Brooklynne.

In 1995 his mother called him up and told him that if he did not take his brother in, she was going to lose him. Her name is Elaine. The brother is Chuckie, the oldest of them. Here is where Muggsy Bogues was when that phone rang. He is 5 foot 3, and no shorter man has ever played in the NBA. He had just had surgery on his left knee and it had cost him most of the season. His marriage was coming apart at the same time. He was 30 years old and nothing in his own life was working. Chuckie had been using since he was about 15. He got arrested in 1993. By 1995 he was deep into cocaine. Back in the 1980s he had fallen off a wall into Baltimore's Inner Harbor while he was high and nearly did not come back out of the water. So Bogues brought him to Charlotte and put him in the guest room. Chuckie would not go to a treatment center. He refused. Which meant the withdrawal happened in his little brother's house, with no staff and no doctors and nobody to call. The first six months were shaking and vomiting and screaming. Bogues hid the alcohol in the house. He fed him. He sat with him. He has said there were stretches where he was not sure any of it was doing anything at all. Here is how he describes that whole year. "That was my job; that was my brother." Eventually Chuckie said this to him. "I ain't gonna mess up on you." Then Bogues started bringing him along. To practices. To games. Chuckie sat there and watched his brother work. The next season the Charlotte Hornets won 54 games and lost 28, which is still the best record in the history of that franchise. Chuckie has not touched a hard drug since. About ten years ago he had a stroke that took some of his short term memory and his balance. He still turns up and yells louder than anybody in the building. At a night they held for Muggsy in 2018, this is what Chuckie hollered. "MY BIG LITTLE BROTHER!" Be straight about two things. Chuckie still drinks some days, so this is not a clean ending anybody should pretend it is. And detoxing a person in a spare bedroom with no medical help is genuinely dangerous and is not a thing to copy, however it turned out here. On February 11 the Hornets are going to hang his number 1 in the rafters. He is the franchise leader in assists, steals and minutes, and he spent ten of his fourteen seasons there. He was there from the first season the team existed. Chuckie plans to be in the building. He has been at the rest of them.