It all played a big part. There were a lot of things,” Rozier said. “I never witnessed true murder, but you could tell what was going on. I lost a lot of family members, a lot of friends, uncles. You grow up quick because you’re street-wise and you know what’s going on.”

But at 6, Rozier simply didn’t want to leave.

“He didn’t like me,” said his grandmother. “He wanted to go back to Youngstown, and I told him, ‘I don’t want to see you robbing or killing somebody for their shoes.’ ”

Rozier sometimes acted out so horridly, Amanda Tucker pinned him to the floor until the rage faded with a splayed out hold she calls her “butterfly technique.”

“I was disrespectful to my grandmother,” said Rozier. “I just couldn’t accept the fact that I couldn’t live with my mom, and that my dad wasn’t around. I was very disrespectful. My grandmother had to pin me down, and I would call her bad names. She had to restrain me, and I told her I hated her, and she told me she loved me, and every time I told her I hated her, she would tell me she loved me.”

Amanda also had an angry daughter to appease.

“I never, ever got used to it,” said Gina. “Every weekend I drove up (to Shaker Heights) and visited. It was just really hard. At the time it first happened it wasn’t so hard because I thought it was going to be temporary. It became hard when it started looking like it was going to be permanent. I felt like my child had been ripped from me.”

But what happened during a visit to Youngstown on Thanksgiving weekend, 2003, ended any further debate. As Gina recalled, she was at a neighborhood club with a sister and a cousin. The cousin got into an argument with someone who fired an errant shot.

Rumors abounded that this person was going to take revenge on the family. The argument was somehow related to Terry Sr.’s return to prison.

“Part of the reason I had to move to Cleveland again was because there was talk of revenge on my dad. It was crazy, that’s why I moved in with my grandmother,” said Rozier. “But from what I know it was words, a revenge thing. I was young, but I knew what was going on. It was like a blank, I can’t even tell you. Everything was going so fast.

“It was something that happened with my uncle. I don’t know the dude’s name who was involved. My uncle is actually dead now. We called him Brock. That’s how we know him.”

Rozier pointed to an image of Uncle Brock tattooed on his upper right biceps. He grew up remembering too many people this way, and now his mother’s house was under threat.

According to Gina, someone drove by a night or two later and fired a shot at the house, though it’s unclear whether a bullet actually hit. But by then Amanda had hidden Terry and Tre’Dasia under a blanket in an upstairs bedroom.

It was around this time that Rozier also finally told Amanda that he loved her.

“Ever since that day I’ve looked at her really differently. She cares,” he said. “It wasn’t the day at the house, but I started to realize that I started to love her. My grandmother became the most important person in my life, and I love her more than anything on this earth.”

The coming of age

Maybe it helped that Rozier had those three months with his father in Youngstown. Terry Sr. left prison raring to make good as a dad. His son’s passion for sports was a natural gateway. Amanda very grudgingly gave permission for an extended summer stay.

Rozier played every skill position on his youth football team. One day he was overthrown while trying out at wide receiver and retrieved the ball in the end zone. He cocked his arm and threw a long spiral.

“They were like, ‘Man, this guy can throw; he’s a quarterback,’ ” Terry Rozier said of his coaches’ reaction.

Though gone by the fall, Terry Sr. became his son’s full time trainer. He gave him a weight vest and took the 10-year-old out for some high octane jogging. The father slowly drove with the son running next to the car.

Terry Sr. broke out the boxing gloves, and they sparred.

“It was one of the funnest times of my life,” said Rozier. “He told me he wanted me to be the best. I was just motivated by him. Tagging along with my father was special. They said he was one of the craziest, nicest athletes. His sport was football, but he played everything. He really could fight. He liked boxing, football, a true athlete.”

But Terry Sr. was better at helping his son than himself.

“Terry was just outdone,” said Amanda. “He was sad. I don’t know exactly what happened, but someone called and told me that Terry had to come back up to me in Cleveland, because something went wrong.

“I didn’t like letting him go there to begin with, but Terry was coming of age. So I let him go for the summer. I was a nervous wreck, but he just loved his father.”

Rozier hesitated before answering a question about what he lost that summer.

“It was tough, definitely tough, because he’d been locked up when I was young, and then when I thought I could move in with him, I was having so much fun, and then he has to go back,” he said. “With what he went back for, I was thinking I may never see my dad again.”

Tempered like steel

Once basketball took hold of his future, Rozier discovered that sports’ version of pressure meant little.

“I’m honestly a guy who doesn’t feel pressure in situations because of what my family has been through, and what I’ve been through and seen,” he said. “That’s just me. I’m not afraid to take on someone, or guard a certain person. Just the way I was brought up.”

Much to the relief of his grandmother and mother, the young, hyper kid had matured. Gina would sometimes hide around a corner in the local mall, and smile at the sight of Rozier and his younger brother Jmaine holding open doors for fellow shoppers.

“There were times he was angry and we couldn’t reach him,” said Gina, who left Youngstown five years ago, and lives with the rest of the family in Shaker Heights. “But then he did a 360. He could be a spokesperson for ADHD now, he’s done so well. By seventh and eighth grade he had become a respectful young man.”

Rozier now talks to his father “almost every day. He always calls.”

Gina Tucker is impressed by this display of unconditional love from her son.

“Terry never held anything against his dad,” she said. “He’s used his dad as motivation for what not to do. I’m very impressed and very proud of him staying in touch with (Terry Sr.), because there’s been times I couldn’t have done it — him leaving me here alone to raise his son.

“I was angry with Terry’s father for many years, and I just started communicating with him six years ago. We’re not together, but I want to make sure that he has his head on straight.”

Perhaps the greatest sign has been Terry Sr.’s desire to hold onto his son.

“That’s now a relief for me,” said Gina.