Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer

www.northjersey.com
By TARA SULLIVAN
6/7/2011

EAST RUTHERFORD – Billy King’s initial meeting with Alexandra Scott was little more than a scheduled promotional stop, an opportunity for the then-76ers general manager to drop off a donation check for Scott’s fledgling charity efforts.

But as with anyone who ever met or heard about the story of this little girl and her lemonade stand, Scott made an enormous and lasting impact on the basketball executive. She inspired a partnership that, sadly, outlasted her own fight with cancer, but one that continues to thrive in the vital effort to raise money to find a cure for the deadly disease, one that King, now the Nets’ general manager, has brought with him to New Jersey.

“I was just asked to present a check at a community event, but I left in awe of this little girl,” King said recently, sitting inside the Nets’ practice facility in East Rutherford. “She had started these lemonade stands to raise money and she was in charge. I could hear her talking, ‘We need lemonade? I’ll go make some.’ ”

Scott, born in January 1996, was the second of Jay and Liz Scott’s four children. Diagnosed with neuroblastoma before her first birthday, Alex quickly informed the world of her fighting spirit. Though her parents were warned the multiple surgeries to remove tumors would likely prevent her from ever being able to walk, Alex needed only two weeks to start kicking her legs. By her second birthday, Alex was crawling and standing up with leg braces. Yet despite her successes, the cancer returned by her fourth birthday, and it was after treatment for more tumors that Alex voiced the idea that would become her legacy.

“When I get out of the hospital I want to have a lemonade stand,” she told her mother, then vowing to give the money to doctors to “help other kids, like they helped me.”

The first stand raised $2,000, and soon word started to spread. King, who connected with the Scotts after they were forced to move from their hometown in Connecticut to Philadelphia in order to be near the premier facility Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, made his first donation to the lemonade stand in 2001. When he returned a year later to help at a new annual event, it was as if the circus had arrived. Television trucks, cameras, reporters and microphones crowded the family’s front lawn.

“So many people were there and Alex was overwhelmed,” King said of his new little friend. “I went in the house and she sat in my legs. We talked for a while, and she ended up doing interviews in my lap.”

Alex passed away in August 2004, her eight years on earth defined less by her disease than by her amazing courage and legacy of helping others like her. King certainly hasn’t forgotten her. He was fired by Philadelphia and soon hired in the same capacity by the Nets, but more than bring the league-wide contacts that allowed him to swing the on-court trade of the season in landing point guard Deron Williams, he brought the off-the-court connection to Alex.

“When he left the Sixers, the first thing he said to me was, ‘I might be done with the Sixers, but I’ll take Alex wherever I go,’ ” Jay Scott said from his office, where he runs the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation. “I cannot say enough good things about Billy. He came in as a donor, but we consider him part of our family. His involvement helps raise our profile and bring our message to a new group of people.”

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