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If you lived in Boston in 2008, you were probably watching the Celtics.
I mean, I wasn't, but even I knew the team had gotten good.
There were drunk people in shamrock t-shirts frolicking all over my city.
Pictures of the team were everywhere.
The Celtics mascot, a leprechaun, was finally feeling lucky.
Worth mentioning, his name is actually Lucky.
By the time the NBA Finals started between the Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.
It was madness here.
But for Shannon Allen and her husband, Celtics star Ray Allen, it was a far more complicated time.
And so game four, I believe, Ray and the guys came back to win.
The Celtics turn in one of the great comebacks in NBA playoff history.
The guys played amazing and we were like, oh my God, we're going to win in L.A.
This is crazy.
We're going to win game five and bam.
It was unreal.
But after game four, Ray said to me, Shan, I think something's really wrong with Walker.
In a hotel room in Los Angeles, many hours from home.
Shannon is confused and deeply worried about their young son, Walker.
She needs help.
And this is when she turns to the most important player in her life.
From the Boston Globe and PRX, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
If you listened to our last episode, you know that I do not follow sports, but I do find sports relationships compelling.
So I wanted to tell you two stories about them.
The first featured a young couple, Jordan and Garrett Whitlock, figuring out priorities distance and community during a pro baseball career.
Today's episode is like an answer to the questions posed by the Whitlock story.
We're going to hear from someone who's been through it all and has figured out how to make love and family work, no matter what's happening on the field or, in this case, the basketball court.
I'm Shannon Allen.
I am an entrepreneur.
I'm also married with five children and one grandbaby.
I'm originally from Connecticut, and I currently live in Miami, Florida.
Shannon, who's 49, grew up with her family in the small community of Rockfall, then in Middletown, not far from Hartford.
My parents are hippies.
My dad grew a massive organic garden every summer.
For breakfast, we would go outside in our pajamas.
I remember like the fresh morning dew in the summertime and our toes covered with grass and making our way to the garden with salt and pepper shakers in our hands and having like a cucumber or a tomato for breakfast.
My dad, who was kind of the only husband that stuck around of these four amazing black women.
He was like everybody's husband.
John was everybody's husband.
And so he would grow so many tomatoes that he would fill black garbage bags hefty bags filled with tomatoes, and he would just drop them off, like Santa Claus, at all my aunt's houses.
Shannon grew up proud of her parents and also seeing that they were proud of each other despite their differences.
My dad was really kind of like a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-nothing, a real renaissance man.
He was was a carpenter.
He restored old wood boats.
He was an oil painter.
He wrote poetry.
He would weld stuff.
And my mom was very entrepreneurial.
She was kind of the polar opposite of him.
My mom is a broker owner of a real estate company called Sterling Realtors.
And for years she had the number one independently owned real estate company in central Connecticut, which was very unique.
She was such a trailblazer because this was the time in the state when Black families, Black and Brown families, it was very rare for homeownership.
Because of her parents and family, everybody knew Shannon.
There's this thing about people know who you are.
Oh, that's Jackie's daughter.
That's John's daughter.
That's, you know, Sherry's niece.
That's Sherry's goddaughter.
There's this thing about belonging somewhere.
That was definitely a part of my formative years that I look back on with fondness.
When it comes time for college, Shannon doesn't go too far.
She comes up to Boston to attend Northeastern University, where she's a music industry major.
Shannon is good at a lot of things, but she loves to sing.
While I was there, I met three girls and we formed a girl group.
It's the mid-1990s.
The girl group is called Shades.
By the time Shannon is 19.
Shades has been signed to Motown Records by Andre Harrell, who'd been instrumental in launching the career of Mary J Blige.
With a record deal...
Shannon leaves school and plans to pursue music in New York.
Falling madly in love is not on her mind.
This is the time to prioritize herself.
Because what if she's on the cusp of making it big?
And isn't it always the way that when we make a very specific plan, everything changes?
One night in 1996, Shannon is at a New York restaurant called the All Star Cafe.
She and her group are ecstatic because they're about to release their first single, Tell Me.
The place is filled with entertainers, record label execs and Broadway stars.
