No one in Charlotte will feel the loss of the Hornets more than Trey and Kerstie Phills, whose father was the team's captain when he was killed in a car crash two years ago.
Five-year-old Trey and Kerstie, 3, have stayed close to the National Basketball Association team since Bobby Phills died on Jan. 12, 2000, while racing his car near Charlotte Coliseum.
PHOTO: AFP
Some of the players and coaches have almost become surrogate fathers. But now the team is moving to New Orleans, and many stories about their father are going with them.
"It's going to have a dramatic effect on my kids," Kendall Phills, Bobby's widow, said Thursday night before the Hornets' playoff game against New Jersey in Charlotte. "For Trey, it's like a part of his dad is going. And my daughter, she never got the chance to know her dad. The only thing she associated with him is the Charlotte Hornets."
The Hornets received final approval from the league Friday to move to New Orleans. The team's owners said they're losing too much money in Charlotte, where voters refused to fund a new arena.
Although Kendall Phills didn't allow her son to attend Thursday's game because it was a school night, Trey is no stranger to the Hornets' locker room. He often attends games, and sometimes participates in on-court skits with the team's mascot, Hugo the Hornet.
The Phills family is closest with Hornets coach Paul Silas and guard David Wesley, who was there when police pulled his best friend's body from his crumpled Porsche. According to police, the teammates were racing when Phills lost control of his car.
"It's been good for Trey to be around the guys," Silas said. "This is all he knows. He didn't really understand who Bobby was, but he knew he was a basketball player. It's too bad it has to end for him. It's going to hurt for a while, I'm sure."
The Hornets applied to move in January, though several NBA owners were skeptical whether New Orleans -- which will be the league's smallest market -- could support a franchise. Last month, however, when it became apparent the team was going to move, Kendall Phills said she broke the news to her son.
"I think he's in denial," she said. "Trey told me that his classmates said they don't have enough money and they can't go."
Wesley has tried his best to help the Phills family cope with the tragedy.
He sometimes takes Trey to the park, where he'll answer any questions the boy might have about his father. Wesley also recently accompanied Trey to his grammar school, where the students were supposed to bring their grandparents.
Not being able to pal around with the players won't be easy for Trey, Wesley said.
"It's fun for him," he said. ``It's a tie to his dad." Kendall Phills also said it's important for her son to interact with the players. Even though she can tell stories about her husband, there's a part of him that even she never knew.
"Now they can know the locker-room Bobby," she said.
"Bobby joked all the time, but it's a different type of humor with the guys."
The team's move to New Orleans, where Kendall and Bobby Phills grew up, won't end the family's association with the Hornets. Kendall Phills said she and her children will visit Louisiana and the Hornets players after training camp opens in October.
"The team, like Bobby, is gone but won't be forgotten," she said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B