Chasing a Dream: The Carl English Story

By Carl English and Blake Murphy

"Never doubt yourself, never stop chasing your dreams, and always believe the impossible.” — Carl English

When Carl English was five years old, he was faced with an unimaginable tragedy. The loss of his parents in a fire would change his life as he knew it. But he found an outlet, a comfort zone, a way out of the emotional turmoil he experienced: basketball. He played, hours upon hours, on the side of the highway, in rain, wind, and even snow. As time passed, basketball grew into a passion, and then a dream.

Where would it take him? How big could he dream? And what would he need to make this dream a reality? Hard work, discipline, practice, determination, and most important, self-belief. Basketball has taken Carl all around the world and, in his own words, has blessed him with so much.

Chasing a Dream is the memoir of Newfoundland basketball phenom Carl English. It’s an inspirational true story of persevering through hard work and dedication to make a dream become reality. In Carl’s case, he always dreamed of playing in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Although he went undrafted through all his years playing, he enjoyed the career of a lifetime playing the sport he loves. The basketball pro from small-town Newfoundland travelled overseas and crushed the European basketball circuit. He became a superstar in his own right, by playing in Europe and for the Canadian national team, and returned to his home province to a hero’s welcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771177887

Carl English

Carl English grew up in Patrick’s Cove, Newfoundland. He attended Fatima Academy and pursued a future in basketball at St. Thomas Aquinas in Toronto and at the University of Hawaii. Carl went on to achieve great success in the sport playing for Team Canada and for various European teams. Today he lives in Paradise, Newfoundland, with his wife, Mandy, and their three children.

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PROLOGUE

We weren’t supposed to be there. If you look at my career—hell, my entire life—I really wasn’t supposed to be there. So I took myself somewhere else.

It’s March 10, 2001, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’m in my freshman year at Hawaii, and we’re on an unlikely run as the No. 5 seed to the WAC Tournament final. We were up against Tulsa, and its home crowd makes for one of the most intense environments I’ve ever played in.

I’ve been seeing inconsistent minutes coming off of a redshirt year but have begun taking on more of a role down the stretch. It’s been a struggle for me, mentally, trying to find my place and being so far from home. My minutes are low enough that most people still don’t really know what I can do. But things are about to change.

We went down early but kept the game close and are down by two with a few seconds to play. I have 16 points off the bench. It may be my best game of the year already, and the season’s about to come down to one possession, so I feel good. With an NCAA Tournament berth on the line, I think everyone thought Predraeg Savovic, our top scorer and future NBA player, would get the ball. With the game I’m having, though, I know there’s a chance I might.

There’s a lot going on in a moment like that. Our whole season comes down to one shot. The crowd is crazy. It’s easily the biggest game of my career to that point, and one of my best. It’s tough to slow your mind down in these situations. There’s so much that’s led to this point—hard work, obstacles, and in my case, a lot of tragedy—and I have to battle to stay focused.

Before the final play, I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I’m not at the Reynolds Center. I’m not shooting on its rims. There aren’t 8,160 people hoping I’ll fail. I’m alone. It’s just me, my basketball, and a homemade net along the side of Route 100 back in Patrick’s Cove, Newfoundland. With the WAC final down to one possession, I take myself back there, back home, visualizing my next shot coming on my wood basket in front of Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior’s place.

Our coach, Riley Wallace, draws the play up for Savovic, but Tulsa defended it well. The ball finds its way to me. I attack the lane driving right, and when the help comes, I switch to my left hand to finish. With 1.8 seconds left on the clock, I rise and go off glass and in. It’s the biggest shot of my life.

In overtime, I score seven more points to finish with 25, a game and season high. I go to the free-throw line four times in OT. I’ve had a bit of a rough season shooting free throws and an even worse start to the game at the line, so each time I try to settle my nerves by taking myself back home. In my mind, I shoot every one of those free throws on the side of the road, the Atlantic Ocean in the background. We finish the upset, beating Tulsa 78-72, and I’m named tournament MVP.