And while I was out with the girls in my group, kind of every time I turned around there was this like tall drink of water staring at me.
Man, what a moment, right?
I mean, here I am getting ready to start my career.
And the night before my dream, my real dream was about to begin.
I kind of lay eyes on this, you know, incredibly handsome, very sweet guy in this restaurant.
I had this intense feeling Meredith honestly, that if I didn't speak to him I was going to regret it.
And so, on my way out of the restaurant club, I walked by Ray and he grabbed my hand and he introduced himself.
Hi, I'm Ray.
I'm Shannon.
Nice to meet you.
Oh, you know, do you live in New York?
Yeah, I live in New York.
And it was a very casual conversation.
Shannon tells him, tonight's a special night for me.
I'm in this girl group and our first single comes out tomorrow.
And he's like, wow, you know, I'm celebrating also.
And so I said, what are you celebrating?
And he's like, oh, you know, I get drafted tomorrow.
And I was like, drafted?
I was like, are we at war?
I've been in the studio for two years.
What's happening right now?
And he's like, no, we're not at war.
I'm getting drafted into the NBA.
And I was like, wow, so this is a really big night for you.
And he's like, yeah, it's a really big night for me.
They discover that they both have ties to Connecticut.
Shannon's dad is a huge UConn basketball fan.
Ray is a star player at UConn.
I said, wow, you go to UConn?
I'm like, I bet my dad knows who you are.
And Ray goes, yeah, your dad definitely knows who I am.
Shannon and Ray spend hours talking that night.
When Shannon gets home, she's so excited, she calls her dad, even though it's 2.30 in the morning.
I literally wake this man up.
I'm like, dad, I met the sweetest guy tonight.
And he's like, why are you calling me Shan?
And I'm like, I don't know.
I feel like you might know this guy.
And he's like, how do I know this guy?
And I'm like, I don't know, dad.
Have you heard this name before?
Ray Allen.
Here's my dad.
Oh, my God.
My dad's going to kill me.
He's like, Jesus fucking Christ.
I've had this guy's picture on the refrigerator for three years.
Like, what's wrong with you?
Shan and Ray start dating, even as their careers take them to different places.
Ray gets drafted to the Milwaukee Bucks.
And yes, for those keeping score at home.
This is the second time I've mentioned the Milwaukee Bucks on this season of Love Letters.
Weird.
Anyway, while Ray is starting his pro basketball career, Shannon has her single on the radio and she's touring with shades from New York to Hawaii.
This was a time before cell phones, so she and Ray page each other to find moments to talk.
Shannon goes to Ray's first NBA game in Philadelphia and travels to other games as often as she can.
During all of this, Shannon decides to pursue acting, too.
But it's Ray, not Shannon, who winds up with a huge acting opportunity.
Director Spike Lee invites Ray to try out for the basketball movie He Got Game, which will star Denzel Washington.
We were having lunch in Washington Square Park and he had gotten the call that he could audition for the movie.
And he was like, you know, just the thought of, like, I'd have to give up my entire summer.
And I'm like, buddy, listen, I mean...
If you knew how much time I spent auditioning, someone's actually asking you to audition.
Like, they're looking for you.
You know, you gotta do this.
You know, it's one of the most iconic sports movies of all time.
He was amazing.
Somebody call a stretcher.
Stick a fork in him, he's done.
Take your old ass back to Attica.
By the early 2000s, Ray is also becoming a huge star on the basketball court.
He's developing into one of the best shooters in the league.
At home, which is now in Milwaukee, Ray and Shannon get engaged.
Ray proposes in the house they share.
Shannon is already basically a step-parent to the daughter Ray has with his high school sweetheart.
They build a strong network of friends and neighbors, including a couple next door that they still see every summer.
Then midway through the 2002-2003 season, something big happens.
Ray gets traded the Seattle Supersonics.
It's a huge change for him and Shannon, but it solidifies them as a unit.
I remember him saying, we got traded.
He used the word we, and I'll never forget that because it was like this was our career.
He was solidifying for me that this was what we were doing.
And he's like, we got traded.
And I said, well, listen, when you go, can you still play basketball?
