You can call it luck or fate or divine intervention or anything you want. But there seemed to be something nudging Dre Greenlaw and the Early family together in Fayetteville, Ark., in the fall of 2011.
Greenlaw, the inside linebacker the 49ers selected in the fifth round last month, was 14 at the time and playing cornerback and running back for the local junior high team. Brian Early was a defensive coach at Fayetteville High. There was no reason for them to cross paths at that point.
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Except Greenlaw was experiencing back spasms one day and because the junior high had no training staff, he and another player were sent to the high school for treatment. Early usually would have been teaching class at the time that Greenlaw stopped by. On that particular day he wasn’t. He was hanging out at the training facility where he ran into the boys.
He asked them the standard questions: Where do you go to school? Where are you from?
Greenlaw’s answers, however, weren’t typical. He told Early he lived at the Methodist Family Boys Home. In fact, he had been living in group homes and shelters across the state — one after another — since his mother lost custody of him when he was 8 years old.
“He asked me why I was there,” Greenlaw, who turns 22 later this month, recalled in a recent interview with The Athletic. “And I kind of said, ‘It’s because I don’t have anywhere to go right now.’ When we were talking — it was kind of weird. He had never met me. I had never met him. But you could just tell when we were talking that he was really interested in me and the whole group home deal.”
“I realized how good of a dude he was,” Greenlaw continued. “I could really talk to him, talk to him like any other guy. He was young, I think in his mid-30s. He just understood. I’ve never met somebody where it felt so right, so perfect at the moment. I could really talk to him.”
Early had the same connection. There was something about the 14-year-old — a warmth, a brightness, a magnetism, a shine — that drew him in.
After Greenlaw was drafted, a man named Gerry Daly took to Twitter to tell a story about how Greenlaw had helped his daughter when they were freshmen attending a keg party at a fraternity at the University of Arkansas.
Somebody had spiked the woman’s drink with a date-rape drug. When Greenlaw — he had gone to high school with her — realized she was acting strangely and being ushered out the door by an aggressive male student, he stopped them from leaving and helped her find her friends.
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“I didn’t ever tell this story,” Daly wrote on April 27, “because maybe someone would say, ‘Oh, he shouldn’t have been at that party.’ Maybe not. But he had my daughter’s back, and for that I will always owe him. So, do me a favor. Root for Dre. He’s a good kid with a good heart.”
Brian’s wife, Nanci, said she’d never heard about the episode until Daly tweeted about it. But she wasn’t surprised.
“He’s a real good friend,” she said. “But not just that. He would have done that for anybody. That was absolutely, 100 percent his personality to do that for somebody. No, I’m not surprised at all.”
Back in 2011, Brian Early figured he’d serve as Greenlaw’s mentor. He attended one of the boy’s junior high games, then brought him to a football game at the University of Arkansas. The family — Nanci and Brian had 7- and 3-year-old daughters — took him to church one Sunday, to dinner at P.F. Chang’s on another occasion and to the mall. They bought him a couple of shirts and some jeans at American Eagle.
Nanci admits now that the idea of adopting Greenlaw crept into her mind during these brief outings. But the Earlys didn’t seriously consider it until they dropped the teenager off at the group home one day and a worker there pulled them aside to tell them the Fayetteville facility would be closing. The boys would be sent to another group home in Alma, Ark., 50 miles away.
“I probably had thought about it and talked myself out of it many times,” Nanci said. “Just saying, ‘He’s fine. We’ll mentor him and take him to church and buy him clothes and that’ll be good. We’ve got these two little girls. We can’t do that.’
“But when the boys home came and said, ‘We’re shutting down,’ to me that was God saying, ‘You’re not doing enough. He’s not OK. He’s going to move again. He’s going to change schools again.’”
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No one else seemed to think adopting Greenlaw was a good idea. Like everywhere else in the nation, babies and young children in Arkansas are far more likely to be adopted or taken in by foster families than teenagers, who rarely thrive as adults. Nationally, as many as 20 percent of teens who age out of the system become homeless at some point. They are more likely to struggle with substance abuse, commit a crime and become incarcerated. Only a small percentage go on to earn four-year college degrees, according to national studies.
“I can remember having a conversation with our pastor and saying, ‘We felt like we’re being called to help this kid,’” Brian said. “But we’d been advised, with young daughters, to be careful with that — bringing a teenage boy into the house. And we kind of got (the pastor’s) thoughts on the situation. And he discouraged it. And he said, ‘I’m not discouraging you from helping the kid. Let’s see if we can’t help him find another home somewhere else.’ And I remember him saying, ‘Brian, I don’t think it’s a good idea that you guys adopt him.’”
Did the pastor have a point?
It wasn’t as if the Earlys had known Greenlaw all his life, after all. Their relationship spanned only a few months and there had been just a handful of interactions. Nanci said that one day Brian suggested they take Dre to dinner but thought that his last name was Green.
“He said, ‘How about the Earlys and the Greens go eat?’” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Who’s Green?!’”
That’s how little they knew about the boy.
Greenlaw doesn’t want to over-dramatize what life was like in the boys home in Fayetteville. In some ways, it was the best place he had been up to that point. He learned to love football when he was living there and he made lifelong friends at school. Three of the boys on his junior high team played alongside him in high school and later at Arkansas.
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Still, it wasn’t easy and it certainly wasn’t carefree.
Something as simple as a bowl of cereal had to be precisely measured out at every sitting. Boys received a single allotment of food for each meal, and that was it. If you were an athlete who craved extra calories, you had to sneak your snacks from the kitchen to your room.
