USA volleyball: Anderson’s loyalty skin deep | anderson, team, michael - Sports - The Orange County Register
around to all these volleyball tournaments you think about what it's costing. It wasn't putting us in a bind but it wasn't letting us be as comfortable as we could be." Some parents saw the early sacrifices as an investment in the future, counting on the return of a college scholarship or Olympic glory. Not Michael and Nancy Anderson. "My dad said, 'You don't have to do this to make us proud,'" Anderson recalled. "'You being happy makes us happy. If you wanted to quit tomorrow you could ... if you quit for the right season." In the summer of 2009, Michael's youngest child was anything but happy. "Things just didn't seem to work out (with the national team)," Anderson said. "I wasn't very mentally tough. I wasn't very strong physically." An already rough transition into Team USA hit a dead-end when Anderson came down with pneumonia during World League play in June 2009. He spent two weeks in a San Jose area hospital, two tubes in his chest. Before he was released 7.5 liters of fluid had been drained out of his lungs. "I don't know what hit me," he said, "but it hit me hard." Seven months later he was blindsided again. Michael Anderson's health problems began when he fell off the roof of a family summer house. Suffering a compound fracture of both his fibula and tibia, Anderson developed blood clots. Subsequent tests revealed that he had kidney cancer. The kidney was removed and doctors were optimistic that they had caught the cancer early. Anderson was recovering and in good spirits when died in his sleep on Jan. 23, 2010, the victim of a massive heart attack. Matt Anderson turned his grief into his game and the rage he already felt. "It worked," he said. "It gave me a healthy confidence to trust myself to play my game." Michaels' death also brought an already close family even closer. Joelle, who even while in college would call home each morning to make sure her youngest sibling got on the school bus, talks to Matt every other day via Skype when he's in Italy. That is when he's not on the phone with Amy or his other sister Jennifer or brother Joshua. "I talk to him every day," Amy said. "He's still my best friend." The day Matt got his tattoo in Huntington Beach, Joshua had a similar one put on him in Baltimore. Amy was beside Matt in Orange County as an artist drew a cross and her father's initials on her back. "I still miss talking to my dad," Anderson said. "I guess the hardest part is knowing that my kids don't get to meet him. He was a great guy." Those children will, however, hear him in the voices of their parents and aunts and uncles. "Now we're trying to pass on to our children what my parents taught us, it's up to us," Joelle said. "My dad was the person we always talked to about everything. Now if we have a question, we call each other." Or maybe Michael Anderson taught his children on those long car rides to and from a childhood full of volleyball tournaments that some of life's most important answers are found within. Maybe what Matt Anderson learned in the two often trying years since his father's death that his father was locked to his side long before the bookends of his life were engraved on his ribs. http://www.ocregister.com/sports/anderson-352562-team-michael.html[5/4/2012 5:36:55 PM]