And he was like, no, I get to still play basketball.
And I said, so then we're good.
Around this time, Shannon has an acting job on a show called Century City, which I remember watching, by the way.
It's about a law firm set in the future.
But then two things happen.
One, Shannon finds out she's pregnant with her first son.
Two, the show gets canceled.
She thinks, maybe this is the right moment to step away from my career for a while.
With Ray's travel schedule.
You know my gosh.
I mean, sometimes you're on a, an East Coast wing or a West Coast wing and you could be gone 21 days out of the month, but somebody had to be home to take care of a baby.
Shannon knows that Ray will be supportive no matter what she does.
But she has to make peace with this decision to pause her own career dreams.
Because my mom worked 90 hours a week growing up, and, you know, she had to do that.
I had this kind of luxury.
I was kind of like my ancestors wildest dreams that Ray put us into a position where I didn't actually have to go to a job every day.
I didn't have to go to a nine to five.
I was able to stay at home and really pour into this baby.
And that's not the norm for most people.
And it definitely wasn't the norm for all the black women in my family.
I wrestled with it for a while because I'm a worker and there's this kind of survivor's remorse that goes along with this decision of staying home.
It's in Seattle with a baby where Shannon starts to really understand what it means to be the partner of an athlete, what it means to create community and adjust.
Ray himself is more accustomed to this, and not just because of his job.
He'd grown up in a household where moving was part of the deal.
Ray actually grew up in the Air Force.
His mom was a military dependent because his dad was in the Air Force, so he lived all over the world.
He was born in California at Castle Air Force Base, but he lived in Germany at Ramstein.
He lived in...
Graper Inn at Bentwaters.
And so he had a very unique experience as a child and met kids and friends and had to pick up and leave every three years.
And I was kind of the complete opposite where I lived in the same little town my entire life.
But being a professional sports dependent, there are some similarities.
And a lot of times I liken it to kind of being an army or an Air Force wife, without the whole militaristic thing.
And obviously no one is saving lives or fighting for freedom on an NBA court.
But this feeling of being uprooted and being implanted in a new place and having to start all over again, I think is not dissimilar.
And so yeah, when you're a new parent, a new mom and you've got babies and you don't have a pediatrician, a gynecologist, you don't know where your kids are going to go to nursery school.
You're trying to find the best place to buy groceries and get your dry, clean stuff.
And if you need, you know, support of any kind, because you just do as people.
Do you remember how long were you in Seattle after starting to have kids?
So we were in Milwaukee for almost seven years.
We were in Seattle, I believe, for six.
And I had a community there.
I mean, one of my best friends to this day is Giovanni Lewis, Rashard Lewis's wife.
And it's not just the, you know, getting resources piece because that's a big part of it.
But it's also the sharing of time.
We see each other three to four times a week at these games.
There's a family room where we're changing diapers and nursing babies and talking about plans.
You're giving each other baby showers and you're doing Christmas parties and New Year's parties together.
You're building out nonprofits together.
When we were in Seattle, Giovanni and I started this organization that for years, even after I was gone, was providing prom dresses and limo rides and hair and makeup for girls in the community that couldn't afford prom dresses.
All of these people helped Shannon as her life with Ray changes.
They have two more kids, their lives get bigger, So, of course, more help is necessary.
But to me the biggest source of help in this story is not all of these wonderful people who step in to give advice, hang out and make a new city feel smaller.
Shannon's biggest helper might be obvious to you, but it wasn't to me.
I'll explain when we come back.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of Okay, we're back.
So, after about a dozen years in Milwaukee and Seattle combined, everything changes for Ray and Shannon Allen in 2007, when Ray gets traded to the Boston Celtics.
What I know about the Celtics, mostly from ex-boyfriends, is that they were very good in the 1980s, led by a guy named Larry Bird.
Sources say he was an incredible player.
Then the Celtics were bad, then good, then pretty bad again.
The year they got good again is the year Ray Allen comes to town, which is no coincidence.
He is brought in specifically to help Boston win a championship.
By 2007, Ray and Shannon have three children.
