NEW YORK ? Shortly before his eighth birthday, Dereck Lively II and his mother heard a loud thump coming from downstairs. This wasn?t the first time.
?Big Dereck,? Lively?s father, had just returned from another night out in Bellefonte, Pa. A loud and boisterous chef from Philadelphia, Big Dereck embodied his surname and possessed enough natural charm to woo Kathy Drysdale, a former Penn State basketball star. But their marriage was strained by Big Dereck?s cocaine and heroin habits, which caused him to disappear for days at a time.
That January night in 2012, Drysdale found Big Dereck lying on the living room floor, intoxicated but unhurt. His efforts to get clean never stuck, and she had become adept at working around his drug problem. Before going back to bed, Drysdale wrapped her 41-year-old husband in a blanket, rolled him on his side and propped his head on a pillow. He had called home earlier in the evening to say, ?I love you.?
Come morning, Drysdale and Lively both sensed something was wrong. Drysdale couldn?t hear her husband?s typically loud snoring, and Lively realized he was late for school when he awoke to unusual yells.
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?I went to the edge of the stairs and peered down,? Lively said during an interview before he was selected with the 12th pick in last month?s NBA draft. ?I see my father black and blue, lifeless on the floor. My mom was over him with her phone in her hand screaming for help to 911. It was too late. He had overdosed on heroin. You never get over it. Whenever you go in the living room, you feel it. The spot where he was on the floor was darker and the rug was a little flatter.?
Drysdale had felt for a pulse and attempted CPR as she waited for the paramedics and police officers to arrive. Big Dereck was taken out of the family?s home in a body bag, and Drysdale was left to answer the toughest question from her devastated son: ?Where?s Daddy??
Lively was too young to understand what had happened to his father, and he couldn?t have known that his mother soon would begin an excruciating eight-year battle with Hodgkin?s lymphoma. No one could have foreseen that the skinny boy, whose family seemed to be disintegrating, would become the country?s top-ranked high school basketball player, land a scholarship to Duke and join the Dallas Mavericks as a 19-year-old rookie.
Dereck Lively II shook hands with NBA commissioner Adam Silver after being drafted 12th overall by the Oklahoma City Thunder. He was later traded to the Dallas Mavericks. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
As that journey unfolded, Lively confronted a deep-seated guilt complex. His father was gone, his grandfather died soon after and now his mother was fighting for her life. None of his friends were dealing with anything like this, Lively reasoned, so it must be his fault. Those thoughts lingered for years, even after Drysdale found out in August that her cancer was in remission.
?Is it a miracle for her or am I a curse for bringing this upon my family?? Lively wondered. ?As a kid, you blame yourself. You?re overwhelmed and caught in your own mind. You don?t know how to talk to people about it.?
Losing Big Dereck
Lively?s memories of Big Dereck, all 6-foot-7 and 310 pounds of him, are rich and colorful, though not uniformly flattering. Big Dereck bopped around the house dancing to Shakira with corded headphones in his ears. He went all-out during snowball fights and joined the family for a rare summer trip to the Jersey Shore. He was a cutup who wanted to make his son smile, and once bought him gobs of candy when their neighbors had been too stingy with the treats on Halloween.
Big Dereck also had severe mood swings and occasionally would forget to pick up Lively from school. His struggles to manage stress prompted relapses. Lively doesn?t harbor a grudge, believing that his father ?did whatever he could to stay in my life for as long as possible.?
Drysdale met Big Dereck when she held a marketing role with the Philadelphia 76ers, and he was a bouncer at a bar she frequented after games. They were both tall, outgoing and quick to crack jokes. Grocery trips with their son devolved into fits of laughter, and Drysdale remembered how Big Dereck loved to declare: ?That?s my boy.?
But she also found herself losing to ?the demons? in the fight for her husband?s attention. The family lived modestly, in part because of the cost of Big Dereck?s drug habit. Five hundred dollars to pay someone back. A grand for a flimsy cover story. Drysdale gave what she could, only to find drug paraphernalia in his clothes and to raise Lively by herself during her husband?s extended absences.
?When you have an addict in your family, it financially drains you,? she said. ?You think the money is going somewhere else and it?s probably going to drugs. That?s when you learn, unfortunately. If I only knew not to do that, maybe [Big Dereck] would be here. If somebody came at the height of his struggles, they could say I was an enabler. I?m sure I was without really knowing.?