Not many people knew about me then. I was a redshirt freshman from a place in Canada nobody had heard of, on a mid-major with up-and-down playing time. They were about to learn, though. We’d just punched our ticket to the NCAA Tournament, which would bring March Madness to Newfoundland and my story to a national audience.

My life was about to change, and my career was about to take me down an incredible and improbable path. It all started with a Newfie kid and his homemade net on the side of the highway.

A basketball hoop Carl English made with his uncle Junior McGrath, on which Carl practised in Patrick’s Cove, Newfoundland.

The gravesite of Carl English’s parents, Kevin and Lavinia English, located in Branch, Newfoundland.

1

TRAGEDY. THE FIRE AND AFTERMATH.

My parents died when i was five. I don’t remember much about the fire.

Family photo. Kevin and Lavinia English and their five sons, (L-R) Bradley, Kevin, Michael, Carl, and Peter.

I remember playing with new toys that morning. When you grow up in a small town in Newfoundland, going into town is a big deal. Every three or four months, my parents would take me and my four brothers on the two-hour drive from Branch, where we lived, to St. John’s. It was always special for us, because we knew we’d get a couple of toys or snacks that you don’t get at the stores in and around Branch. We went into St. John’s that week, the Thursday before Easter weekend, and I was playing Cowboys and Indians with my new toys somewhere in the house on Good Friday morning.

That’s when I heard my mom, Lavinia, screaming. My mom was screaming, and my dad was yelling. I remember smoke starting to fill the house and coming into the room we were playing in.

I only remember parts of the chaos and the details. A lot of what I know was told to me later by my brothers, family, and neighbours. I was only a kid at the time—my recollection of the day isn’t all that great because I was so young and scared. One of my brothers is the same. People remember what they want to remember and try to block out what they need to block out.

Something went wrong when my dad, Kevin, was lighting the stove. At one point, I’d heard that he used boat fuel instead of the proper oil for the stove, but forensics didn’t find any gas. My brothers remember my mom always going on about keeping the chimney clean, otherwise the house would burn down. What they told us later was that when Dad lit the fire, there was a sort of backdraft that blew back toward my parents. It blew fire around the kitchen, and my dad’s shirt and some other things caught on fire. Mom went over to help Dad, and her nightdress caught on fire. The whole house was beginning to burn.

My brothers said everything happened quickly. Peter, my oldest brother, helped me get out. He ran downstairs to see what was going on but saw smoke everywhere and was having trouble breathing. He came back upstairs, grabbed me and my younger brother Michael, and took us outside onto the roof of the cellar through a window. Our neighbour, Mr. Quigley, saw what was going on and came over and helped Peter get us down off the roof.

Bradley got out through a window on the second floor and jumped down to the ground. Kevin Jr., my older brother, had been downstairs and got out through the front door.

Somehow, all five of us brothers got out safely. We were all fine, hardly a scratch on us, but it was the scariest experience of our lives.

My parents weren’t as lucky. They’d both been so close to the fire when it started and were so focused on stopping it and making sure we were okay that they were injured by the time they got out.

When we got outside, we all ran to get away from the house. When we turned back, there were flames and smoke everywhere. The house was in a blaze. We were helpless. My parents were rolling on the grass to try to put themselves out. Neighbours were coming from everywhere, and there was screaming and shouting from every direction.

I was just a little kid. I was in complete shock. All I wanted was my mom. I was trying to look for her, and everyone had to keep me settled down and keep me from running back toward the house to her.

My mom was badly burned. She went to the neighbour’s house across the street to lay in the bathtub to keep cool until the ambulance arrived. Being in rural Newfoundland in the 1980s, it took a while for ambulances and fire trucks to arrive. They took me in to see my mom while she lay in the tub. I was crying and scared, but at least I was with my mom.

My memory gets foggy after that, but I remember little things. I can remember the pyjamas that I was wearing. I can remember the boats on the wallpaper in our room as smoke started coming in. I can remember the toys I was playing with. I can remember the flames, and the panic, and how scared I was. And I remember sitting with my mom while she soaked in the tub, the last time I ever saw her.

Mom died at the hospital soon after arriving due to oxygen complications. Dad died from his injuries a few days later.