Shannon is ecstatic when Rae gets traded to Boston because she's a Connecticut girl who'd gone to school in Boston.
Shannon actually has a ton of Massachusetts family.
Her mother's family is Cape Verdean and she has relatives all over Cape Cod.
Man, it just felt like coming home.
I'll tell you something that was so interesting.
Moving back to Boston from Seattle, I had this weird moment where it was like we had just had a snowstorm.
And I walked outside and like I could hear the snow crunching under my boots and And I looked at my car and it was like blinding.
The sun was blinding.
It was radiating off of the snow.
Because I had forgotten what it was like to see the sun in the middle of winter, because you lose the sun in Seattle for eight months.
It was a very sparkly, shiny time for me.
You're trying to make me like this weather here and it's not going to work.
You get to say that from Miami.
How beautiful.
Sparkly.
It does not take long in Boston for things to heat up.
The Celtics, with Ray, Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo, and Kevin Garnett, are winning like crazy.
Bandwagon fans are jumping on.
I mean, the energy in Boston in 2007, 2008 was palpable.
There was definitely something in the air.
And I would have to characterize it as magic.
It was just something.
You could feel it.
Shannon supports Ray with routine as much as she can.
They don't read the newspapers.
They stick to their rituals.
We really kept ourselves in this bubble.
And we kind of developed this way of kind of not coping, but how to operate within the span of an NBA season right,
And I think we just did it organically.
Like, I don't really think we put any real thought into it.
But Ray would go to the gym.
Like, I would make his pregame meal every day.
He'd have his pregame meal.
I'd walk him to the door.
I said the same thing to him at every game.
I'd tell him to be great.
That's what I always said, be great.
And he'd get in his car and he'd be off to the arena.
During home games, Shannon spends time in the Celtics' family room nursing, changing diapers and hanging out with the partners of the other players.
That's where all the girls and I would get together and we'd be talking about our week and potluck dinners and bridal showers and baby showers and how we were going to prop each other up during the season and whatever we had going on.
Who had family coming to town, we would all have community with them.
After games, Shannon waits with the kids for Ray to come out of the locker room.
And then they drive home in separate cars.
Every night, right when I got into the car, my phone would ring and it would be Ray calling me and we would go through a breakdown of the game.
We would talk completely about the game and I'd tell him about the kids and the family room, what was going on with the babies and who.
You know what they were into and who took a nap and who didn't, and blah blah, blah.
What did Ray Ray do?
And because they had little hoops back there for us, it was very cute.
But by the time we got to our house, he'd pull in, I'd pull in.
That was the last discussion we had about the game.
We never talked about basketball in our house.
It's at the end of this magical season in 2008 that Shannon needs help in a way she never imagined.
First, let me do my best to tell the basketball part.
So it's clear that this Celtics team, Ray's team, has a chance of getting the NBA title for the first time since 1986.
They beat Atlanta They beat Cleveland.
They beat Detroit.
And then it's June, and suddenly it's a best-of-seven Celtics-Lakers series for the finals.
It's an epic rematch of two teams who had battled for dominance in the 1980s.
Or so my exes say.
The Celtics win the first two games at home.
Then, as Shanna described at the start of the episode, the Boston families travel to LA for games three and four.
And I noticed that our 17-month-old Walker had a new word in his vocabulary.
Because right around 15, 17 months, you have about 50 words.
And juice was not one of Walker's words.
But between a Monday and a Friday he taught himself how to say juice mummy, because he was just excessively thirsty.
And in addition to being really thirsty, he was also kind of lethargic.
The energy in L.A. is incredible.
It's an exciting time.
The Celtics players and their families are on top of the world.
We thought, oh my God, we are going to bring another championship back to Boston, which hadn't happened in a really long time.
And I think there were 35 of us just in our family that traveled.
My mother-in-law, my sister-in-laws, everybody.
We were all out there and we were, oh my God, so excited for Ray.
Like I could cry just thinking about it.
But there was this thing with Walker where every day after a game, he just wasn't himself.
The Celtics lose game three on the road.
Ray plays amazing in game four and the Celtics win, putting them within one victory of the championship.
