The Thrashers are no more. A franchise has come and gone, vanished almost without a trace — only one season with more wins than losses, one Southeast Division title and not a single postseason victory.
Leaving, it would seem, what typically remains after the ice melts: Nothing.
If there is to be a legacy to the Thrashers’ 11-year run, it will have to be written by those hardy few who loved them despite their flaws. Proof that this short-lived team served any purpose at all must come from the spectators’ side of the glass.
Brandi Shaw and Andy Freeman were Thrashers fans of the first rank — and they have the scars to prove it.
Shaw’s is a short, straight line red slash, running from breast bone to belly button. It marks where the transplant team went in and plucked one of her kidneys for someone who was a stranger to her only a few months earlier.
Freeman’s runs horizontally, half a belly long — “a shark bite” as Shaw calls it. That is only one reminder of the gift he received nearly five years ago.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my transplant and how I got it — that means meeting the Shaws and that means Thrashers hockey,” Freeman said.
Online plea pays off
Theirs was a remarkable tale leading into the 2006-07 season, one the teamed seized on back in the days when it was still trying to market a love of pro hockey in the hub of the American South.
Freeman was a Thrashers fan web site regular who began signing off his entries with a curious, almost whimsical, request: “Does anybody have an extra kidney they can give me?” A medication he had been taking for colitis had caused his kidneys to fail in late 2004, leaving him tethered to the continual cycle of dialysis while awaiting a transplant.
Shaw often eavesdropped on the back-and-forth between the most fervent Thrashers fans online, leaving it to her husband, Doug, to actually contribute to the conversation. Through him, Brandi responded. To her husband’s amazement, she wanted to look into helping Freeman.
The Shaws met Freeman and his wife during the first intermission of a Thrashers game in April 2006. Shaw thanked Brandi for her concern, thanked her for being willing to take a blood test to see if they were a match. And he thought little more of it — 20 others had taken that test, and all had been rejected.
But four months later, the two were being wheeled into surgery at Piedmont Hospital. A transplant can be performed, Freeman said, with a match of three out of six blood factors between donor and recipient. Shaw and Freeman matched on all six. Even Doug Shaw, who would watch his wife go into a risky surgery for the sake of a stranger, couldn’t argue with that. “It was meant to be; you don’t fight fate,” he said.
By the early stages of the next season, everyone was back on their feet and back at the game. Through chatter on the blogs and through newspaper and television accounts, word spread about Shaw’s extraordinary gift to a fellow hockey fan. She was recognized in the stands as a celebrity. The team treated them all to a tour of its practice facility, led by defenseman Garnet Exelby. Even after Exelby was traded to Toronto, when he returned to play against his old team, he’d always recognize the Shaws before the game by banging on the glass with his stick and waving in their direction.
They had all come out of it healthy and happy — friends and fans forever.
But wait. There’s more. Much more.
The difficult search for something lasting and worthwhile in this whole Thrashers experience leads back to the Shaws and the Freemans.
New generation of fans
Lives have been fundamentally changed by hockey, and that is something to be remembered.
If there had never been the Thrashers, maybe there never would have been a Bryson Shaw Freeman.
Andy and Emily Freeman’s little boy is almost 3 years old now. His middle name is borrowed from the family who gave his daddy an organ. Long after a little boy’s disappointment over the relocation of his favorite hockey team fades, he’ll know what the sport meant to his father.
If there is ever a doubt, Andy can show his boy the so-called “ambigram” tattoo on his right arm. It reads “hockey” one way, and “kidney” when held upside down.
“I wanted to be a hands-on dad and, while I was on dialysis, obviously I couldn’t be,” said Freeman, 40, the director of government affairs for the Georgia Pharmacy Association. “I wouldn’t have my son if the transplant hadn’t happened.”
The friendship between the Freemans and the Shaws has been close since the transplant. “We may share a kidney,” Brandi said, “but there are times I think Andy and my husband share a brain.”
That friendship has only deepened since the arrival of Bryson. Shopping for a good school district, the Freemans moved from Austell to Powder Springs.
They are only about five miles from the Shaw home in Dallas. That proximity was a big selling point.
The donor speaks now of what she got out of the deal.
“I got friends out of it,” Brandi said. “I got Bryson out of it — even though he’s not ours, we always jokes he’s our son, too [her two daughters dote on the boy like a little brother, she said].
“The team may go away, but we’re always going to have that. And I got a whole career change out of it.”
New life for donor
A pre-K teacher before the transplant, Brandi, 35, had been contemplating a change for some time. The experience of the transplant gave her a clear direction. She will finish her nursing classes this month.
She knew she had made the right choice when, during her training, she came across a patient awaiting a kidney transplant. “He had kind of given up,” Brandi said. “I told him that I knew it was hard waiting, but that he had to fight. I told him my story. There was kind of a transformation with him, a realization that, if a complete stranger could do that, maybe it would work out for him.”
The Thrashers were always special to these two families, beyond the ripple effects of the transplant. The Shaws celebrated their 10th anniversary at Philips, the team presenting Brandi with flowers to mark the occasion. When Marian Hossa had a hat trick that night, she flung her flowers over the boards and onto the ice.
“My wife and I don’t have a tremendous amount of things in common in terms of hobbies,” said Doug Shaw. “Hockey was one of those few things that we really loved to do together. Hockey completely changed our relationship and our marriage for the better.”
A room of the Freeman’s new home is splashed in Thrashers hues and adorned with team posters, signed memorabilia and even a coffee table made of hockey sticks. “I’ve already asked my wife, ‘Do I have to change the color of the room now?’” he said.
Flowers wilt and rooms can be repainted. Guys like Jeff Odgers, the Thrashers grizzled first enforcer, have come and gone. But he was a silk-suit dandy compared to the tough lady who gave a kidney to the cause. Shaw’s gift will last a lot longer than 11 years, doctors tell Freeman.
“I don’t think I could have done what she did,” Freeman said. “I’m enough of a realist to say there are family members I don’t know if I could have given a kidney to. For a complete stranger to do that — I still don’t understand it.”
In retrospect, Shaw explains, “In the long run, I think it was something I was supposed to do. It’s one of those mysteries of the universe, why it worked out the way it did, why we were introduced the way we were.”
It can never be said the Thrashers did not help broker at least one magical connection before skipping town.
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