The Brewer High School varsity basketball team welcomed a new player Friday night -- a 9-year-old star named Carter Escobar.
The Fort Worth boy has a rare type of cancer and it’s in the final stages.
He is no longer receiving treatment and instead decided to make a bucket list of things he wants to do and posted it to Facebook.
“And then it got crazy,” his mother Rachel Escobar said. "We just want him to feel good and get to do things that are going to make him happy with memories."
He wanted to ride fast in a Ferrari.
Check.
He wanted to eat a waffle at Waffle House.
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He wanted to become a police officer.
Fort Worth police will make him an honorary officer next week.
And he wanted to play in a high school basketball game.
"It's something he would have been able to someday, you know,” his mother said.
Now, he can check that one off his bucket list too.
When the varsity basketball team at nearby Brewer High School heard about Carter, they invited him to join them in their next game.
"It means a lot. I mean you know his story,” said Brewer High School senior Devin Avent. “And we just want to help him have fun."
Carter got his own jersey and hung out with the team shooting hoops before the game.
And when the game started, he got surprise video welcomes from NBA greats like former Dallas Dirk Nowitski.
"The first 4th grader to play on varsity,” Nowitski said. “Wow that has never happened in high school basketball."
Even former Los Angeles Lakers legend Shaq O’Neal appeared with a message of his own on the video scoreboard, introducing Carter as the game began.
"He's a slasher, he's a dunker, he can do it all,” O’Neal said.
For any 9-year-old, playing high school basketball would be a dream come true.
For this little boy, it was so much more. And in the first play of the game, in his first shot, Carter scored.
Fans from both teams cheered him on and erupted in a chant: “Carter! Carter! Carter!"
"It's cool to see how many people really care about our kid,” his mother said.
