Marcus Smart on Celtics Media Day. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
BOSTON (WBZ-AM) -- Celtics reserve and fan-favorite Marcus Smart did something Saturday no 24-year-old should have to do. He buried his mother, who tragically passed last week after a fight with a rare form of bone marrow cancer. Smart previously lost a brother to cancer in 2004.
C's held Media Day yesterday on the eve of today's start of training camp, and Smart explained what basketball means to him as he deals with tragedy off the court.
"I look at basketball as like a storm, but it's the eye of a storm," he said. "The calmest place of it is to be right in the middle, the eye of it. That's what basketball is for me, it's my eye. While everything else around me is going on and destruction and things like that, it keeps me calm. That's probably why I go out and you see me dive on the floor, or take a charge, or throw my body this way and give it everything I have, because I know and understand that any day could be my last day--and if it was, would I be proud of what I've accomplished in that time here?"
Smart said he was touched Wyc Grousbeck, Danny Ainge, Brad Stevens, and some of his teammates took time from their schedules to attend his mother's funeral in Texas.
WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Adam Kaufman (@AdamMKaufman) reports