Brandon Pettigrew is not a crutches guy.
"As soon as I can get off those things, I'm off of them," he said.
So it came as no surprise that, nine days after he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee for the second time in six seasons, Pettigrew was walking up and down the aisles of a Dearborn Target store taking six underprivileged Detroit-area youths on $300 Christmas shopping sprees.
As Pettigrew watched the kids fill two shopping carts with everything from Xbox games to sporting goods — "Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it on the back end," Pettigrew said when one of the youths asked for a calculator to total up how much he'd spent — it was clear his long-planned goodwill gesture also was uplifting him in unexpected ways.