“I definitely learned how to do that,” he said with a grin.
Greenlaw’s modest haul from American Eagle also caused problems when another boy tried to take his clothes. At the boys home, jeans came from Walmart and the boys didn’t get to pick them out. When Greenlaw returned one day with fancier-than-normal pants, it triggered a fight.
“He hit me three times,” Greenlaw said. “And finally, I hit him back, so he stopped when he took that punch. There was nothing else after that.”
Greenlaw stayed at the facility, which housed boys aged 10-18, for about a year. One day, one of the boys threw a brick through a car window. On other occasions, a boy tried to run away. Whenever that happened, the police were called and the home essentially went on lockdown.
The Earlys twice stopped by to pick up Greenlaw for an outing but couldn’t because none of the boys were allowed to leave. How could he flourish in that environment? What would happen to him after he turned 18? Every instinct they had told them he needed more — more stability, more care, more love.
“It’s just something you felt from him,” Brian said. “You felt like he wanted a family. He wanted to be a part of a family and have people that loved him and looked out for him and give him warmth. He found that with us.”
So against the advice of their pastor, and contrary to the statistics, the Earlys decided to make Greenlaw their son. They began taking the necessary classes and initiated the proceedings.
Even though their minds already were committed to it, Nanci said she and Brian wanted their daughters to be part of the decision. After dropping Greenlaw off at the boys home one day, they discussed the proposition on the drive back to their home. AJ is their oldest daughter. Camryn — “She’s the sassy one,” Nanci said — is the youngest.
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“We talked about it with them and said, ‘We just really feel like Dre needs a family and that he needs a mom and a dad and he needs sisters and we just really feel like God is wanting him to come live with us,’” Nanci said of their conversation. “And we got in the car the next day. We were picking them up from school. And my 7-year-old is like — this is AJ — she said, ‘Mom, I’ve been thinking about it. And God’s been speaking to my heart and he wants Dre to come live with us.’ And I said, ‘AJ! That makes me feel so good!’ And I’m kind of looking in the rear-view mirror and I look at Cam in her car seat and she says, ‘Don’t look at me. God’s not been speaking to my heart.’”
It didn’t take her long to warm up to her new big brother.
Greenlaw moved in with the Earlys a few days before Christmas that year. Nanci said they knew their first night together would be awkward for everyone, so they decided to make popcorn and watch a movie so no one would feel obligated to make conversation.
“And I look over, and my 3-year-old has her arm around him and was touching his hair because she had never touched a black kid’s hair before,” Nanci said. “And I said, ‘Cam! What are you doing?!’ And we all just busted out laughing.”
Said Greenlaw: “All I remember is laughing because my little sister, Camryn, she didn’t say nothing to me for a couple of days. Didn’t look at me. But she’d sit there and rub my head like this (rubs the top of his head). And I told them, ‘You need to bring her around more black people!’ Because she’s like, ‘Why’s his hair like this?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God!’ while she’s rubbing my head. But it was a real family thing and real funny. Everyone was laughing.”
Greenlaw’s story is no fairytale.
The Arkansas Department of Human Services said it could not disclose why he was taken away from his mother, but a story last year in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette cited drug use in the family and a prison sentence for a family member.
Greenlaw lived for a short time with his biological father. His stepmother already had children of her own, however, and they ultimately did not keep him. He has at least eight half-siblings and is particularly close to two of his younger brothers. Brian says that all of the siblings were taken in by a relative when they were growing up; Dre was the only one who wasn’t.
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But he never became embittered, never resentful that he’d been abandoned. He never shut down. Instead he maintained the openness and optimism that initially drew the Earlys toward him and continues to impress them. Nanci said that each time her girls turned 8 she was struck that it was the same age at which Greenlaw became a ward of the state.
“And I’m thinking, ‘At 8! I’m still rinsing shampoo out of my girls’ hair at 8. How did he survive this and still have this attitude?’” she said. “He has done it and he has done it with the most amazing attitude. It’s crazy. Because so many kids would have been bitter or hurt or feel like they’re owed something. And that’s just not him at all. That’s not his personality. Somehow his ordeal didn’t steal that from him. And we are awed by that.”
After their movie-night icebreaker, Greenlaw quickly and easily became a member of the family, so much so that the Earlys — eight years later — say they can’t imagine what their lives would be like without him.
The 14-year-old Greenlaw was like any other teenage boy. He aggravated his mother by watching television with the volume on full blast. Nanci said that there were worries when they first took him in that he would be listening to loud music with cuss words in earshot of the girls. The TV indeed was loud, but Greenlaw’s favorite shows were Disney flicks and “Hannah Montana” — to the delight of his little sisters.
Before he started living with the Earlys, Greenlaw communicated with them by logging onto Facebook on a school computer. On their first Christmas morning together, he was given his first cell phone. Greenlaw was ecstatic when he was drafted last month. His reaction to getting his own phone was nearly as emotional.
It turned out to be a gift for Nanci as well.
Like a lot of young men, Greenlaw wasn’t great at sharing his feelings with his mom in face-to-face chats. Instead, his deepest thoughts and most heartfelt words have come via text, often from an adjoining room.
Nanci said she received one in the wee hours after the 49ers had selected Greenlaw in the fifth round. They had had a celebration that day, invited friends and family members. The house had finally grown quiet when her phone buzzed on her bedside table.
“I can’t explain how much ya’ll mean to me,” the text read. “I love you all so much. I don’t think anyone has a more caring and loving support system than I have. I just want you to know how much I appreciate you.”
(Photo: Stephen Hopson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
