Boys and girls
Girls were obsessed with Dele.
Angie, a teenager, followed him around Denver, where Dele, then Brian Williams, was a Denver Nuggets center in the early '90s.
"I got an e-mail from her. She said she was always trying to go places that he might be," says Patricia Phillips, Dele and Dabord's mother. "He had noticed her and started talking to her. He asked her if she'd like to go out. She was so excited, thought she was going to have this really grown-up experience, going out with this older guy.
"Where does Brian take her? He takes her to buy ice cream cones and to the playground. Then he went and bought sparklers, and they just sat out on his deck, lighting the sparklers. The sun was setting, and they just watched it from his deck and played with sparklers, and then he took her home."
Dabord was just as charming with women.
"But he was far more nervous about it and intimidated," Phillips says.
He met a woman at his office, where he worked with computers.
"She kept brushing him off," Phillips says. "He couldn't figure out why this girl wouldn't go out with him. I intuited that maybe she had a child. I was a single mother; I know how guys react when you tell them you have children."
Phillips suggested that Dabord invite the woman's son.
"He bought a picnic basket, a cloth, matching napkins, plastic dishes, silverware for the picnic basket - he bought all this food," Phillips says. "He bought a little ball for the little boy. Off he goes. The girl called me (later) and said, 'I just didn't know what to do with all of it. Did you do this?' I said, 'No. My God, I wish I could meet a man like that.' I always felt that way about my boys: 'Why can't I meet a man like this?' "
Harbinger
"Am I responsible for my sons' deaths?" Phillips asks on a late Friday night in October in her California home. "Suppose I had never (remarried)?"
Phillips and others say the boys' stepfather abused her and her sons physically and mentally. Paul White, Dabord's lifelong best friend, says Dabord never recovered from his experience with his stepfather.
"Some people coming from an environment like that can overcome that kind of background, and some people can't," White says. "Miles was a person who could not."
The stepfather could not be located to talk about his life with Phillips and her sons.
Phillips laments the relationship. She won't talk about it. She has done all she can to suppress it.
"I have so banished that man from my conscious mind, I cannot tell you when I married him, how long I was married to him or when I divorced him," she says. "At one point I had completely forgotten that man's name."
When pressed, Phillips says she left her second husband when Dele was in seventh grade, when Dabord was in ninth or 10th grade. From then on, she raised her boys alone.
Phillips, 53, was a teenage bride. She married Eugene Williams when she was just 17. They divorced five years later. Phillips still talks to him.
Williams, who now drives a cab in Las Vegas, traveled extensively as a singer for The Platters. But Williams is not responsible for Dele's curiosity.
"Gene doesn't like to travel at all, but with The Platters, he had to travel all over the world," Phillips says. "He would just stay in his hotel room. He's seen places that I will never get to, and he can't tell you a bloody thing about them."
The boys moved to Nevada in their teens and spent about a year with their father.
Williams says Dele was nothing like a typical teenager. Sports, Williams says, just fell into Dele's lap.
"He didn't play organized basketball until he was in the 10th grade," Williams says. "He was an athlete. He was qualified as an athletic type, but he didn't have that true passion for the game."
Dele returned to his mother in California, but Dabord - his asthma had removed any chance that the 6-foot-8 brother would be an athlete, too - stayed on to go to college. He soon would shed his father's name and change Kevin Williams to Miles in honor of his favorite jazz musician, Miles Davis, and Dabord for a relative on his mother's side.
Williams was in Chula Vista shortly after Dabord was found comatose. Like Phillips, he figures he never will know the truth.
"That's what's hard to deal with," he says. "They were just my loving sons, and my heart is broken over this, and it always will be broken.
"It's just impossible to imagine. I have no idea how an argument could have escalated to that point."
Precocity
Phillips is eccentric. So were her sons.
"I always had someplace we were going off to," she says. "We explored every facet of Fresno, (Calif.). We used to stop and steal fruit out of orchards and get chased by dogs. I taught them how to ride your bicycle with a dog in pursuit. If you just keep pedaling, the dog will focus on the pedals and it disorients them.
"I grew up doing this. By the time I had kids, I was an old pro. Let me teach you the ropes. This is how you steal fruit. Stolen fruit just tastes different. Eating it dusty, stopping someplace: There's something extra about it."
Both of her boys were smart. Dabord, Phillips says, was labeled a genius in third grade. He reveled in the role.
"My mother bought a set of World Book encyclopedias," Phillips says. "Miles read every volume from cover to cover."
Both boys were meticulous. They built model airplanes.
"They were both painstaking in that no glue (was) visible," Phillips says. "Both of them, with these huge hands, have this very delicate, intricate ability with their fingers. When they painted it, it had to be perfect."
And both were curious.
Dele's wanderlust was evident immediately.
"Now it's politically correct to have these little harnesses on your children when they are young, the little harness and the leash so you can be in the grocery store and actually do some shopping and them not wander away," Phillips says. "I wish they had those leashes when Brian was a kid. Brian had no markers. He's so free-spirited.
"Some kids look up and don't see their mother, and they immediately start crying. He would look up, see no mother and assume I was going to find him. It would never occur to him, 2 years old, 5, 15 or 25 - it would never be a consideration to come back and find me unless there was something he wanted to show me or something he wanted me to buy."
Dele never changed. His size - 6-foot-10, 270 pounds - and his athletic gifts led him to the NBA, where he made history. In Denver, he helped lead the Nuggets past Seattle in the first round of the 1994 playoffs, the first time a No. 8 seed had defeated the No. 1 seed. He hauled in 19 rebounds in Game 5, a Nuggets playoff record. He was traded to Los Angeles, played for the Clippers and eventually won an NBA title with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in 1997, the highlight of his career.
"Michael Jordan just took him under his wing," Phillips says. "Brian wasn't very disciplined in a lot of ways. He didn't work that hard. Michael was always the enforcer. Michael said, 'You will give it to me in practice, you will give it to me in games, and you will be in the weight room every day.'
"One month of hanging out with Michael Jordan, it was this incredibly chiseled body. When he left here, he was pretty flabby."
Dele wound up in Detroit the next year, and after two seasons with the Pistons, he walked away in 1999 from a guaranteed contract that would have paid him more than $30 million. He just turned his back. As his brother had done, he changed his name, from Brian Williams to Bison Dele - Bison, an homage to his Cherokee heritage and Dele, his family's original African name.
But then one day he seemed to realize that finding his identity wasn't as simple as changing his name or moving.
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