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  Bob Lutz  

Grandma ready for football

This column includes an element of football; but it is secondary to family, roots and a very sick grandmother.

Seven years ago, LaVona Spencer, who for 32 years was on the faculty at Wichita State, was told she had five years to live because of bone marrow cancer. Well, she's still alive and, at 74, as vibrant as ever.

She has a hearty laugh and a fertile mind, but she knows her time is limited.

Spencer still lives in the same northeast Wichita house in which she raised four children. One of them, Kirsten Spencer-Joyer, lives with her husband, Jack, and their three sons in Tampa, Fla.

This is where football enters the story.

Kamran and Hunter, the two oldest kids, are players. Kamran, a junior, was as high as a second-team All-Class 5A offensive lineman at Wesley Chapel High. He is 6-foot-3, 325 pounds and he runs a 5.25 40-yard dash. Tennessee and South Carolina have made scholarship offers. Florida and Notre Dame have made overtures.

Hunter is a freshman and just a couple of days ago he bench pressed 415 pounds during a weightlifting competition. He is 5-11, 240 pounds and rushed for 700 yards for Wesley Chapel in 2007.

Their grandmother has never seen them play. And she probably doesn't have much time. It's not possible for her now to get to Florida.

So her family might come to her.

Spencer-Joyer said she and her husband are contemplating a move back to Wichita (she graduated from Heights in 1983) this summer. Just so happens they'll bring with them two top-grade football prospects.

"The likelihood of us coming back there is pretty good," said Spencer-Joyer, an assistant principal at Thomas E. Weightman Middle School in Wesley Chapel, Fla. "It would be a great present to my mother if she got to see her two grandsons play football. We want to be close to her."

I can almost feel football coaches in the City League and the surrounding area licking their lips. Calm down, fellas. It's not quite a done deal.

But if the Joyers move to Wichita, chances are the two oldest boys -- 6-year-old Chancellor is the youngest -- will go to Heights.

"My husband and I were talking about the possibilities just the other day," Spencer-Joyer said. "Heights is my alma mater, so of course I would love for my kids to go there."

It's at this point that Rick Wheeler, the football coach at Heights, is scurrying to find out anything he can about the Joyer brothers.

In this scenario, not only would the Joyer brothers move to Wichita and enroll at Heights, but they would look seriously at any offers from Kansas or Kansas State.

"Kamran is really the one who brought up this whole idea of moving back," Spencer-Joyer said. "He's been saying for the longest time how cool it would be to get back to where we came from. He was so little when we left Kansas and he's talked about going back and playing ball ever since. I think he's a Midwesterner at heart."

Spencer-Joyer said both of her boys are low key and devoted to family. They love their grandmother, she said, and would love to get a chance to play games she could watch.

Grandma would like that, too. "I'm so excited about it," she said. "When I was more well, I used to go to Florida and spend the holidays with them. But I never got a chance to see those boys play football. And it's been breaking my heart."

She is so proud of her grandkids and not only because they're big-time football prospects.

"They're good kids, very good kids," grandma said. "I know grandparents always say how proud they are of their grandchildren. But they've never been a problem."

Both Kamran and Hunter are good students. Kamran has already met NCAA qualifications, his mother said, and will graduate from high school in December.

"My kids are so quiet and unassuming," Spencer-Joyer said. "But when Kamran steps on the football field, he's an absolute beast."

Their father, a former junior college football player, is a stay-at-home dad. He's been working with the boys since they were small. They haven't been small now for a long, long time.

"His whole focus has been those boys," Spencer-Joyer said. "They've been doing all these push-ups since they were 10 years old. Our neighbors used to laugh because (Jack) would sit in the car, put it in neutral, and have the kids pushing the car up and down the street, time after time. I kept worrying somebody was going to call child protective services, but nobody ever did."

At least partially because of that training, Kamran has bench-pressed 185 pounds 40 times and leg pressed 1,000 pounds.

"He's one of the best football players in our state," Wesley Chapel coach John Castelamare said. "There are many, many colleges looking at him. And his little brother is just as strong. It runs in the family."

One of their family members, though, is losing her strength. The long battle with cancer is taking its toll. There's only so much more time.

"When my mother calls me in the middle of the night and she's in pain or she's scared, I can't do anything about it," Spencer-Joyer said.

Grandma is counting the days until her daughter, her son-in-law and her three grandsons arrive in Wichita. What she anticipates the most is watching those boys play football.

"I think that might add six or eight months to my life," she said.

Eagle sports columnist Bob Lutz co-hosts "Sports Daily" from 9-11 a.m. weekdays on KFH, 1240-AM and 98.7-FM. Reach him at 316-268-6597 or blutz@wichitaeagle.com.