Longshot (19 page)

At the beginning of my junior year,
I finally moved out of my parents' house. I turned to the path that many of my teammates were walking: low-income housing. Several of my teammates were taking advantage of the option, as our scholarships were not considered a source of income and thus we were classified as at the poverty level, making us eligible for government housing.

That summer, I also got a puppy, a Scottish terrier. I named him MacMurrin, in honor of my Scottish ancestry. He has traveled the world with me. He is my friend and companion. When I moved into government housing, Mac was able to come with me, as with my hearing impairment I was able to have him certified as my hearing-assistance dog.

Although it may seem that I was pulling the Handicapped Andy card here, I wasn't, as I was by myself and Mac did help me, letting me know if someone was at the door, or if my phone was ringing by bringing it to me. Somehow he knew that his job was to be on alert. He brought me my phone only when we lived in that apartment, though. Since then, as we have house-hopped through my vagabond days of professional basketball, he has totally slacked off.

My junior season introduced a few new teammates into my life. There was a walk-on named Jack. Jack was a big ex-marine coming to school on the GI Bill. He was twenty-eight or so at the time, had a few kids, and was about six-foot-nine and close to 290 pounds. He told the coaches he wanted to walk on, and they had no objection to it, seeing as how he was a big body. During pickup in the preseason, I accidentally hit him in the shin with my shoe and cracked his tibia. As he limped off the floor, I turned to him, out of breath, and asked, “Are you OK?”

He began to cuss me out. Apparently, the tone I asked him in had sounded sarcastic or mocking. This happens to me a lot. I cannot hear what I say as well as others do. And if I'm breathing for air because
of my asthma and try to say something, it comes out sounding a bit different than what I aimed for, and the tone is wrongly interpreted. Even when I'm not playing, I try to catch the right rhythm in speaking, sometimes adjusting the pitch in a sentence to try to match the tone of the conversation, going from memory as to what that tone is supposed to sound like. It has gotten me into trouble often, the incident with Jack being one of many such events.

Jack kept telling me and everyone else on the team that he was going to get back at me when he was healthy. By the time I went to apologize to him a second time, I was already his enemy. He just said, “Don't worry about me, man, I will see you back on the court,” and then looked down to the cast on his leg. You can't really rationalize with crazy.

When Jack came back, within the first week he got even. We were playing a drill in practice, and he intentionally swung his elbow into my face, splitting my chin. Pat Danley walked over to help me up as Jack looked down at me and said, “Payback.”

I said nothing as I pressed the skin against my chin, taking Pat's helping hand. John Hamilton looked at Jack and said, “Idiot.”

Incidentally, Jack would later be involved in an on-campus paintball fracas and consequently was with us for only one season.

The new teammate I was most excited about was Troy Goodell, a junior college transfer from Snow College. He was a smart, hardworking kid out of Layton, Utah. I could write pages about how good a guy Troy is, but all you really need to know is that our senior year, Coach Cravens would label Troy and me as two of the best senior captains he ever coached. Troy wasn't vocal by any means. He had a surfer-dude mentality, and he shaved his legs. He might be the only guy that has ever shaved his legs who I actually deign to call my friend. Troy had more nicknames than anyone else I ever knew, but “Frenchman” stuck over time. Troy had the long European nose that typifies the Frenchman. We even called him French Onion Soup from time to time.

In my very first game for Weber State University, wearing the purple of the Wildcats, I scored twenty-seven points.

 

Utah winters kill me. The inversion-induced smog that settles in the valleys during the winter plays hell with my sinuses and lungs. Every winter I have an annual bout with bronchitis as well as countless sinus infections. The bronchitis hit me early my junior year, right after Thanksgiving.
I chose to continue to practice through it, having some coughing and hacking fits on the side but making it through the day.

In December we went down to play Southern Utah and won a good game. Afterward, I coughed up some blood in the sink. My lungs and airway were not doing so well. We then flew to the Missouri Valley State tournament…and lost in a not-so-impressive game. I should've taken time off after this, as I'd be up late at night with coughing fits hunched over a boiling pot of water, breathing in the humid air to help break the layer of mucus blocking my windpipe.

