In the grand scheme of things, tonight’s final score is irrelevant. Tomorrow’s too.
Sports are just games we play, after all, and what do they really count for?
Nothing, except for everything.
Ernie Alderete will tell you.
He’s been stationed at Riverside Medical Center for the past 30 days, dealing with life and death. Fighting through red tape and fighting back despair, buoyed throughout by … basketball.
By Clippers’ scores, by talkin’ Clippers with people at the hospital, and, big time, by the support he’s getting from his fellow Clippers fans, people who mean it when they say they’re a “famdom.”
Alderete’s father, Bob “Butch” Stevens, another longtime Clippers fan, was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2022 – just three months after he lost his wife and Ernie’s mother, Jill, to ovarian cancer.
Wham. Wham.
Then just as this year began, Butch, 77, became delusional, barely able to speak. It seemed to Ernie that his father – step-father, technically, but in reality the only father he’s known – might be having a stroke.
So Ernie brought him to the hospital, where a wretched reality only worsened. Butch’s symptoms were caused by his failing liver, which was allowing ammonia into his blood system and ultimately destroying his kidneys, is how Ernie describes it.
Four sessions of dialysis did not improve Butch’s condition, and so doctors deemed it time to arrange for hospice care, breaking the news to Ernie last weekend. Crushing, emotionally. And crushing financially, too. Especially because there’s no telling how long Butch will be in hospice.
Ernie, who is a marketing manager for Complete Garment, a dye store in Vernon, does know that hospice will cost around $5,000 per month on top of other fees – a sudden, substantial burden exacerbated by the fact that Butch poured most of his retirement savings into his wife’s medical treatments.
Heartbreak and headaches and thank goodness for his fellow fans. For the
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