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COPYRIGHT 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Byline: Alex Marvez
CARTERSVILLE, Ga. _ Expect to see Ronnie Brown jerseys being worn at Miami Dolphins home games this season by his parents.
All four of them.
Such a statement may sound funny, but so are some of the tricks played by the folks whose nurturing helped mold Brown, who was the second player selected in April's NFL Draft.
Joyce and Ronnie Brown, the tailback's biological parents, and Chris and Andy Tripp, who are so close to him that they may as well be related, attended games together wearing No. 23 jerseys while he was playing at Auburn.
"I have what I call two sets of parents," Brown said. "Sometimes we would joke about it. I know one game we had at Auburn, Chris and my dad were walking down the street. Someone asked if she was my mom and she said, `Yeah.' They kind of made a joke about it like they were married."
Said a smiling Chris Tripp: "When we go to games and somebody asks Joyce if she's Ronnie's mama, she'll introduce us as the other mommy and daddy. At one game, I was sitting by Ronnie's daddy. We were all side-by-side and people were hearing us cheer. A lady turns around and says, `Which of you are his parents?' I said, `We're both the mothers and daddies.' She said, `I don't understand.""
Here's a reason why: The Browns are black. The Tripps are white.
The closeness of their relationship may seem curious to those who can't look beyond skin pigmentation. But that's not the case in this small Georgia city nestled in the foothills an hour's drive north of Atlanta.
"There's not but one color in Cartersville and that's purple," said Cartersville High baseball coach Stuart Chester, referring to the school's nickname of the Purple Hurricanes. "It doesn't matter if you're Chinese, black or white. Our kids believe that.
"There are a lot more people here...
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