Kenny Nims was six years old when a blood clot killed his father.
He was six years old when, in 1993, he became, as he said, "the man of the house" for his mother Julie and his sister Taylor.
He's now 21, a junior attacker who started and scored two goals for Syracuse in Monday's D-I national championship game win over Johns Hopkins, a day when the NCAA commemorated the 25th anniversary of Syracuse's first national championship team -- his father's team -- with a halftime ceremony. Nims, the Orange's second-leading scorer in 2008, wears No. 10, the same number his father, a goalie, wore. But he retains so much more.
"All I'm trying to do is carry on his legacy," Kenny Nimms said. "I pay attention to that every day."
Julie was 15 when she started dating Tom. A girl from Watertown, N.Y. meeting up with a boy from nearby Geneseo through a cousin and hitting it off right away. They dated through college, and Tom popped the question when he was a senior at Syracuse. They married in 1985. From the start, they clicked, conjoined by inextinguishable energies.
You ask people about Tom and you see smiles. You hear stories about the freewheeling guy who would face six shots in warmups and say I'm done, then go out and toss every available limb at oncoming rubber bullets, stopping most of them. You hear about the guy who wore black shirts and denim jackets around campus and demanded that the Stones' "Start Me Up" play on the crackling PA before games.
"He was definitely a different guy," said current Syracuse assistant coach Roy Simmons III, the goalie coach when Tom Nims was there. "Mister Cool."
Although he was the starter the other three seasons, racking up 692 saves -- third on the Syracuse all-time list -- Nims didn't play much during the 1983 season because of a shoulder injury. But you wouldn't have known it, Julie said.
"Most guys would be like so bummed that [they weren't] on the field," she said. "It didn't matter to him."
That was the Tommy she loved. The Tommy everybody loved, she says.
"No one has ever said a bad thing about Tommy," Julie said.
Tom developed diabetes, which led to the blood clot that ended his life and jarred the Syracuse world, a program founded on families, from the Powells to the Deskos to the Simmons and others.
"I got to know Julie over the years," said current Syracuse coach John Desko, who brought in Tom Nims as one of his first recruits. "Then going to the services, when Kenny was a little one at the time, it hit home when all of that happened."
At home, Julie lost the only man she'd loved since she was in high school, the father of her two children, six-year-old Kenny and two-year-old Taylor. She sought refuge in the closeness of her family and Tom's family, who swooped in to provide the relief efforts.
"It was awful," Julie said. "But, you know, you do what you have to do to get through," Julie continued. "Unfortunately, life doesn't stop. I would've loved life to stop, but it didn't."
They got through it, all of them. Julie later re-married, to a man, Chip Korwek, that people regularly refer to as "wonderful."
But, Julie says, something mysterious took place after Tom died. Kenny knew -- right away, she says -- that he was going to pick up where his dad left off. Julie just didn't know how much he meant it.
"He's here, for sure, he's definitely here," Julie, seated at Gillette Stadium, says about Tommy. "Kenny acts just like his dad. If you would've met Tom, Kenny is Tommy. I've been very blessed. Some people don't like that their kids act like one parent or another. I'm very blessed that Kenny is his father, for sure, the way he acts, walks, talks, his mannerisms."
He became more of a "protector" of his sister, Taylor, than a brother, Julie said. Chip shakes his head and smiles when he thinks of how much Kenny put on his shoulders, as a 6-year-old, to keep his father's memory alive and his family together.
And when Kenny was being recruited by several D-I schools, he fixated on Syracuse immediately. Korwek tried to get him to at least consider Notre Dame, but Nims was dead-set on wearing Orange.
"I think the day Tommy died, he knew he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps," Julie said.
Kenny looks and plays like his dad, too, Desko said. Maybe a little quicker. The coach said he does a double-take occasionally when he sees Kenny wearing the 10 and catches his face under the mask.
There's something about that number, too, in the Nimms-Korwek family. Something in it that makes Julie sure that Tom is watching Kenny, watching them all, a proud father and husband.
"Ten means more to our family than anything," Julie said. "We'll call each other and it's 10 o'clock at night. We'll be driving in a snowstorm and the number 10 will come up on a road sign. Every day our lives are centered aroung the number 10, which is really weird, so we feel he's with us."
For Kenny, lacrosse became the link to his father. He could keep Tom's memory alive every time he picked up a stick. So he worked. He worked to get there, and he worked once he got to Syracuse. And he worked even harder last off-season, after the Orange went through 2007's massively down year, to bring the program back to where it is today.
"We nurtured lacrosse," Chip Korwek said. "Because that's what he wanted to do as a result of his father. I took him to every tournament, every game. It was a wonderful time."
Forty-eight-thousand-plus people applauded when the 1983 Syracuse team was honored at halftime, with a roar swelling when Julie was announced as Tom Nim's widow. But on Monday, there was no mourning. Just celebration of a life lived, and a life passed onward.
"We've had people say he'd gotten into Syracuse because of Tommy," Julie said. "Uh-uh. He earned it, he earned his way, he proved himself. He's done it on the field. He deserves to be here, not because of his last name, but because of what he's given to the program."