* * * * *

The thing about losing your parents so young is that you can’t understand it. It hit me much harder later. When I was an adult, I found out the fire didn’t kill my mother. The hospital made a mistake with one of her oxygen tubes. Maybe 20 years later, a nurse explained all of this to Peter. As he understood it, the family talked with lawyers at the time and decided not to do anything about it legally. This was incredibly difficult to learn. My brothers and I had to process my mother’s death all over again with that new information.

You never truly heal from something like that, but as an adult, at least you can try to understand. As a child, they’re just gone, and you can’t comprehend why or what that means.

I didn’t fully understand the impact until I had a family of my own. Now, when I leave for a week, my kids are lost. They’re calling me every day, they’re FaceTiming me, asking when I’m coming home. My five-year-old sleeps with a picture of me when I’m on the road. I was five when I lost my parents and my whole world went upside down, and it didn’t really get put into context until I had my own kids. Now I can comprehend what that loss did to me over my life and what a piece of me was missing, because I see it in my own kids and understand that relationship between parents and children.

I remember some of the funeral. I was only five, so I didn’t understand what was going on, but I remember being there and being very sad. I think I tried to do what my older brothers did and tried to stay close to them. It was overwhelming, at that age, all those eyes on me and my brothers, and I wasn’t equipped to process it.

Family photo taken in Branch. Lavinia and Kevin English and their five sons, (L-R) Peter, Bradley, Kevin, Michael, and Carl.

I remember everyone was so nice, and I remember not truly understand why. But that’s small-town Newfoundland. Everyone always tries to pick each other up. Everyone has each other’s backs. We lost everything we had when the house burned down, and I remember people coming by and giving us clothes. It’s touching, looking back on it, but at the time, as a kid, it was confusing.

I’ve carried the loss of my parents my entire life. It’s always been there. But so much about their loss hit me when I started figuring out who I was, when I began on my basketball path, and when I started my own family. At the time, it was sadness and confusion.

* * * * *

The next few months were difficult for all of us, especially for me as one of the youngest.

The family had to figure out where the five of us would go, and nobody could take on all five of us, so right away our biggest support system, each other, was split up. At first we all lived with my aunt Florence for a couple of days while my parents’ siblings figured out what was going to happen. That’s how I ended up with Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior.

The family decided that Bradley would go to St. John’s with Aunt Shirley. Kevin, Michael, and Peter would stay with Aunt Florence and Uncle David in Angels Cove. I would go with Aunt Betty. So, the five of us were split across three homes. Aunt Florence’s was only about 10 minutes away, so three of my brothers weren’t too far. The four of us would all be at the same school eventually, and we’d be able to see Bradley at Christmastime or in the summers. But we’d no longer live together. It wouldn’t be like before. That’s just the way it was.

The adjustment was hardest on me initially. The first week I stayed with Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior, I kept asking to go back and be with my older brothers. I cried at night and was eventually taken to Aunt Florence’s in my pyjamas so I could see them. Then we’d try again the next day. Eventually, I got used to my brothers not being around.

Things got a bit easier as we got older. We began to accept our situation. It became what we knew. We were all together on Christmas and on some special occasions, and it was hard. I felt like I lost my parents and then my brothers were taken away from me. On top of this inexplicable tragedy, I had to adjust to a new family, all by myself.

The transition wasn’t easy, even in a good home, which I’m thankful Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior provided me with. Aunt Betty was my mom’s sister, and they were raised together in a foster family with Aunt Florence’s parents. Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior have four kids of their own, so it was hard at first to find my place in the family. Aunt Betty used to joke when she’d get interviewed later in my career: When you got four kids, one more is not gonna matter a big difference. I became their baby at the time.

But it took some getting used to. Being the youngest and thrown into a new house, I had to discover the pecking order and my place within the family. I was already dealing with a lot, separated from my brothers, and I was always missing them, or my mom and dad. Every day seemed to get a little more difficult. I was trying to adjust to my cousins, to my aunt and uncle, who were doing everything they could for me, but who weren’t, in the end, my mom and dad.

