Every night, a 6-year-old Terry Rozier slept in a tote bag filled with his clothes, refusing to unpack because he wanted to go home.

He hated his grandmother. He hated living with her and he wanted to be back with his mother.

“It was like somebody took my heart,” Gina Tucker, his mother, said. “It was so hard for both of us.”

Rozier was born in Youngstown, Ohio, but his mother had to give his custody to her mother when he was 6 because his criminal father’s enemies made threats on Rozier’s life.

Rozier grew up in a dangerous area, misbehaved as child and lacked a male influence in his life, but persevered through it all. Now, he’s the leading scorer for a fourth-seeded Louisville (26-8, 12-6 Atlantic Coast) that’s facing No. 8 seed North Carolina State (22-13, 10-8) in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament at 7:37 p.m. in the Carrier Dome on Friday.

“I’m a tough kid,” Rozier said. “I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been through a lot.”

Tucker was 19 when she had Rozier, the second of her three children. But a month after his birth, his father was sent to prison, leaving her to raise him alone.

Rozier was a hyper child, always running around the house. Soup cans and rolled up socks were substituted for basketballs and milk crates stood in as nets.

“He would light my day up,” Tucker said. “But at the same time I would cry because it was just overwhelming for me.”

She would often call her brother or a friend to help handle a young Rozier and bring a male influence in his life. One day, Tucker was so upset with her son that she gathered all of his toys and game systems into a trash bag and made him watch as she threw them out.

When Rozier was about 5, his father was released from prison and he got to spend time with him for the first time in his life. But after nine months, Terry Rozier Sr. was sent to prison again for his role in a robbery and kidnapping in 2003.

“I blamed him for Terry having a behavioral problem and being difficult,” Tucker said. “For not being there to help me with this child that I can’t really control at times.”

Rozier had not only lost his father again, but was threatened because of his father’s actions.

Tucker packed her son’s bags and gave custody of him to her mother, Amanda Tucker, who lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Rozier cried, screamed and lashed out at his grandmother. He thought she was the reason he was taken from his home. Amanda Tucker would often have to pin him to the ground until he calmed down.

Friends told her to send Rozier to a juvenile detention center or a foster home, but she refused.

“‘I don’t care how much you dislike me, I love you and you cannot do nothing to make me send you back to Youngstown,’” Amanda Tucker recalls telling Rozier.

“‘You’re going realize, one day, how much I love you.’”

Four years later, when Rozier was 10, that day came.

He was back in Youngstown for Thanksgiving. His mother was at a bar when someone told her that someone was going to shoot up her house, where Amanda Tucker and eight of her grandchildren were, and throw Molotov cocktails into it.

Amanda Tucker took her grandchildren into a room in the back of the house and cried with them, preparing to throw them out of the window to escape if anything happened.

Nothing did, but for the first time since Rozier was forced to move in with his grandmother, he told her loved her.

“I never thought I could hear those words from him,” Amanda Tucker said.

At 14, Rozier got his mother and grandmother’s names tattooed on his forearms, and later followed that up with a tattoo of his father’s face with the word “motivation” above it.

Louisville was his dream school, but he had to attend Hargrave Military Academy for a post-graduate year because of academics. The discipline and structure were a shock.

“I wrote him a letter and I told him if you stop playing basketball right now, I’m going to always love you,” Gina Tucker said.

He didn’t and when Rozier finally made it to Louisville, he donned the No. 0, symbolizing a fresh start from everything in his past.

A boy that once resented his own grandmother and was too much for his family to handle has grown into the leader of a Division I basketball team making an NCAA tournament run.

“Sometimes I’m at the games and I feel teary eyed, not because I’m sad, but just happy and excited for him,” Gina Tucker said. “All of his dreams are just coming true.”

Published on March 27, 2015 at 12:29 am

Contact Jon: jrmettus@syr.edu | @jmettus