The first one came in 1974, a few months before they were told it would come, Jim said:
“The lady said, ‘Mr. Brown, you and your wife are on our list for an adoption. Are you still interested?’”
The final call came early last Friday morning and again Jim answered:
“It was 6:30, maybe 20 ‘til seven. It was Mia and she was crying. At first I couldn’t understand her. She said it again: ‘Matt and Ellen have been hit ... They’re doing CPR on Matt right now!’”
That first call back in ’74 brought Jim and Becky their eight-week-old son Matt. The last one let the couple know their 51-year-old boy was being taken away from them.
In the predawn of Nov. 14, Matt Brown and Ellen, his wife of 25 years, had just left their home on Peters Pike to walk their three dogs.
It was a routine they did every morning and, like always, they walked in the grass, toward oncoming traffic until they could traverse the length of the neighbor’s yard and turn down a side street with almost no traffic.
They had gone only a few strides when they were hit from behind by a black 2014 Ford Fusion driven by a 19-year-old from Arcanum who was on his way to work. He not only had strayed out of his lane, but had veered across the oncoming lane of traffic to the grass.
Matt died at the scene as did his big Doberman, Russell. Ellen was knocked down and fractured her radius. The other two dogs survived.
Jim and Becky sat at their dining room table a couple of mornings ago and in the 90 minutes of conversation that followed – some of it through tears, a little with laughter, but all of it under an ever-pressing cloud of sorrow – they shared some of the stories of Matt’s life that had come between those two defining phone calls.
The more they talked – often with one of them unconsciously ending the sentence the other began in the seamless way you might expect a couple married 57 years to do – the more one thing became clear:
Matt Brown grabbed hold of life with both hands, and he did so enthusiastically.
He was known for his kindness, his laughter, a sometimes-short fuse, but always an easy laugh, and a love of his family and friends and his myriad pursuits.
He was an accomplished chef, a budding artist, and a household handyman. He was a bow-and-arrow deer hunter, rode motorcycles, raised chickens and ran the Columbus Marathon a month ago.
He liked cereal and ice cream and the Kentucky Wildcats.
In fact, just three nights before he died, he was texting back and forth with his dad as he watched his beloved ‘Cats fall to Louisville, 96-88.
His love of sports was a connective thread that ran through the family.
Jim is known across the Miami Valley as a basketball man.
He played at Belmont High and on the UD freshman team. He spent 27 years at Wright State as a top recruiter, assistant coach and head coach. After that he was the head coach at Northmont High, was enshrined in the Wright State Hall of Fame and today is the color commentator for radio broadcasts of the WSU basketball games.
Matt’s younger brother Anthony played basketball for the Raiders in the mid-1990s and Matt’s wife – then known as Ellen Musk – was a scholarship swimmer at WSU.
He and Ellen’s two sons also are athletes. Logan was a Chaminade Julienne swimmer who qualified for state four straight years and Alex got a lacrosse scholarship to Tiffin University.
Matt – once the Carroll High JV basketball coach and also an assistant with his dad at Northmont – was about to start coaching again. He was going to help his son coach the Carroll fourth grade team.
But the best sports stories Jim and Becky shared about him go back to his days with the Wright State basketball teams. He was a student manager, but before that he was a ball boy on the most celebrated hoops team ever to wear the Raiders’ green and gold.
‘You gotta talk to Mom’
“This picture is just priceless,” Becky said as she held up a black and white photo from the Raiders 1983 run to the NCAA Division II national championship. “This is typical of all those years Matt was the ball boy for the team.
“He was so enthusiastic. He loved doing that.”
Although his eyes were now brimming with tears, Jim managed a chuckle: “I have video tapes of games we played. He’d sit at the end of the bench – he was really young then – and you can see him jumping up and down like a fan.”
When Matt was nine, the Raiders won the national title. The photo Becky held was from one of the games leading into the Final Four.
“It’s probably from our game at Bloomsburg State,” Jim said.
It shows the jubilant Raiders players with their hands held skyward, most with index fingers pointing to the heavens. Head coach Ralph Underhill holds the game ball in his left hand and in front of him is young Matt in his Wright State jersey, with his arms stretched out in victory.
“When we got to Bloomsburg, they had a small gym that maybe seated 3,000,” Jim remembered. “We got there an hour and 15 minutes before the game and the place already was packed and the band was playing.
“The only way we could get to our dressing room was across the floor, right through all that. Now our players didn’t give a crap. They loved it.
“But by the time Matt got to the dressing room, he was so nervous he was hyperventilating. Dr. (Bill) Donahue, our team doctor, had to get him a brown bag so he could breathe into it and calm down.
“He did and we won by 20 points.
“But then came the trip to the national championship and he wanted to go, but Mom wouldn’t take him because of what had happened in Pennsylvania.”
Asked if Matt was ticked off, Jim laughed.
“Ticked-off doesn’t begin to tell the story. He worked on me big time: ‘Dad! Dad! You gotta talk to Mom.’
“I said, ‘Matthew, I can’t … if she said no, I can’t.’
“So he didn’t get to the final two games.”
While he did shine in one particular quickness drill at the Raiders’ annual summer basketball camp, Matt thought he faced another hoops crisis his sophomore year at Carroll.
“Becky and I were at the dinner table when he came in in tears, ran upstairs and slammed the door,” Jim remembered. “I went up and said, ‘What’s wrong Matt?’
