LAS VEGAS — There are no Lombardi trophies to hoist for a foster child, when every day is a desperate fight to keep hope alive.
For so many of them, there is no escape from oftentimes tragic circumstances that leave children abandoned on a highway to hell with no light at the end of a dark and empty tunnel.
Dre Greenlaw was 8 years old when he and some of his siblings began bouncing through a system in which only the strong and the fortunate survive.
And he was 14 when fate delivered him a pair of angels who were convinced that he was in no way, shape or form one of the unsalvageable ones and determined to give him a new lease on life.
“I wouldn’t be here without ’em,” Dre Greenlaw was saying this week at the 49ers hotel headquarters, where the 26-year-old linebacker is preparing to play in his second Super Bowl. “Probably wouldn’t be able to play football without ’em either.”
This is a tale of The Impossible Dream made possible by a family that opened their house and their hearts to a young boy who wished better for himself than a dead-end destiny.
“He had every reason to be an angry kid, to blame his circumstances, to blame the environment, but he was an incredible kid,” Brian Early told The Post. “He was ‘Yes sir, no sir,’ very polite, happy all the time. He didn’t know what he didn’t know. Thought he had it as good as anyone else had it.
“[Officials at a group home] had some type of scale that he had to put his cereal on, he could get like one bowl of cereal, couldn’t get any seconds, and they portion all his food, and this is how this kid is living, and he doesn’t know that he doesn’t have it great, you would not know that just in the way that he carried himself and handled himself. We all know that 99 percent of the kids in that situation, they don’t turn out like Dre turned out.”
Early did not know the kid who was surrendered as a ward of the state — because of an alcoholic biological mother — had been nothing but trouble, who was jailed at 10 for reportedly stealing a cell phone from his school’s principal’s office and lived obliviously on the edge and seemingly didn’t care about falling off it. Early was an assistant football coach at Fayetteville (Ark). High School and Greenlaw was playing football at nearby Ramay Junior High when they met.
By this time, Greenlaw had begun a dramatic personal rise from the depths of despair that landed him in the good graces of the authorities at Methodist Boys’ Home in Fayetteville. Early called his wife, Nanci.
“I want you to call the Boys Home and see if I can mentor him,” he told her.
The answer was yes he could. They had taken him to church and to lunch and to the mall for jeans, and on Saturdays Brian Early would take him to Arkansas football games before returning him to the Boys Home.
“He grows on you fast,” Brian Early said. “If you ever met him, you’re gonna fall in love with the dude in the first five minutes.”
“But,” Nanci said, “when I was dropping him off one day, they told me that the Boys Home was closing, and that they were gonna be sending all the boys to a ranch in Alma, Ark.”
The Mom at the Boys Home there asked the Earlys if they could take him in.
“She told me, ‘He doesn’t belong here. He is not like the rest of these kids,’ ” Nanci said.
The Department of Health and Human Services had a different idea for the Earlys, who already had Camryn, 3, and Aivery, 7.
Early (bottom left) and Aivery Early The Early family
“They kept trying to match us with other kids that they thought would be more comfortable for our family,” Nanci said. “Like younger girls. I said, ‘We’re not opening our home to just any foster kid. We already have the kid that we’re trying to help.’ It was actually really stressful to even get them to allow that to happen.”
But it would happen. As long as the little girls didn’t object.
“We wanted them to feel like they were included,” Nanci said. “‘Dre doesn’t really have a home and a dad right now, what would you guys think about if he came and lived with our family and he was our family?’
“My 7-year-old was like yes, absolutely. And my 3-year-old wasn’t answering. Later that afternoon my 7-year-old said, ‘Mom, I’ve been thinking about it and I really feel like God’s been talking to my heart and I think He would want Dre to have a family.’ ”
Camryn resisted.
“ ‘Don’t look at me,’ ” Nanci recalls her saying, “ ‘God’s not been talking to my heart.’
“So we told them basically he got three votes yes and one vote no.
“But what’s so funny about that is she’s the one that literally was in his lap 24/7.”
Dre moved in the day before Christmas in 2011.
“He was really quiet when he first started living with us,” Brian said. “He was afraid to ask us for food. So we’d go to bed and we’d hear him at the pantry at night.”
Greenlaw had grown from cornerback into a 210-pound safety who was recruited by the University of Arkansas at a time when Brian Early was defensive line coach at Arkansas State.
Early had coached him as a sophomore in high school. Greenlaw committed to Arkansas.
“We felt like all of Dre’s life really decisions had been made for him,” Brian Early said. “We thought we’re gonna let him make this decision and support him either way.”
Greenlaw was 21 when he decided to officially become a member of the Early family.
Brian Early was the defensive line coach at the University of Houston when the 49ers drafted Greenlaw in the fifth round in 2019.
Greenlaw came to Houston for the draft, which was held in Nashville. Around 2 a.m. Greenlaw texted Nanci from his room: “I would not have been able to do this without you.”
Brian and Camryn were at the NFC Championship when Greenlaw, a dynamic linebacker who intercepted Jordan Love twice in the divisional round, punched his ticket to his second Super Bowl.
“It was just special to me,” Greenlaw said.
Aivery is a sophomore at Arkansas with Greenlaw’s half-brother.
Camryn is in the 10th grade and will watch this Super Bowl at home with Nanci.
Brian was promoted last week to defensive line/edge coach at Missouri.
Greenlaw has a fiancé, Mikaela, and a 3-year-old son, Kamari. He has a relationship now with his biological mother.
Brian Early does not consider himself a hero. But he is.
“I’m so proud of him and just excited and happy for him,” he says. “I don’t really ever think about it in terms of me being proud of anything that I’ve done for him. I feel like that God called me to be there for him and put him in our lives, put us in each other’s lives. It has been as good for me and everyone in our family as it has been for him. We just wanted to give him a fair chance.”
Nanci Early doesn’t consider herself a hero. But she is.
“It is a good feeling, it is,” she says. “I don’t ever want Dre to feel like he owes us for something like that, I don’t like that thinking that people will be like ‘You saved him, you got him here,’ and I’m like, ‘No, absolutely not.’ He did this. He got him here. We offered him stability, and that’s it. It was a calling. It was a feeling that God was asking us to do that.”
Dre Greenlaw wasn’t supposed to be playing in one Super Bowl, much less two. Even if he walks off the field on Sunday night a loser, he knows, and the Earlys know, that he has already won. All of them have.