Cage's Thanksgiving will Include Hoops and Family
11/21/2007 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Becky Hopf
UA Media Relations
TUSCALOOSA ?? Wednesday is traditionally the biggest travel day in America as millions hit the road to gather with family and friends for the Thanksgiving holidays.
Among those holiday travelers will be a car loaded with kids and food and making its trek from Indianapolis, Indiana to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It is a car that will contain the most precious of cargo to University of Alabama sophomore guard Greg Cage: his family. Cage can’t be home for the holidays because he and his Crimson Tide teammates have a home basketball game on Friday night against Southern Miss, so his family is coming to him on Wednesday to celebrate Thanksgiving together.
That a son loves his parents and siblings is not exactly news. But how this family came to be together is what holiday stories are all about. It is a story that began several years ago in Guatemala. Cage’s mother, Vickie, went there on a mission trip. Already a mother of two boys, Greg and his older brother Dan (who played basketball at Vanderbilt), Vickie fell in love with the children of Guatemala and longed to help the orphans and abandoned children she had encountered there on the mission trip.
When Vickie re-married a few years later, Greg and Dan added a stepsister, Brittany, to their household. Their lives were happy and full, yet still she kept the children of Guatemala in her heart, and she shared her dream of adopting one with her new husband, Phil Bastnagel. He concurred. One by one they came: first came Alex seven years ago, when Greg was in eighth grade. Mia came along when Greg was 16, and a year later Ramiro joined the expanding clan. Alex and Mia were both babies, about a year old, when they were adopted from Guatemala. Ramiro was 10.
Suddenly, for a teenager, life in his household was completely chaotic. Blissfully so, says Cage. And particularly special were the holidays.
“It just suddenly became more hectic, I guess,” said Cage who will graduate by the summer of 2008 within three years of enrolling at Alabama as a basketball player on an academic scholarship. “Most of the people in my family had all kind of grown up, so Thanksgiving had become more of an adult meal and an adult occasion. And then when we added all the little kids, it kind of went back a few years. All of a sudden we had all these kids running around, and, I don’t know, it just made it more fun. I think every Thanksgiving since they’ve been here, we’ve been kind of all over the place, especially with Dan and me in college and playing basketball. So it seems like every year we have Thanksgiving at a different place. This year we’ll have it here. Last year and I think the year before that we had it in Nashville with Dan. Ever since they’ve been here, it’s been kind of a roaming holiday, I guess, but the most important thing and the best thing is our family has been able to be together.”
Going from a family of two kids to three and now six has come in non-traditional stages for Cage and his siblings. Like anything that involves change, it has been a transition that took some initial adjustments for all. Greg and Dan were teenagers when they suddenly were in a household with babies. And Ramiro was 10 when he was adopted, joining a family with five other kids.
“I think everybody had different aspects that they had to deal with,” said Cage. “The older kids had to deal with having little kids, and some of the younger kids had to deal with coming to a new family. With Alex and Mia, they were so young when they came into our lives and family that they were basically babies or toddlers so I don’t think they really understood that much so it was probably pretty easy for them because that’s all they knew. I think Ramiro probably had a little more to overcome and to deal with since he was coming when he was older and he’d already been with a family. He was trying to and learning to get accustomed to our family when he’d already been in school and had already kind of adjusted to another family. So I think he faced the hardest adjustment of any of us.”
Cage’s family will arrive in Tuscaloosa on Wednesday evening, minus Dan who is playing professional basketball in Europe.
“My mom’s going to do all the cooking,” said Cage, smiling, when asked what he might be contributing to Thanksgiving dinner. “She made sure when she looked into coming down here that she could rent a condo that had a kitchen and all that stuff. They’ll get here Wednesday night then on Thursday, after practice, we’ll have a traditional Thanksgiving family meal: turkey, dressing, pie.”
Cage, who plans on going to Law School after graduation, says never could he imagine, or want to imagine his life without his three brothers and two sisters. He even took Spanish in high school to help the transition for his adopted siblings and to help them hold on to their Guatemalan heritage.
“I think they’ve made me more responsible,” said Cage of how his life has changed since his family expanded. “I had to take on some responsibilities when they came, and I also had to be conscious of the fact that they all looked up to me and that the things that I did didn’t just affect me but they affected the way my family looked at me, especially my little brothers. My little brothers are going to look up to me and try to emulate me, so I’ve got to be careful what kind of example I’m setting for them.”
Friday night at 7:00 p.m. CT, Cage will have his own fan club gathered at Alabama’s game, though injuries to his ankle prior to Alabama’s exhibition games’ trip to Canada at Labor Day and other nagging injuries have kept him off the court much of the fall. And while they’ll be cheering loudly for him and his Alabama teammates, so, too, inside, will Cage be cheering for his family.
“I’m really looking forward to them being here,” said the 2007 Academic All-Southeastern Conference player out of Indianapolis’s Bishop Chatard High School. “Just being able to see them and be with them is special. With school and basketball, I don’t get to see them very often, so anytime that we get to spend together, eating a meal or anything, just getting to talk to them and be with them is the biggest thing for me. Spending time with each other will be the best part of the holiday.”
