Coach's corner: Pine tells 'Legend of Patrick Grass'
By Dale Pine, Special to the Journal
PINE RIDGE - I first met Patrick Grass in the summer of 1995, his older brother Wesley was a Pine Ridge High school cross country runner. Patrick wasn't even 4-foot-6 or 75 pounds, he was just a little brother who looked up to his older brother and his cousins from the Igloo district in Pine Ridge, named after the houses that were moved into the neighborhood from Igloo, S.D., after the ammunition depot closed years ago. It's a tough neighborhood to grow up in, but the boys from the Igloo's were known to be good runners.
The 1994 Pine Ridge boys team finished third in the state with a bunch of young runners from this area. They were Patrick's cousins, his brothers and neighbors. The following three years, 95-96-97 they became the State "A" champs with great running teams. These teams never had an individual champion, just a bunch of tough underprivileged kids looking to become the best runners in South Dakota. So if you wanted to be known in Pine Ridge, which was known as a basketball town, running was now it, and a long-time Lakota tradition.

During the summer, the local high school runners would gather up for fun runs and road races. To get in shape, yes, but more for the free T-shirts and drinks and maybe a sweatshirt for the winner. It was then that I met this young boy, hanging on the side of the van asking if he could go to the run, too. The boys called him PW or Pdubbs, Wes' lil brother. I knew they had a division for younger kids and if he wanted to run I figured, why not? Jump in Pdubbs, the very small fourth- or fifth-grader jumped in with a smile from ear to ear.

When we got to the race the high school boys entered the 5K race, I told Pdubbs that the little kids run the 2000 meter race. He told me he wanted to run with the big guys, the champs, so I said OK, knowing he wouldn't be able to finish and wouldn't bug me anymore to go on runs and practices or hanging on the side of the van. I went to the finish line after the race started with my stop watch in hand to see how the high boys would finish and how fast. The first two runners were high school boys from the team who had placed high at state the previous year followed by another all-state runner who was working hard because a little kid was right on his tail, it was Pdubbs.

He finished fourth in the 5K, beating the other 45 runners including three boys off the state championship team. Did he run all the way, I asked with my first question to Doug Pourier, who was a member of three State "A" championship teams and later became a Junior College All American. Doug said that Pdubbs ran the whole thing and he had to work hard to stay ahead of him. From that day on I had my eye on Pdubbs or Patrick Grass.

He joined the elementary cross country team and did well, but he would always ask to run with us, the state champs. He said the little guys weren't going far enough or fast enough. We took him to many meets where they had elementary divisions and Patrick would destroy the competition while only being half the size of the other elementary kids. He got so fast that Pine Ridge Reservations Big Foot Conference did not want him running against the other kids and even went as far as to change the rules so he couldn't compete. He ran in the championship one year as a sixth-grader and beat all seventh- and eighth-graders, and coaches complained - so he was asked to give back his medal. He only wanted to know if he still won and we told him, 'You sure did.'

In 1998, I wasn't the coach of Pine Ridge, but my assistant of many years took over, he wanted to do well at state and he thought he should get Pdubbs moved up to seventh-grade, of course he didn't but that was the potential you could see in the sixth-grade.

The following year, 1999, he became a seventh-grader at Pine Ridge Elementary school and joined the high school team. It was hard to find a uniform that wouldn't fall off him. He wasn't the best runner that year but he did bypass the junior varsity team and did well in all his meets finishing in eighth place at the state meet as a member of the State "A" team champions. Not bad for a scrawny undersized runner who was still not even a teenager.

The following year, as an eighth grader, he continued to do well, although still obscure as running goes. But at the state meet in 2000, Patrick beat some very experienced and older runners while picking up his first state championship. The name Patrick Grass was starting to become a household name in Pine Ridge.

He traveled after being chosen by Wings of America, a non profit group seeking to help Native Americans through running programs. This program would send him to Rhode Island, Portland, Oregon, Houston, Texas, Santa Fe and numerous trips to Kenosha, Wis., for the Footlocker Midwest Regional. All throughout his illustrious high school career. All in the name of running.

In 2001, Patrick became a high school freshman and already a state champion and an outstanding runner. He didn't succeed very well in the classroom his freshman year. He had a learning disability and was in a Student Assistance Program with an Individual Education Plan, but coming from a self-contained classroom to changing individual classes, he wasn't succeeding, which caused him to suffer in school. He won most of his meets that year, but was beaten in the state championships - held for the first time in Rapid City - by the previous year's runner-up and a previous state champion, Patrick finished third. He found out he couldn't kick with big boys.

In 2002, he came back to school running tougher than ever before working hard in the classroom and running better than ever. He worked on his kick and worked hard to get separation in a race, so it would not come down to a kick. Hardly a runner in South Dakota could come near him; he won his second state championship while leading his Pine Ridge Thorpe team to another state team championship. He then competed in the freshmen and sophomore race at the Footlocker Midwest Regional where he finished in the top 10.

Then, after winning the state AAU meet, he competed in Ames, Iowa, at the National AAU meet where he placed fifth, earning him All-American honors. He was then asked by Billy Mills, former U.S. Olympic 10,000-meters champion, to join a national native cross country team which took him to Houston, where he competed and helped his team win the national cross country title.