Drysdale, who took a marketing job at Penn State and moved the family to Bellefonte in 2011, focused her attention on raising Lively rather than trying to fix his father. Even when his parents argued, Lively sensed their mutual love. When Big Dereck died, Drysdale told Lively that ?his heart got too big for his body? before later revealing the truth.
Lacking the means to move out of their Bellefonte townhouse, Drysdale and Lively rearranged some of the living room furniture to cope with the trauma. Drysdale found her purpose as she grieved by making sure her son was back at school, surrounded by his friends and involved in sports.
From that point, she decided to be Lively?s mother, father, disciplinarian and best friend rolled into one. When her son wondered whether he would forget what Big Dereck looked like, she told him to look in the mirror. When he felt isolated in Bellefonte, which is 94 percent White and 1 percent Black, she talked to him about racial identity.
?I couldn?t lose hope because she?s depending on me and she couldn?t lose hope because I depended on her,? Lively said. ?We both knew that we needed each other. My way is to take the toughest route. The tragedy shaped who I am, and it made me realize that I?ve got to step up. The burden is going to break you down and feel like it?s going to kill you, but it?s going to make you a better person.?
A shocking diagnosis
Lively is a lithe 7-feet-1 and 230 pounds, making him a natural fit in the modern NBA. His first love was swimming, though, and his arms were so long that his knuckles would scrape the lane lines when he uncorked his butterfly stroke with dreams of becoming the next Michael Phelps.
While he initially resisted playing basketball because he saw it as his mother?s domain, growth spurts helped change his mind. Drysdale became the loudest voice in the gym, shouting instructions from the stands before later serving as his coach. She relished that quality time with her son but made sure not to display any favoritism, and she even tossed him out of practice for loafing to prove the point.
?I?m not mom,? she told him. ?I?m your coach. You can wait for mom in the car. He was shocked.?
Mother and son both run the court in transition and protect the rim on defense, but their games aren?t carbon copies. Drysdale was known for her sharp elbows and traditional post moves at Penn State, where she racked up more than 1,200 points and 700 rebounds before graduating in 1992. By contrast, Lively is a mobile above-the-rim finisher who doesn?t spent much time working on the block.
Dereck Lively II has averaged 7.7 points and 5.7 rebounds in three NBA Summer League games. (Candice Ward/Getty Images)
In 2014, Drysdale sat down with her 10-year-old son for a conversation that had nothing to do with duck-ins or box-outs: She had cancer and would begin chemotherapy and radiation treatment at Mount Nittany Medical Center in State College.
Friends and family shuttled Lively to and from school while Drysdale managed the brutal side effects of her treatment. Her hair fell out ? though it kept returning ? and she dealt with persistent nausea, a bad cough and neuropathy in her feet. Lively had a courtside seat to her pain, waking up at 3 a.m. to the sound of his mother vomiting in the bathroom toilet.
?That image doesn?t leave your mind,? he said. ?Chills down your spine.?
The initial rounds of chemotherapy proved unsuccessful, so Drysdale sought treatment at Penn State Cancer Institute in Hershey, went to Houston for a clinical trial and returned to Hershey to start a new drug regimen.
Radiation treatment had singed the upper lobe of her right lung to her chest wall, and a hole had developed where fluid was collecting. Drysdale was coughing up colored phlegm so regularly that she carried a spit bottle. Finally, she traveled to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where doctors advised surgery to remove a portion of her lung.
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Drysdale had the surgery on her lung in August 2021 and underwent full-body radiation to prepare for a stem cell transplant. Thankfully, doctors had located an excellent stem cell match, and she underwent the transplant procedure in April 2022. Drysdale spent the next month recovering the hospital and remained in New York for two additional months of follow-up appointments.
The total cost of her treatment exceeded $2 million, Drysdale estimated, but her employer-provided medical insurance prevented financial calamity.
The transplant caused Drysdale to drop 50 pounds: she lost her appetite, and her meals either wouldn?t stay down or would go right through her. Lively cringed while recalling that his mother, thin and pale, was often too weak and tired to watch a movie in bed.
?Giving up was never a part of anything my mom did,? he said. ?We fight.?
