Six hours before he was drafted by the Nuggets on Thursday, Monte Morris drove away from all the nerves and sat down with his grandmother.
At the Sunset Hills Cemetery in Flint, Mich., where Shirley Faye Morris was laid to rest almost two years ago to the day, Monte was alone only in the physical sense. The matriarch of his family was there, too. He could feel her with him, just like he always has.
So the grandson talked to his grandma about the basketball dream that began growing all those years earlier, when he was an audacious fourth grader who walked up to the most famous basketball coach in Michigan and told him to remember the name Monte Morris.