In 2003, Pdubbs continued his dominance in high school cross country, by now he was known throughout the state and was becoming a hero in his village of Pine Ridge for the good things he was doing for his school, town and all Indian people. He again won the state meet with the fastest time in all classes. Again he led his team to victory. By now, everybody knew Patrick Grass.

He is still very quiet and shy, never bragging or boisterous or even bothering to keep all the clippings about himself and his team from many local newspapers.

In the Spring of 2004, Patrick decides finally that track will help him with his distance running, he never liked waiting around all day to race or running in circles and running against only a few competitors, but he would give it a try. He wasn't doing well or succeeding. Everyone whom he had beaten was now running by him, he couldn't run. He didn't feel well. He started missing school. Everything was going wrong.

He decided he would still give it a try, but he didn't show up for the bus to go to the Regional meet, which qualifies you for the state meet.

Why?

Patrick was sick, but he didn't know how or why or what was going on with his body. His mother said he was not feeling well and was getting depressed; he couldn't sleep well.

What was the problem?

His mom said she would take him to the doctor. He showed up at the Pine Ridge High School graduation ceremony after one of his teammates went after him as he was to get the "Athlete of the Year Award". He accepted the award, not looking well or speaking to anyone. What happened to our Pdubbs?

Patrick's mother called me a week after school was out and told me that Patrick was taken to Rapid City to the hospital from the Pine Ridge Hospital where he was being treated for having seizures while sleeping. I made it a point to visit right away. Patrick didn't know me, he couldn't talk, a kind of psychosis had entered his body and the doctors were doing tests, trying to find out what had happened and what they could do to help him. After very slowly trying different medicines and working with him, Patrick would start recovering, but it was a very slow process. The first week he could remember only certain things he would repeat whatever was told to him. The second week he started answering yes and no questions. After a month-long stay in the hospital, he was released to go home with several medications that they would help the seizures from reoccurring, and with instructions to go to the local clinic for checkups.

He was in tough shape. He had gained 20 pounds in the hospital and hadn't run well since the cross country season almost nine months ago. The medications made him feel lazy and lackluster. He was still a three-time state champion, I pondered, but would he be able to run again? ... Would he want to? ... Should he run?

A few weeks later, he stopped by and said he would like to try to run again. He started out slowly, running very short distances. He never mentioned quitting. He said a few times that he wasn't running well. I knew this and encouraged him only to do his best and what he felt comfortable with. After a while he was back to running twice a day, trying to lose weight and regain what he had lost. He decided to try and run himself back into shape.

Patrick entered the cross country season with no summer mileage base. The season began and Patrick was running a minute slower per mile, putting him back in the pack with the mediocre runners. You could hear kids talking about how they beat Patrick Grass and being happy. Other runners and caring coaches would ask about him wonder if he was OK. He would always answer that he was fine and I answered that he just out of shape. Finally after placing as far back as 30th place in a few meets. I told a few people that he had been sick, they seemed concerned, and every meet the coaches and athletes would encourage him, especially runners and coaches from Hot Springs, Custer, Lead, Stevens and others, even parents of kids from others teams, his competition. This gave him more confidence to keep working and trying, which he did.

The season is now over and Patrick did improve over the season, placing 12th in the state meet. He says he still wants to improve even more and get it back. He said he wants to run in the Footlocker Midwest Regional Meet again. He can still run track this spring, he once ran an indoor meet unattached in Chadron and placed, it was a college meet. It's a long uphill climb to be the runner he once was, but he does have the desire and determination. He is on track to graduate this spring, he was homecoming royalty for the school a few weeks ago. Even his grades are improving.

Patrick Grass has done so much with his running for the school and community. He made his teammates better, he made the community proud. His speed, strength and stamina are what made him a great runner, along with his big heart. Now they are things that will make him into a healthy productive young man. His sickness is demanding, challenging, and unpredictable just like running. But he plans to succeed.

If you measure success with individual wins, you probably won't be successful. A few runners quit if they can't be the best runner. They don't realize that every member is important. The real winners are the runners who don't always come in the first but work on improving and they never quit.

There are a few three-time state champions in South Dakota, a very few. I don't know if there has or will be ever again a runner who has medaled in six state cross country meets. Patrick Grass should be an inspiration to all high school athletes. Is he a high school cross country legend? You decide ... but Patrick Grass never quit!

Dale Pine is currently the cross country coach for the Pine Ridge Thorpes.

Catching up with Patrick Grass
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

Runner fights to save his hero
Alex Wilson Pine, the second-fastest cross country runner at Pine Ridge High, refuses to give up on Patrick Grass, his best friend and uncle. He tries to get him to run again on reservation roads. He tries to make it like it was before, when Patrick would leave him in the dust.



BY COLLEEN KENNEY | Lincoln Journal Star

Fifteen-year-old Alex Wilson Pine walked into the hospital room, scared of what he'd see.

The doctors were saying his best friend and uncle, 17-year-old Patrick Grass, had had a seizure.
They didn't know why.

They didn't know if Patrick, one of the best high school distance runners in the nation, would come out of it.