It's after this game that Ray comes back to the hotel and says to Shannon something is wrong with Walker.
I'm thinking, you know, maybe he's got a little bug, maybe he's got a little flu.
And he was like, no, something else is going on with Walker.
And I mean my God, everything that Ray had going on.
This is the moment he prayed for and played for and worked for his entire life.
But he's noticing that more than I had, that something was seriously wrong with Walker.
And he was like you got to promise me that if you wake up tomorrow morning and he's still like this, you're going to take him in.
And I said, okay.
And so I woke up the next morning in a pool of Walker's urine.
The concierge connects her with a doctor affiliated with a hotel who recommends that Shannon take Walker to the hospital.
And he's like, but wait, don't leave there without a blood test.
And I said, oh, okay, a blood test.
Well, what am I looking for?
And he said, I don't know.
But anything really scary, you can rule out with a blood test.
Don't leave there without one.
And I said, okay.
Those are the words that changed my life.
30 minutes later, Shannon is with Walker at an LA area hospital.
She's trying to persuade people to take his symptoms seriously.
And so finally, I just stopped asking and I said look, I'm not a doctor, but I spoke with a doctor and his recommendation was don't leave without a blood test.
I'm not leaving here without one.
And 20 minutes later this doctor walks back in the door, white as a ghost, and she's got tears running down her face and she just looks at me and says your blood sugar's supposed to be between 70 and 120.
Walker's is 639.
He has type 1 diabetes and he's entered a phase of diabetes called ketoacidosis, which means his blood sugar is poisoning him to death.
The doctor tells Shannon, if your baby doesn't get insulin soon, you're going to lose him.
It was like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me and I was just hurtling through space trying to just hold on to whatever I thought was real.
Shannon immediately calls Ray, even though she knows he's on his way to the arena for game five of the finals, the single biggest game of his career.
Because we've always promised each other that we would never hide our own lives from one another.
We wouldn't walk around on eggshells around each other.
And Ray had to always be an active participant in his own life, even if he had a game.
And I said, well, I've got bad news.
Walker has type 1 diabetes.
We're giving him insulin now.
They're saying he'll have this for the rest of his life until there's a cure.
And Ray said, thank God.
And I said, thank God.
Thank God.
I mean, he has a life-threatening medical condition.
We're going to have to give him insulin every day for the rest of his life until there's a cure.
And he said, thank God.
Do we get to bring him home?
And I said, yeah, we can bring him home.
And he said, then thank God.
I wanted to do this series about the partners of pro athletes to highlight who in the community helps them as they adjust to new cities, new attention and the stress that comes with high expectations.
And that's definitely part of the story, as you've heard from Shannon and from Jordan Whitlock in the last episode.
But I didn't think about the fact that the biggest helper in these relationships probably has to be the athlete.
I mean, this is true with Jordan too, right?
In that last episode, Jordan explained all of the great help she and Garrett have had from friends, family and people in their faith community.
But fundamentally, even though Garrett is a major league pitcher, it sounds like he realizes he has to show up for his wife, who's trying to cure rare diseases, while investing in their long-term relationship.
In Shannon's case, she had friends, family, and a team with a whole support staff.
But even more importantly, she had Ray.
Even though he was arguably one of the most important athletes in the world in that moment, he was fully present with Shannon.
He was a dad, a partner.
So the Celtics go on to lose game five to the Lakers.
After the game, it's clear Ray is preoccupied.
I mean, and if you look back on the footage and anybody that was paying attention at that time Celtics fans, basketball fans you know they'll see just a different Ray.
He's quiet.
He's pensive.
You can tell that he's in deep thought.
And I mean the second.
The game is over and this is like an incredibly private person.
He's taking off his uniform on the court.
You can see him running off the court with no shirt, like taking his uniform off because he probably dove into a cab to get him to the hospital as fast as humanly possible.
Amid all of this personal and family stress about Walker, Ray returns to Boston with the Celtics for Game 6.
It's there, on their home court in June 2008, that they win the NBA title with a blowout victory over Los Angeles.
The Boston Celtics are NBA champions once again.
Shannon says that if you look back at the postgame photos, Ray is holding Walker on the podium and Walker still has his hospital bracelet on.