I coughed so hard that blood came out of my throat, but then so did much of the mucus. I finally got to bed at 4 a.m. When I arrived at the Dee for practice the next day, Coach Cravens was in a bad mood because we had lost and was feeling it was time to give things a bit of an overhaul. He decided to run a little drill with the bigs; that meant we had to play post defense for however long he wanted us to. If we gave up a catch in the post, we had to run a sprint.

It was during about the twelfth subsequent sprint that I finally noticed that something wasn't right. A heavy pressure was building in my chest, but seemingly on the outside of the lungs, forcing them to collapse, as I couldn't take a deep breath. If I fought it, a choking sensation would squeeze my windpipe. It was very painful, and I was growing light-headed and very irritated. And my inhaler wasn't helping. The next play, I was up. Coach threw a lob over my head, and I blocked Anthony Jackson's shot from behind, still knowing I was going to be running, since Anthony had caught it in the first place. I ripped the ball from Tony's hands and gave it a good boot into the nosebleed section of the Dee.

“OK, Lance. Here's another one,” Coach said sarcastically as he rolled a new ball to me. “You wanna kick that one, too?” I wasn't going to say no, so I took the second ball and gave it a good boot as well.

“Good job, Lance. Now you can go up and get the two balls.”

I jogged the steps of the Dee, each step causing a burning not only in my legs but in my chest as well. Something was wrong, but what was I going to say? “
Coach, I can't breathe
”? That was the oldest trick in the book, but also the last one you want to use, as it tells a basketball coach one thing only—that you're out of shape. And I wasn't.

Retrieving the two balls, I ran back down to the court, where the group was waiting for me. If I was going to die, I wanted my last act to be a defiant one.

Before Coach could even say a word, Anthony threw the ball in the stands himself and began yelling in my face. To top it off, he began to shove me—right in the chest, right where it hurt. He was hitting the pressure point, making me nearly keel over in submission as he cussed me out. “You think I like doing this stupid drill? Huh?” he yelled, pushing me again. “Grow up!” He berated and reprimanded me for a good twenty seconds, but I was too short of breath to even respond. But that was Anthony; he always meant well.

Practice finally ended, and I went home to my apartment. I got Mac and drove home to Salt Lake, as I knew something was wrong. When I got to Mom and Dad's, I tried lying down for a while, but that actually made the pain worse. Mom finally took me to the ER. Three hours and seven bleeding drunk idiots later, my X-rays revealed that I had torn a hole in my windpipe, or rather I had coughed a hole in my windpipe. The mucus buildup had been so strong and thick that my skin and muscle were easier to rip through than the mucus. The X-ray showed air pockets surrounding the lungs, which explained the pressure that was pushing down on them, bringing them near to collapse.

The doctor said I'd be out for three weeks. But the doctor didn't know me and my stubborn inaneness.

For a week I slept in Mom and Dad's guest room, working on my senior thesis. Even though I was a junior athletically, the combined inactive gray and redshirt years allowed me to be well ahead of schedule to graduate before my NCAA eligibility expired.

One week is all I'd sit out, not wanting to let my teammates down. Mom wasn't happy, but she acknowledged by this point that I was a twenty-two-year-old man and could make my own choices. “Just be careful,” she said, as though I was running around with a pair of scissors, not a broken windpipe.

I walked into the locker room and gave all my teammates a hug. The next game up was against BYU in Provo. Slobodan Ocokoljic ended up sitting out with the flu, while I played with a punctured windpipe. The game was close at first, but thanks to me and a couple of bonehead turnovers early in the second half, BYU pulled away. I should not have come back so soon. I was seeing stars for most of the game, and I recall it only as a blur.

