Diane Brown knew that something was up when she saw the unusually serious faces of her son Anthony's friends as they gathered at her house. Something wasn't right. She knew it. A mother always does.

"I've got to tell you something," Anthony said.

His mother looked around at those faces again, her son's dearest friends each in turn: Peanut Arrington, Kelly Garrett, Cheyney Preston. They were some of the best basketball players ever to have set foot on a Bedford court and had been the foundation of Liberty High School teams that won back-to-back Group AA state titles.

She looked at her daughter Gail, Anthony's younger sister but not by much. Gail looked like the guys did, so serious when they should have been joking around, talking hoops, having a good old time like they always had. As for Anthony, he could hardly look at his mother. He was jittery, distracted. She could tell.

"Oh Lord," she said. "I think I better sit down."

Alan Kim | Roanoke Times

RU senior Anthony Brown, who returned as a walk-on with the Highlanders basketball team after a tour of duty in Iraq, will graduate on schedule in May with a degree in exercise science.

With his buddies there to support him, Anthony began to speak, haltingly at first.

"I didn't know how I was going to tell you this. I didn't want to tell you. ..."

He might as well have poured ice water straight on her heart.

"I'm going to Iraq."

The tears started then, hers then his.

The year was 2004. Brown was 21, a junior at Radford University and a little-used reserve on the school's basketball team. He had joined the Marine Corps Reserves the year before, in part because he wanted a backup plan for after college. But also for the challenge.

Brown had always been a young man driven by challenge.

Soon after, he shipped out to California for training and then to the desert south of Baghdad. With him, he carried all the gear of a modern soldier. He also carried along a basketball. "I had to have that," he said. "I had to have my basketball."

Unsinkable spirit

Basketball had always been a cornerstone for Brown.

But growing up, he didn't have the talent or the size the older and more skillful kids had. He was always the kid on the court who had to work the most diligently, to scrap the hardest, just to be able to hang, just to get picked to play.

He had the same heart they did, though. Maybe bigger.

That's what the guys liked about him -- his tenacity. He never backed down from a challenge. That's why they nicknamed him "Penny," after NBA basketball player Anfernee Hardaway's persistent, miniature alter-ego in the Sprite ads.

Eventually, his unsinkable spirit carried him onto the basketball team at Liberty High School in Bedford County. His sophomore year, Liberty fell just short of winning its third state championship in a row. Hopes were high for the team again when Brown earned the starting point guard spot as a junior.

Then 11 games into the season, he went down with a catastrophic knee injury. The injury pretty much precluded a shot at a third title for Liberty in four years. "Losing him just devastated us that year," said then-Liberty coach Mark Hanks, now at Pulaski County.

It didn't devastate Brown, however. He never missed a beat that season with his unflagging good cheer and loyal support of his teammates. And after surgery, he remained just as positive as he tediously worked his way back into shape and built up his wrecked knee.

"He was an inspiration to everybody," Hanks said.

When senior season arrived, he was ready. He became the team's natural leader. He could also play lock-down defense and was a solid ball-handler and passer. But at just 6 feet and only about 150 pounds, Brown was not a Division I caliber prospect. Especially with a reconstructed knee.

Not that he accepted any of this as the final word on a college basketball career.

Even in high school, he had hung around on the fringes of the Radford University team. He'd come down to visit Peanut Arrington, his friend and hometown hoops hero who was by then a rising star for the Highlanders. He got to know some of Arrington's teammates and occasionally engaged in some offseason pickup games with them.

When it was time for college himself, Radford was the only place he wanted to go. He immediately approached then-Highlanders coach Ron Bradley to ask about trying out for the team as a nonscholarship walk-on. Instead, Bradley offered him a chance to manage the team. He accepted.

Still, he didn't give up.

His sophomore year, he was issued a uniform. "He was just a survivor," said Bill Lilly, currently head coach at West Virginia Wesleyan but then one of Bradley's assistants. "The old boy just wanted to play basketball and you couldn't run him out of the gym if you tried."

It's players like that who can sometimes hold a team together, even if their time on the floor is limited.

"Unlike a lot of guys, he never worries about how many points he scores or how many minutes he plays," said teammate and fellow senior Whit Holcomb-Faye of Brown. "All he cares about is the team winning. That's so important to a team to have guys like that."

