<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">The tears for her mother, which flowed so frequently a year ago, have slowed for Kathy Sloan Wood ever since she's been able to immerse herself in the charitable foundation the family started last spring in the name of her mother, Bobbye, and her father, Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. "I haven't really cried like I used to," said Wood prior to Thursday's Jazz-Los Angeles Lakers game in the Delta Center. Obviously, it was a year and more of great emotion for the Sloan family ? Jerry and his children, Kathy, Brian and Holly ? after Bobbye died at age 61 in June 2004 of pancreatic cancer five years after she had beaten breast cancer. "I never had anybody close to me die," said Wood. "You look at everything differently. You try to be a better person." She quit her position as a pharmaceuticals salesperson and took over running the Bobbye and Jerry Sloan Hand-in-Hand Foundation after it was formed last spring to benefit people and groups in three geographical areas close to the Sloan family ? southern Illinois and Bobbye and Jerry's hometown of McLeansboro, the Evansville (Ind.) area where he went to college and Utah. It gives Wood a feeling of doing something positive in her mother's honor, and that makes her feel better. Wood, who is married to Todd Wood and lives in Omaha, Neb., has seen quite a change in her father, too, since Bobbye's death. He is more involved with her three young boys now. "My boys look up to him," she said. "We grew very much closer as a family. "Now it's our job to keep him in line." That, Wood said, was what Bobbye used to do in a marriage that lasted some 40 years and a relationship that began in the McLeansboro school system. The 2004-05 season, Wood said, was "extra rough" for her dad, who answered the same questions in every NBA city about how he dealt with Bobbye's death. "He handled it with so much class," Wood said. "People got to see a different part of him. He's not the tough person he is on the court." Despite Sloan's saying he had to be pushed into the latest Hand-in-Hand Foundation project where the highest bidder in an eBay auction wins quality game-day time with him ? attendance at the shootaround, lunch with Jerry and a pre-game visit in the coaches' office prior to the Jan. 21 game with the Cleveland Cavaliers ? his daughter said he readily agreed. He'll do anything for the foundation, though he wasn't sure about lunch ? he rarely looks up while eating, she said, after growing up in a family of 10.</div> Source
