Chris Paul (3)

His story;


Here is why I love this player;


After watching the video within 24 hours of its posting, Paul contacted his wife and personal assistant.

"I sent them the link," Paul recalled, "and I said, 'Find him.'"

They located the Gallaghers of Erie, Pa., and arrangements were made for Jack and several family members, coaches and friends to make the 3 1/2-hour drive to watch the Clippers play the Detroit Pistons at The Palace of Auburn Hills as Paul's guests. The All-Star will take the floor with "L.E.G." inscribed on his shoes.

"Sometimes," Paul said, "stuff is bigger than the game of basketball."

The six Gallagher children are in need of more than a pick-me-up moment. Their mother is gone and their jobless father, Michael, is suffering from kidney failure and needs a transplant.

Lisa was given three to six months to live when she was diagnosed last November but persevered for nearly a year, dying in early September.

She passed on her love of basketball to her children, surprising Jack with a pair of CP3 sneakers the day before his seventh-grade tryouts last year because she knew Paul was Jack's favorite player.

Lisa, a former high school player, also pestered Jack to attack the basket with his left hand.

"If you can't go with your left," Lisa would tell her son, "you're not going at all. Go left! Go left! They're expecting you to go to right."

Sure enough, Jack perfected his left-handed moves.

Jack Gallagher
Jack Gallagher, who lost his mother Lisa Elaine Gallagher to cancer, is connected to Chris Paul through a pair of the Clippers star's shoes. Paul will wear the initials "L.E.G." on his shoes as a tribute during a game Wednesday in Detroit. (Michael Gallagher)
Jack wore the shoes his mother gave him until they gave him blisters. But his body language signaled his sorrow in the realization he would soon have to move on to another pair.

"What's the matter?" Jack's father finally asked him. "He said, 'The shoes don't fit anymore.'"

Jack placed one sneaker on his mother's grave, inserting purple roses into the opening. He stuffed the other in his gym bag and touches it before each of his eighth-grade team's games.

Lisa attended as many of Jack's games as she could before her death, though her condition often left her unable to recall any details the next day.

"She would see a game and she would know and she would talk to Jack and she would see him after the game," Michael said of his late wife. "But the next day she wouldn't even remember being there. So it was always about the next memory, the next thing because we knew that while it was happening she was living it."

The family videotaped and photographed nearly every moment so that Lisa could savor her final days with those who mattered most. A video of Jack discussing his mother's devotion to his basketball career and of his desire to have Paul write Lisa's initials on his shoes for an NBA game left Paul wanting to make his own gesture, however small.

"To know that someone cares about me that much to where his mom did that for him and to know he put that on his mom's grave," Paul said, "I got goose bumps, I got chills."

Paul has wowed Jack since the boy started watching him on television three years ago. "I liked how he threw the alley-oops and everything and his ballhandling and his great vision," said Jack, 13.