Posted: Sunday, September 23, 2007 7:00 pm
Some days this spring, Pine Ridge High School’s cross country team runs past a familiar face.
They wave, and Patrick Grass waves back.
“Things are going good,” says Patrick, one of the best runners in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation’s history and the subject of a Journal Star series this past week.
The three-time state champ’s struggled from June to January with his father’s alcoholism and a seizure that left him zombie-like. Still, he was determined to get off the reservation with a cross country scholarship.
Patrick will not graduate from high school this month. He stays around the house a lot, he says, but he’s not drinking like his dad, a familiar face in the Nebraska border town of Whiteclay.
He says he’s happy and might go back to school in the fall. His old coach, Dale Pine, doubts he will.
Patrick helped put out a fire in his family’s duplex a few weeks ago. After the fire, which was blamed on fault wiring in the stove, his family moved in with his grandmother, then into another house in Pine Ridge. They are waiting for their old house to be fixed.
— Colleen Kenney