After being engaged for more than a decade, Shannon and Ray finally have time to get married on Martha's Vineyard the summer after the big win.
After the series, the Allens also set up care for Walker in Boston, working with the Jocelyn Diabetes Center and Boston Children's Hospital.
They taught us how to be this new family because we were new.
It's scarier than bringing a child home, a newborn, from the hospital because, my God, I mean you could do this wrong.
You could actually do this wrong.
And...
Life is in the balance.
It made me certainly a different person, a different wife, mother, friend, member of the community.
I fell into this new world where I had all of these extraordinary parents that were there to lift us up.
It's at this point that Shannon realizes that she can also be a helper to so many.
She and Ray have a platform now.
Just about everybody in our life was like, don't talk about this as a private family issue.
You know, you don't talk about medical stuff.
Just talk about the championship.
And he and I were so aligned.
It was like, no, we have to talk about this because we almost lost our son.
We felt this enormous responsibility that our son was spared and that we needed to take this moment where Ray was on this national stage of winning an NBA championship the first time in I don't know how many years that Boston had been on this national stage.
And so...
We had to take this moment to talk about Walker and what had happened to him and how fortunate we felt and how blessed we felt and how grateful we were to God that he was here and that we were able to catch it.
I used to always say that being a part of this type 1 diabetes community was kind of like cheers.
You know you want to go somewhere where everybody knows your name, but it's like somebody knows your pain because we were here.
You could tell who we were because we had like frizzy hair and dark circles under our eyes.
And we were like browbeaten and exhausted because we didn't get REM sleep, because we were checking our kids' blood sugars in the middle of the night.
It's not funny, but you have to laugh at it so you're not crying about it.
But, you know, we were doing everything we could to keep our kids alive.
A few years after that champion season in 2008, Ray left the Celtics for Miami, where the family still lives today.
I guess I should mention that he won another NBA championship with the Miami Heat.
2014 was his final year in the NBA.
Shannon admits that yes, Miami is a nice place to live, despite Boston and its beautiful sparkly snow.
There's a lot about Miami that I don't know if people really, if you don't live here, you don't get to experience.
People think of like, oh, it's the beaches and it's the nightlife.
Yeah, but there's like a huge art community and a big fashion community and real people send their kids to school here.
It's an entrepreneurial hub now.
It's a tech hub.
With NBA life behind them, Shannon has joined this entrepreneurial scene herself, while following in her parents' footsteps.
She started an organic fast food business called Grown.
She's running the business like mom. and serving fresh food like dad.
Their flagship location is in South Miami.
This year, they plan to launch grown franchises.
Walker is now 17 and playing point guard for his high school team at Gulliver Prep in Miami.
Ray volunteers as the director of basketball operations and head coach.
I admit to Shannon that I didn't think Ray was going to turn out to be the biggest relationship helper in this story.
I was very focused on the community of significant others, of athletes who, can you know, help each other.
Other types of outreach you can find in the community.
But it seems that no matter how many people you have, how great they are, you also need your actual partner to be fully paying attention.
And it seems like a lot of the help you've had transitioning to being a Seattle person, a Boston person, a Miami person, like also comes from your Oh my gosh, 100%.
For me, this incredible blessing that I've had is in having Ray as a partner.
I mean, he absolutely is paying attention.
Really, really paying attention and is showing up for me.
He was always very, very supportive of me doing what I loved and kind of magnifying my shine.
One of the things that I've always really believed is that In relationships, you have an opportunity to be the cheerleader and you have the opportunity to be the star.
And those things change over the course of a lifetime together.
And I think where things can get tricky is if you're unwilling to be the cheerleader and you only want to be the star.
And we've been really fortunate in that we're both willing to take on those roles as they pop up.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you, guys.
This has been fun.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design, and mastering.
Shannon's interview was recorded by Joshua Ceballos.
Maddie Mortel does our audience engagement.
Special thanks to Linda Henry and Sue Brady Hartigan.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
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I would have to really do some Googling to figure out who won a championship last year.
Unless it's like right in front of my face, I don't know.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