“And he said, ‘I’m not gonna make the team. They’re going to cut me. I saw the list.’
“I said, ‘Ahhh, come on Matt, it’s no...’” Jim’s words momentarily were choked off by the well of emotion.
“His problem was, ‘Dad was a basketball coach…’ and he felt I was going to be really let down if he didn’t make the team.
“So, I sat in the bedroom with him, and we talked quite a while and I told him not to worry about it. And the thing is, he made the team after all.
“But after that year he didn’t have real passion for it and he gave it up. Years later though, he said he regretted quitting.”
It was experiences like that that made him a good coach.
He could speak to his players about situations – good and bad – but one thing stood out, Jim said:
“He always supported his kids no matter what.”
The right person
Jim had graduated from the University of Dayton and was married to Becky by the time he headed to Vietnam in August of 1969.
When he got home, they still weren’t having any luck with getting pregnant, so they decided on adoption and were told they’d have at least a two-year wait.
They got their beautiful little boy some three months before that and then, three years later, Becky did give birth to Anthony.
“I remember our pediatrician, Dr. (George) Sperry, sitting down with us…” Jim said as the emotion welled up and drowned his voice.
Becky picked up the story: “He wanted to make sure we spent time with Matt because everyone would be making a fuss over the baby.”
Becky sorted through a pack of fading photographs until she found the one she wanted.
“This says it all,” she said.
It showed their two little boys sitting next to each other in an oversized chair. Matt had his arm around Anthony as he looked down lovingly on him.
One day when Jim was working on a low roof at their old house in Belmont, he allowed Matt to come up and sit with him and soon father and son started talking.
“I brought up his adoption and he started crying, “ Jim said, “But we finally talked through it.”
Then came the day in class – Matt was in first or second grade at Immaculate Conception – and the teacher must have mentioned adoption and he told the class he was adopted, Becky said:
“Nobody believed him. They said, ‘You’re not adopted.’
“The kids had been so strong in their disbelief that Matt came home and asked, ‘Mom, I am adopted, right?’ And I said, ‘Yes, you are.’”
Although Jim said Matt could be “a handful” during some of his high school days and then, after starting at Wright State, he dropped out and began working low-wage jobs.
When a string of jobs didn’t pan out, Jim and Becky pushed him to go back to WSU and he ended up graduating on the same day in 1999 that Anthony did.
The best thing that happened to him at Wright State, his parents agreed, was meeting Ellen.
“He was so fortunate that he found the right person,” Becky said. “She balanced him greatly.”
Jim nodded: “Big time.”
The couple had two sons:
Logan joined the National Guard as a junior at Chaminade Julienne and is still in it. He’ll graduate in May from Ohio University with an engineering degree.
A couple of months ago he and his fiancé Mia Andrews-Pope had a baby boy, Wyatt, who became Matt’s only grandchild. Hoping to save money, the couple moved in with Ellen and Matt.
Youngest son Alex started at Tiffin, but in January will begin working toward an engineering degree at Wright State
“Both boys are really smart,” Becky said.
“They get it from their mother,” Jim deadpanned.
‘I wish we could have told him that’
Every morning Ellen and Matt had the same routine. They’d work out at a gym around 5 a.m, and then come home and walk the dogs before showering.
She would then head to her fourth-grade teaching job in Vandalia and he to his job in medical sales.
They had just started out with the dogs when the car barreled into them.
Matt and Ellen never saw what hit them, Jim said.
He said the driver drove away but came back and Ellen talked to him. He told her he never saw them.
There’s plenty of speculation how the young driver could lose such focus to drift over two lanes and not see the couple in the grass or their dogs, but it hasn’t been made public.
Mia heard Ellen scream, Jim said, and came running out of the house to what was a deadly spectacle. She got the two dogs into the garage and by then the Tipp City EMS and the police had arrived. Soon after Mia called Jim and Becky.
“This has been tough for Mia and Ellen – seeing Matt die in front of them – it’s just so terrible,” Jim said
Anthony took the news of his brother’s death especially hard, Jim said, and Alex and Logan have tried to buoy their mom.
Word of the tragedy especially shook the Wright State community.
Jim and Becky have heard from several former players – guys like Vitaly Potapenko, Delme Herriman and Gary Monroe – as well as former Raiders coach Scott Nagy, current coach Clint Sargent and from several of this season’s players.
The couple certainly will be embraced by more people Friday when they receive friends at St. Christopher Catholic Church (435 National Road) in Vandalia from 4 to 7 p.m.
Matt’s funeral mass will be at St. Christopher at 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning.
Becky said she’s been lifted by all the messages she’s read on her son’s Facebook page: “So many people knew him and loved him.”
And yet, Jim said, “I just can’t believe this has happened. It’s such a shock. And Becky’s struggling with it more than I am.”
Becky nodded and after a moment’s silence, she tried to explain:
“I feel badly with it happening like it did. We didn’t have a chance to really say goodbye, or to tell him that we loved him. I know he knew it, but we didn’t get a chance to actually verbalize it. I wish we could have told him that.”
Really though, they did.
Ever since Jim answered that first phone call 51 years ago, they had been telling Matt they loved him.
And in the way their son so fully grabbed hold of life – with so much curiosity and kindness and that light-the-room smile – he showed that love right back.
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