The ink stain on his left arm not the only piece of Lourdes that’s still with Strawther.
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Before his freshman season at Gonzaga, Strawther tattooed his upper-left arm with the name of his mother, a cross and a breast cancer awareness ribbon. Julian was only 9 years old when Lourdes, or “Cookie” as many called her, died from breast cancer. I didn’t shoot it, I didn’t dribble, I didn’t do anything. I’d touch the ball, she was already screaming. “Like, she was screaming at every little thing. “The main thing about my mom, especially at a basketball game, is you knew she was there because she was the loudest person in the gym by far,” Julian said. The first thing to know is Lourdes Cordero was Puerto Rican, perhaps more by personality than by blood. 1 team, scoring 12 points and grabbing nine rebounds less than 20 minutes from the house where they grew up. He thinks about how she would’ve reacted Tuesday night to seeing him on the national stage, starting for the country’s No.
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Strawther’s connection to Vegas is authentic – a product of the relationships he’s formed here, both with those who are still around and also those who’ve left him. It’s why a public address announcer at Tuesday’s game between the top-ranked Bulldogs and second-ranked Bruins read off the names of four other GU starters before finally getting to the hometown kid, whose reveal produced a stirring response from the T-Mobile Arena crowd. Meanwhile, Strawther’s impact on Las Vegas is unmistakable. I don’t think that Julian will ever know the impact that 5 min conversation had on that little boy.” Your player, Julian Strawther (a young African American man who is a basketball superstar), took time out of his day and made him feel so special and made him feel like the coolest person in school today. “I could tell him all that, but my student just sees that as me having to do my ‘job’ and feed him that stuff. “See, my student is an African American boy who has been moved from foster home to foster home, feels like no one cares about him, and has hardly anything,” the email read. The next day, an e-mail from the boy’s paraprofessional was forwarded from Liberty’s principal to Berg. The boy, who claimed he’d never been around “real basketball players,” had a chance to snap a photo with Strawther before returning to class. During a game-day shootaround at a local elementary school, a second-grade student who’d been walking campus grounds heard balls bouncing in the nearby gym and popped in to take a peek.Īs the story goes, Strawther invited the young, wide-eyed boy to rebound and shoot with the team. Liberty’s team was participating in the 2020 Quincy Shootout in Illinois, but Strawther wasn’t slated to play after suffering an ankle injury. Two years later, Stefan Berg can still recite the box scores and the records, but when he says he hasn’t seen a player quite like Strawther, the former Liberty High coach doesn’t stop at the guard’s silky 3-point shot, unique ball-handling skills or pro-level athleticism.īerg’s favorite Strawther story does involve basketball, but only as a secondary character.
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His father, Lee, still has a replica basketball from the 2019 HoopHall Classic, where Strawther put on a dazzling 51-point display in December 2019. 1 Gonzaga have taken up residency this week for games against Central Michigan, No. Julian’s 2,252 career points and 839 rebounds – both program records – may be one way to measure his impact at Liberty, located just 10 miles from the T-Mobile Arena where Strawther and No. Julian’s senior photo hangs on another wall where the school commemorates its “Athlete of the Year” recipients and another slab of wall, designated for Liberty athletes who’ve played at the next level, includes placards for Julian and his sister. 1 team in the country, he wasn’t the only Strawther to lay bricks at Liberty High. 3 UNLV jersey hanging on the adjacent wall – a subtle reminder that although Julian is starring on the No. Hanging on one of the stone walls inside the atrium of the large gymnasium in Henderson, Nevada, is a Gonzaga jersey with Julian Strawther’s name and No. “It’s the house that Strawther built,” he said. LAS VEGAS – Moments after cracking open the double doors of Liberty High’s gymnasium, assistant principal of athletics Preston Goroff tells two visitors they’re walking on hallowed ground.