Hey, Patrick, he remembers saying. How you feeling?

Patrick stared at him, his face blank. He tried to speak. A word came in a whisper.

Ruh... ruh... ruh...

He couldn't say it. Run.

Like most young runners on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Alex worships Patrick Grass, the all-American who's won three South Dakota cross-country titles. The junior who was just named Pine Ridge High's Male Athlete of the Year.

People say Patrick has run every road of the reservation at least once. They say he's trying to make running his ticket out so he won't become like his dad, Clifford Grass, who sits many days down the road in Whiteclay, drinking.

They say he'll get a scholarship. Go to college. Become the next Billy Mills, the Pine Ridge runner whose road led to Olympic glory decades ago.

Ale... Ale... Ale...

Patrick couldn't say it. Alex.

Alex could barely breathe. He tried to smile that June day as he looked at Patrick, who seemed content to sit forever and stare out the window.

Alex remembers telling Patrick they'd be running together soon, leaving everyone in their dust.

v v v

It was a bad batch of meth.

It was rat poisoning.

It was angel dust...

Rumors spread all summer. By early August, powwow time at Pine Ridge, it seemed everyone had heard variations of this one:

Did you hear Patrick Grass was drugged at a party? Now he's blanked out like a zombie.

Alex's biological mom, Patrick's oldest sister Lori Cottier, says a guy drinking with her one night claimed he saw it: Patrick left his beer on the table at a party near Wounded Knee. A guy dumped something in it, shook it. When Patrick drank it, he got dizzy and passed out.

Alex believes the rumors.

Strange stuff happens on the rez, he says, especially at Wounded Knee.

Alex tells about their cousin, Frances Spotted Elk. He's 25 now. Used to be a good student. A good distance runner, too. He was going to join the Army. Now he has a plate in his head and talks like he's in sixth grade. One night at a party, someone took a baseball bat to his head.

People at Wounded Knee say there's a woman who walks around town when she's back from the mental hospital. She lifts her skirt with no underwear on. She used to be beautiful, smart, a basketball player with a scholarship.

One night, they say, she went to the wrong party.

Athletes are worshipped here. But there's this other thing Alex has seen, too. People seem to keep pulling one another down. Like crabs in a basket.

They teach kids at Pine Ridge High the crabs-in-a-basket story:If one crab crawls too high, the others pull it back down.

Patrick's older brother doesn't know what to think. But the night of the seizure, Wes Cottier says, Patrick called from Wounded Knee, saying he was sick and needed a ride.

Wes and Lori stood outside the bedroom door the day Patrick told the track coach he was too sick to run at regionals.

Mom drank when she was pregnant with him, didn't she? Lori recalls Wes saying.

Yeah, she did.

Well, maybe that's what's making him act so strange now.

Wes, 27, was 10 when Patrick was born. Lori, 36, was 19.

Lori drank when she was pregnant. She knows what can happen.

Alex has something called fetal alcohol effects, a lesser form of fetal alcohol syndrome. He and Patrick have learning disabilities.

Patrick's mom doesn't believe the rumors. Rose Cottier thinks it's just a seizure, says he had them when he was a little kid.

Yes, she says, she drank when she was pregnant with Patrick. She drank a lot, she says, but only the last two months. Not as much as she did with some of her other kids.

Maybe that's why he has trouble keeping up with the other kids in school, she says.

v v v

Three weeks into his hospital stay, Patrick snaps out of it. He loses the blank look. He starts talking in sentences, smiling. The doctors are surprised.

But Alex sees he's not the same yet. Back home in Pine Ridge, he sits around all day watching TV.

One hot day in August, he's standing in front of a fan in the living room, lifting his black Nike shirt.

"Are you still taking your pills?" his mom asks.

"Kind of," he says.

One pill is for seizures. One is for depression. One for anxiety.

At powwow time, Alex tries to get Patrick to run, bike and swim with him in a triathlon that starts at the Billy Mills Center in the middle of town.

Patrick says he'll go, but that morning Patrick says he's not feeling well. Alex goes alone. He wins, even though the bike they give him is broken.

He wishes it'd be like before, when he couldn't keep up with Patrick.

Alex's adopted parents, Dale and Lyn Pine, coach cross country at Pine Ridge High. They are second parents to Patrick. On one visit to the hospital in Rapid City, Dale Pine walked out to the hallway and cried. Another kid lost.

But Alex says Patrick will run again. He picks Patrick up to lift weights at the school. He takes him out running in the country.

Patrick is out of shape. Alex pushes him, a little more each day.

Cross country season starts in a few weeks.

The rumor is Patrick Grass won't even go out for cross country. He won't win another state title. He won't even make it through the door the first day of school.

But by late August, Alex sees Patrick start crawling back up - 70 percent, 75 percent, 80 percent.

His legs and lungs start filling out. His words start to make sense. His humor starts to come back.

I'm going to catch up with you soon, Patrick tells Alex.

Running on a road on the state line south of town one day, Patrick runs past Alex and pushes him.

Cheater! Alex pretends he's mad.

But inside, he feels good as he tries to catch Patrick, who's looking back at him with a smile on his face.