There were many nights that I found it got to me. As I got older, it started to hit me a bit more that my parents were dead, and I started questioning a lot of things. Were they proud of me? What were they really like—not just what people told me they were like? Was I more like my mom or my dad? What would life be like if they were still here? What would our family be like? There were so many questions.

There were a lot of long nights, the realization that my parents were dead, and the questions that accompanied their loss. It would always come up if it had been a hard day at school or a hard day with basketball or I’d gotten in trouble. Those tougher moments would trigger the sadness and loneliness. I started asking, Why me? In my darkest moments, I asked, Why not me instead? I cried myself to sleep, wondering. It comes up in everything that you go through, and it’s the most personal thing, because those thoughts come right at you.

As a young boy, especially back then, I never talked about my feelings. It was always tough love. No one told me to express myself or asked how I was feeling, so I bottled everything up. I’ve always referred to it as the hockey mentality. That’s what people expect in that culture—a strong Newfoundlander. Even as I got older, being interviewed about the loss of my parents was never easy. It’s still hard, today, to write about it.

I had a family supporting me, but I didn’t communicate what I was going through. The people who could relate, my brothers, were at Aunt Florence’s and Aunt Shirley’s. When I got down, I couldn’t ask if they were going through the same thing. I had a strong relationship with my brothers, especially Kevin and Michael because of basketball, but the freedom I felt from that was because of the basketball, not because we talked about things. I felt incredibly alone.

Looking back, going through it all alone developed in me some sort of drive, some sort of toughness. If I can get through this, I thought, nothing can stop me. Every day I woke up and had no choice but to find a way through the fog. I spent a lot of time dealing with what I was feeling inside and trying not to let it affect what I was doing outside. I learned to compartmentalize. And then as life went on and other things happened to me, I was a little more centred because, you know, what could happen to me that’s any worse than what’s already happened? I didn’t get that until later, though. As a kid it was just frustrating and lonely and sad.

My aunt and uncle, though, were extremely understanding, and I’m grateful for their love and support. They knew when I was sad, when I was lonely, and they kept me connected to my parents. They took me on drives at night, we looked at the stars, and they told me the brightest ones were following me, shining down, and those were my parents.

That stuck with me, to always look for signs that they were still around. Some of the only things that made it out of the fire were pictures, and I still have them. The edges are burnt, but the pictures remain. They’re something. Enough to help keep my parents’ memory alive, to remember that Mom was beautiful and that Dad was always working for the family. In my twenties, I had both their faces tattooed on my back. Little things. A connection. So that they were always a part of my life.

Carl English’s memorial tattoo, which he had inked on his back in Gran Canaria, Spain: They live with us in memory. The tattoo shows Carl’s parents, Kevin and Lavinia, and his uncle Junior McGrath, and the dates of their deaths.

Whenever things were difficult later in life or on the basketball court, I reminded myself: My fan club is upstairs.

2

THE HOOP. CHILDHOOD AND FINDING BASKETBALL.

Life at aunt betty and uncle junior’s eventually became my new normal. I got used to my aunt and uncle, and to living with my cousins instead of my brothers. As I got older, I had enough on my plate, with school and chores and sports, to keep myself moving, even if I was still sad and lonely sometimes.

It was my relationship with Uncle Junior that helped me push through. My uncle, Ignatious Junior McGrath, and I became close almost immediately.

He was 36 at the time I moved in. A few years earlier, he had suffered a stroke because of a fairly rare heart condition called arrhyth-mogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (AVRC), which left him without full function of the left side of his body. His left hand and left foot, in particular, were limited. But that didn’t slow him down. The way it works in rural Newfoundland is that if something is wrong with the car or truck, you fixed it. If the roof had a leak, you fixed it. You don’t call a roofer or a mechanic unless maybe your neighbour happens to be a roofer or a mechanic. So Uncle Junior was a jack-of-all-trades handyman, but his left hand didn’t work so well.

That’s where I came in. By trade, Uncle Junior was a fisher person, and while my older cousins, Gerard, Howie, Chris, and Pamela, all helped out, as was expected of them, I was too young. So I became Uncle Junior’s left-hand man when he wasn’t on the family boat. Our entire relationship was built