Called up

In the summer of 2002, Brown took on another challenge: boot camp.

His plan was to return to school that fall after basic training with the Marine Reserves. But a paperwork mix-up forced him to take the year off. He spent the time working manufacturing and construction jobs around Lynchburg.

Meanwhile, Radford changed basketball coaches, promoting assistant Byron Samuels to the head job. Samuels allowed Brown to rejoin the team for his junior season. Then his off-again, on-again tenure was interrupted once more when the Marines called his number.

In Iraq, he served with the 4th Combat Engineering Battalion, building road checkpoints and other construction projects outside Baghdad. It was hot and dangerous work. There were precious few opportunities to get a game going with the basketball he kept in tow. And though nobody from his direct platoon was killed in the line of duty during his stay there, he said five others from his larger unit didn't make it back home.

The deployment was especially brutal for his mother, who works for commercial printer R.R. Donnelley in Lynchburg.

"Some days, I could barely function, could barely get up out of the bed," she said. "If the phone would ring, I didn't want to answer. If somebody knocked on the door, I was always looking outside to see if there was a government car parked on the street."

Friends and family helped. She and her daughter Gail, also a student at Radford by then, leaned on each other. Their church, Washington Street Baptist, was wonderful. Military family support groups also were a comfort.

Contact with her son was erratic. Once, he called to say that he'd been injured. She almost went to pieces.

He'd been riding on the back of a truck, when it became entangled in some roadside wire and tumbled over. Brown and his fellow Marines on the back were flung headlong onto the rugged terrain.

"I was the worst hurt," Brown said. "I was cut on my chin and jaw, right to the bone they told me. I had whiplash. Hurt my back, hurt all over."

In general, Brown doesn't talk about his experience much.

"He told me he's had trouble sleeping," his mother said, "that he's had nightmares that wake him up in the night and won't let him go back to sleep. He says the dreams aren't as bad now but he still gets them. I can only imagine what he's seen.

"If he did want to talk, then I might just tell him that I'm not sure this is something I want to hear."

A team leader

Brown returned from duty last spring with a scar on his chin -- it was the first thing his mother noticed at their teary reunion -- and with his treasured basketball still under his arm.

He enrolled in summer school back at Radford. He started playing pickup basketball games again and getting back into basketball shape, although getting in shape wasn't much of a problem after logging months of grinding labor in the desert.

He called Samuels to tell him that he still wanted to play some ball, no expectations harbored.

That's the silent compact a walk-on makes with his coach. The player keeps his mouth shut, his eyes open, his behavior above reproach and his work ethic as bulletproof as Kevlar. In exchange, he might get in the game for a minute or two every now and then.

"That was all right with me," Brown said. "I just wanted to have a chance to be on the team."

Going into tonight's final regular season game, Brown had appeared in 17 of 26 games while playing an economical 2.6 minutes per outing. For the year, he has passed out five assists, grabbed two rebounds, scored two points from the foul line and missed all 14 of his floor shots.

Typically, not the numbers of a team leader.

At 24, Brown is the oldest player on the team. He has remained an unflagging cheerleader and supporter of his teammates. Certainly, being a Marine who has been to war also carries its own weight.

It was no accident where his locker in the Highlanders' dressing room was placed. Between two freshman.

"Right where Penny can be a leader," Samuels said, "show the new kids how we do things."

Brown isn't a team captain. That distinction belongs to the team's other two seniors, Holcomb-Faye and Andre Bynum. But Bynum sees Brown as a peer. "He's such a hard worker all the time. In the weight room, everywhere, he's as much a leader as we are."

Samuels backed that up.

"Sometimes they defer to him," the coach said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Future coach, officer?

Brown isn't sure what he'll do next.

In May, he and his sister will get to graduate together -- the first in their family to earn college degrees. Then he may be off to Marine Corps Officer Training School. He also has thought about teaching and maybe getting into coaching himself.

Either way, the idea that her son may be getting in deeper with the Marines has Diane Brown worrying again.

"I'm not going to stand in the way of the things he thinks he needs to do," she said. "I never have. I'm going to stand behind him, not in front of him.

"If he goes back to Iraq, the Lord is going to have to help me through again. I don't know. They may just have to put me in the nut house."

Then she laughed. The laugh was faint and unconvincing.