I mostly remember just getting a whole lot of elbow in my throat and face from their starting center, Rafael Araújo. Now, don't get me wrong: Haffa, as he is called, has a decent shooting touch and runs the floor very
well for his size. But he got away with some pretty dirty stuff because he was a star and the Mountain West Conference was banking on him being an NBA draft pick. In fact, they let him get away with murder.
*

Araújo was allowed to camp in the key and just stand there. It was their home court and their officials. To my frustration, and apparently unnoticed by the officials, Araújo would seal me above him and wait in the key for a lob to be thrown to him, placing his forearm in my throat, giving me an all-too-close view of his many charming tattoos, most of them of Japanese markings; I'm sure he had no clue as to what they meant but thought they looked pretty. He would then push against my throat, catch the pass, score the layup, and run back down to the other end, pounding his chest in a fit of excited 'roid rage as the BYU faithful cheered and the angels of heaven blew their trumpets. Hooray, Jesus!

The next day in practice Coach Cravens had us sit down in the film room and drew up a stat on the board: “33–1.”

“What is this, Lance?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“This is how many minutes you played,” he said, pointing to the
33.

“This is how many rebounds you had.” He pointed to the
1.
He then punched the whiteboard and spoke a few unkind words, after which he announced I'd be coming off the bench and would no longer be starting. I sat there and didn't say a word. I could've whined about how I was playing in pain, but I never want to be that guy. So much for trying to come back early with a broken windpipe. I should've stayed in bed like Slobodan.

No one likes a hero.

If you want the glory, you have to be ready to accept the blame.

 

That January, the University of Utah came up to play us. As I walked into the Dee, luck had it that Coach Majerus and I would cross paths, alone, in an empty hallway.

“Hello, Coach.”

“Hello, Lance.”

The game came and I wasn't starting, as Cravens feared I'd try to do too much. Utah jumped out to an early 12–4 lead before Coach put me in. A few of my old teammates at Utah—Nick Jacobson, Tim Frost, and “Big Red” Chris Jackson—greeted me as I stepped onto the floor. My first bucket was a three-pointer from the top, one that Majerus would never have allowed me to shoot and furthermore didn't believe I could shoot.

I ended with ten points at the half, and we were down by only four. The second half, Utah's defense shifted priorities and I was no longer so free to score. It was a hard-fought game, but when the Utes got a lead, it was hard to crack it. They slammed on the brakes to slow down the game and wear the clock thin, limiting our opportunities to catch up the score.

When it was over, my old teammates at Utah gave me a hug and congratulated me on the good game. Eric Jackson and Scott Garson were all there at the end to pat me on the back, and Coach Rupp hugged me and told me he was proud of me. I quickly walked off the floor. Majerus shook no hands.

I went to my locker and cried—mostly out of relief. It was over. My ghosts were silenced.

When I came out of the locker room, Dad and Mom were talking with Chris Jackson's parents.

“Lance! Great game! I didn't know you could shoot like that. You do so many things!” Mr. Jackson said, barely concealing his amazement.

I smiled. “There are a lot of things I can do, I just wasn't allowed to do them.”

He gave me a knowing smile and shook my hand good-bye.

Two days later I was told that Gordon Monson, the
Salt Lake Tribune
sportswriter who had wanted to interview me when I was playing for Majerus, wanted to do an interview with me. And this time my coach wouldn't be saying no to block the interview.

But I was nervous. I was terrified of the long-term ramifications that telling my story would have, not only on me, but on my family, as Mom and Tara were still in school at the U. I called Dad and told him the situation.

“What should I do, Dad?”

“What do you think you should do?”

“Well, I'm happy now. I've moved on, and I have a nice life here in Ogden. So I don't know if there's really any point in telling my story anymore. I don't want to ruin anything for the family.”

Dad asked one more question, and it was all I needed.

“Lance,” he said, and then paused. “What do you think is the right thing to do?”

Two hours before practice, I walked into the Dee and met Gordon Monson for the first time: “Gordon Monson, the man who ruined my life. Nice to finally meet you.”

He gave me a confused look, and when we were at last alone in the Wildcat club room, he sat down and took out his pad and pen. “OK, well, first things first: What do you mean, I ‘ruined' your life?” he asked worriedly.