Q Dawg, Vietnam, the Final 4 and A Sense of Duty

Goin' to the Final 4.

As in the men's national college basketball championship in San Antonio this weekend: Kansas, UCLA, North Carolina and Memphis.

Some folks consider it the premier sporting event in America because it embodies so many basic American values: tribes; underdogs; passion; heartbreak; joy; teamwork; fun.

I've been to the Super Bowl. To the Summer Olympic Games. To the national championship college football game. To NBA playoff games. But never to my favorite sports event of all--the Final 4.

Now I'm goin'....

The story behind the trip is purdy cool.

It's all because of one man: Quang Pham.

 www.qxpham.com

He and I met after the Persian Gulf War. He was a Marine helicopter pilot (the first Vietnamese-American to become a U.S. Marine Corps aviator) In Saudi, Kuwait and Iraq and later in Somalia; I was reporting on a book about the war. We hit it off immediately because we shared two abiding interests--the war in Vietnam and basketball.

Quang, his mother and sisters fled Saigon as refugees in 1975 when the communists took over the country. I'd been a soldier there a few years earlier.

He graduated from UCLA, enlisted in the Marines, served seven years active duty and got out as a major in the Reserve. He played high school basketball in Oxnard, intramurals on the Westwood campus and pickup games until his early 40s, finally retiring so he could train for a marathon. I played in high school, college and everywhere I lived around the world.

(His teammates have called him "Q Dawg," and he imagines himself as the answer--at 5-foot-8--to UCLA's shooting guard problems. With the ball, he has no conscience; he's a veritable Black Hole on the court--once the ball gets into his hands, it disappears until it's launched rimward. Since I like to pass and rebound, he loved playing with me.)

After we met in 1991, Quang told me he wanted to write a memoir about his dad and himself. His father, a pilot in the South Vietnamese Air Force, put his family on a C-130 escape flight, stayed behind and spent 12 years in the communists' reeducation camps. A helluva tale of courage and perseverance. Quang's bootstrapping yarn--from 10-year-old refugee whose only English was "Coke" and "GI" to UCLA graduate in economics to respected Marine aviator to CEO of his own multimillion-dollar online startup--was clearly worth telling as well.

So Q started to write.

I can't begin to remember how many versions, how many false starts, he abandoned over the next decade. I do know that I read 'em all, editing for technical stuff, offering advice on style stuff and trying overall to keep encouraging his project.

In 1993 I wrote a story about Quang and his father finally coming together at Tustin Air Station in Southern California.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/930308/archive_014767.htm 

All during the '90s, we'd meet for pickup basketball games, and the next-to-last full-court game I ever played, I played with Quang (the last one was with my son Nao).

In late 2003 and for most of 2004, he left his executive job; his wife Shannon supported his decision to finally complete the manuscript. All year long, he'd fax me pages, I'd edit and either ship 'em back or hand 'em to him on some mutually convenient street corner and make the handover.

 I believed in his mission, in his quest, in his vision, in his story. And he trusted me enough to show me the raw first drafts of his history and that of his father. Some of it was heroic. Some of it was painful. All of it was honest.

The result: in 2005 Random House published "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey." It was nominated for a Pulitzer and was a finalist for a literary prize; it's gone through two printings.

www.asenseofduty.com

All during the writing/editing process, he kept offering to pay me. Nope, I said, I believe in what you're doing. He finally gave up. "OK, if KU (where I went to grad school) and UCLA ever make it to the Final 4 together, we're going--on me!"

Now THAT was something I could accept.

So KU and UCLA are in the Final 4. And Q Dawg and I are goin'.

All the people I've told about this since Sunday, when Kansas sent my blood pressure into the ionosphere before finally beating Davidson by 2, have said the same thing: "Hey, he's a man of his word."

I know that.

He's got a sense of duty.

And, as he'd hasten to add, four years of eligibility in case the Bruins need him this weekend.