Some good news
As Drysdale traveled from hospital to hospital, Lively blossomed into a McDonald?s all-American who was ranked by ESPN as the No. 1 player in the 2022 high school class.
Knowing that small-town Bellefonte wasn?t an ideal springboard to the NBA, Drysdale encouraged Lively to consider Westtown School outside Philadelphia. Though he initially didn?t want to leave his friends, he was convinced to enroll at the boarding school at age 14.
Drysdale liked Westtown?s focus on academics and its diverse student body, and she thought Coach Seth Berger?s brutally honest style was perfect for her son. Lively found a home in the gym, as his high school years were largely consumed by the coronavirus pandemic. He modeled his game after Tyson Chandler, Evan Mobley and Anthony Davis, building a reputation as an unselfish, coachable and defensive-minded player.
?If my mom has gone through all this, I feel like I can walk on water and jump through fire,? Lively said. ?All I care about is winning, not how many points, rebounds, blocks or steals I have. My mom says all the time that I?m a protector. If you look at the court, the best thing I do is protect that rim.?
Dereck Lively II started 27 games as a freshman at Duke. (Chuck Burton/AP)
During the summer before Lively?s freshman season at Duke, Drysdale phoned him with the long-awaited news that she was in remission. They both broke down in tears. Mother and son had gone through so much together that they use the word ?We? when describing Drysdale?s health odyssey.
?You have moments where you think that enough bad s--- has happened in life, it?s time for some good stuff,? Drysdale said. ?Of course, we?re not thinking we?re invincible.?
Lively responded to Drysdale?s diagnosis with a surprise of his own: He had consulted with a real estate agent and invested some of his Name, Image & Likeness endorsement income into a new home for her in State College.
More than 10 years after Big Dereck?s death, Drysdale moved out of their townhouse and into a house that backed up onto a golf course and sported all the amenities the old place lacked: a fireplace, a dishwasher, an open kitchen and bedrooms big enough to fit a king-size bed. Previously, Lively had always scrunched into a double.
Lively also made arrangements to get a tombstone for Big Dereck, who is buried in a cemetery outside Philadelphia. The marker provided relief for Lively, who also tattooed his father?s name, birth date and death date on his left forearm. The words ?Time Heals All Wounds? are inked on his right arm.
A tattoo reminds Dereck Lively of what he has been through. (Ben Golliver/Washington Post)
An early-season calf injury limited Lively at Duke, but he returned to average 5.2 points, 5.4 rebounds and 2.4 blocks in a narrow offensive role. Dallas targeted him as a much-needed frontcourt defensive presence who could support all-star guards Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving. On draft night, Lively and his mother wore matching black and maroon outfits, and Drysdale fought through her foot neuropathy to slip into high heels for the first time in years.
Lively believes he can do more as a scorer and facilitator than he showed at Duke, and he hopes to enjoy a long career as an all-star-caliber player who is always the loudest voice on defense. Chandler, who anchored Dallas?s defense during its 2011 championship run, has already spent time working with the rookie.
Perseverance seems like an inadequate word to describe Lively?s childhood. Remarkably, he rarely confided in his high school teammates and coaches about his family?s challenges, and he never sought professional counseling to work through his grief, guilt and self-blame.
But Drysdale raised Lively to understand that nothing should be taboo, and they hope that speaking about their experiences with drug addiction, death and cancer will be comforting to other people facing similar challenges.
?The more you keep it inside, the more it?s going to wear on you and eat at you,? Lively said. ?Maybe you have a bad memory and your whole day?s ruined, or you?re crying in the middle of nowhere because you don?t know why it seems like the world?s falling on you. Everybody in the world needs to realize that someone out there has their back.?
While Drysdale is happy to let Jason Kidd handle the coaching these days, she can?t wait to cheer on Lively when he makes his NBA debut this fall. Big Dereck, she added, would have been her son?s biggest fan.
?The stuff that [Lively?s] had to go through at such an early age, you don?t wish on your worst enemy,? Drysdale said. ?When he says he thinks he?s the curse, that?s him thinking he had something to do with my cancer. But he?s why I?ve worked so hard to get through this and be here for these moments. For him to think he?s the curse, it?s the complete opposite. He?s the angel.?
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