Before my senior year started, I decided to tag along with my friend Josh Lund one summer and volunteer at a weeklong muscular-dystrophy camp. Each camper was paired with a counselor. There were two campers assigned to each two-bed room, while the volunteers slept on the floor.
I was afraid that while I was sleeping I wouldn’t hear my camper in the middle of the night if he needed assistance, and so I wanted Josh, who understood my hearing impairment, to be with me. He was happy to arrange it so that he and I would be roommates, as he had enough clout with the higher-ups to arrange it. Plus, he was dating a girl who could make the switch. Yes, there are politics even at MDA—Muscular Dystrophy Association—camp.
I had a camper named J.D., who was confined to a wheelchair. A very somber and quiet kid, J.D. was interested in Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, and other various board games. He wasn’t the biggest socialite and neither was I, so we did well together. Josh, on the other hand, had a camper named Abram, who was eighteen and who, because of age limitations, would be making this his last camp experience.
Abram thus used the week to his fullest potential, squeezing every ounce of socializing that he could from any situation. His main MO was to take his stereo out into the hall during our long afternoon breaks and listen to Depeche Mode, setting a little trap that would create conversation with anyone who walked by. Josh, meanwhile, would sit beside him, saying nary a word. It was, during these breaks that I’d take a nap as J.D. happily watched TV. It became a routine, and on most days, while Abram was organizing his playlist of songs for that day’s hall mingling, I would turn to J.D. and ask, “J.D., what do you want to do? Watch TV?” J.D. would grunt, “Yeah,” and then I’d give a silent fist pump in relief, hand him the remote, and lay myself down to sleep.
Despite nap time, camp was hard work. Josh and I had to wake up early to take a shower and then give our campers showers and get them ready for the day. And, concerned about not being able to hear J.D. at night while I was asleep on the floor, I had the brilliant idea of tying a string from J.D.’s hand to mine before we got ready for bed; I figured that that way, I’d be awakened if he needed my assistance. The system didn’t last very long. Either the string would break or J.D. wouldn’t give a strong enough pull on my arm. Either way, I’d be awakened in the middle of the night by Josh turning on the light as he stood over J.D. The first few times, I’d get up and put my hearing aids in while J.D. would mumble something incoherently. I had no idea what he was trying to say and neither did Josh, and so our default response was just to roll him over on his other side so he wouldn’t get bedsores. That usually did the trick. Eventually, after J.D. had cried wolf a number of times, I’d sit up when Josh turned the light on and ask, “J.D., are you OK?” And before he could whimper a response, I’d say, “OK, cool,” and lie back down, leaving Josh to attend to my camper. I essentially was asking Josh to pull a triple shift at nighttime and to be a volunteer not only for his assigned camper but for J.D. as well—and, furthermore, for me. Josh Lund, my little soldier.
Abram had an assistance dog named Icon. Icon was a well-trained dog, stoic like a German housewife, always on guard. But all I had to do was say, “Oh ya boo! Oh ya boo boo, doo doo!” and Icon, like a guard at Buckingham palace, would do his best not to show emotion—in his case, not wag his tail. But every time, I’d get him: his tail would lightly twitch. And Abram, feeling his dominion over his dog threatened, and appalled that anyone could trump his authority, would shout, “No, Icon.” A shamed look would come over Icon’s face as he returned to attention. At the end of the day Abram would let Icon off duty and the yellow lab would jump up on my bed and cuddle with me while I scratched his feet, which he loved. The love triangle reached its greatest degree of tension when Icon chose to sleep with me rather than on his assigned blanket.
Along with charitable events such as MDA camp come pretty girls. There were lots of them. Often when J.D. and I were out and about at the zoo or the atrium and pretty girls were walking by with their female campers, I’d say to J.D., “OK, bud, help me look good.” J.D. knew his role. I’d pull out some sunscreen and dot a little on his nose, and when I finished I’d give J.D. a little pinch on his cheek and then casually look up, like what I had done was no big thing, like I was hoping no one had noticed how altruistic I was being. But of course I wasn’t hoping that at all. I was cheating at solitaire. In a setting where it wasn’t about me but about my camper, I proved to myself that true altruism isn’t possible.
Even if a volunteer isn’t there to impress members of the opposite sex or gain praise, there are some people who put their volunteer work with the MDA or other societies on their résumés, which defeats the purpose. And there are some who keep their deeds entirely secret. But even those who don’t put their deeds on their résumés, like my friend Josh, still feel the intrinsic reward of knowing they did something good, something charitable, something selfless. Now, does that warm, fuzzy feeling they get when they recall their good, altruistic deeds rob those deeds of any altruism in some way, seeing as how those folks are rewarding themselves with a boost of self-worth?
The argument about whether altruism is possible is synonymous with the question of whether it’s possible to be a selfless Christian. Even if we’re silent in our charitable deeds, are we not, as Christians, still hoping that God is watching us and that he will reward us, thus making our actions indeed selfish? I believe there’s a God who loves me, but I don’t plan on that making a difference. I don’t plan on being rewarded in heaven, as I feel this helps my deeds be more altruistic. Planning on a heaven leads to expectations, and expectations lead to a sense of entitlement.
Charity and altruism come with a catch–22. Whether you have a deck of cards that you’re memorizing before you play, like my father, or you’re blindly convincing yourself that you’re indeed being totally altruistic—either way, we’re always cheating at solitaire.
Having graduated at the end of my junior season and having received Academic All-America honors, I decided that after all that hard work, with an athletic year to spare, I was going to take pass/fail courses with those of my favorite professors who knew of my situation.
The season was under way. I was in good shape and feeling good about the direction things were going. But then I received one of the stupidest, most painful injuries of my life.
We were two weeks into the season, preparing for our first game against Utah Valley State, and Coach Hunsaker, now with the Wolverines. The game was three days away, and before practice I decided to get in a lift in the weight facility. I was doing bench presses, and when I had completed them I began stripping the plates off the bar. I reached for the last plate on the bar, a forty-five-pounder, and began sliding it off. But stopped in the process, leaving the plate on the bar, to wipe away a drop of sweat that was close to landing in my hearing aid. Seeing as how hearing aids are so valuable, I protect them whenever I feel sweat or water coming near them. Thing is, the plate came off the bar.
It fell four feet and thudded, standing upright, onto my big toe. It remained there for a split second before tilting off of my foot and plopping onto the ground. I stood there in complete shock. The wave of pain was so strong that it actually didn’t register up to my brain, instead sending me into shock. Your toes and fingers are a rich source of nerve endings, and the signal to my brain, alerting it of pain, crashed from the huge flux of data. Quicker than I have ever seen before, sweat started to form around my hair and brow and just poured down my face.
I looked around to see if anyone had seen my ridiculous error. The weight room was empty. (It’s amazing how my impulse to make sure I had not embarrassed myself trumped my impulse to ask for help.)
I took a step over to a bench to have a seat, but my foot wouldn’t fire. The muscles were in total shutdown. I instead hopped over to the bench on one leg and untied my shoe. When I pulled my foot out, my sock was already red and dripping with blood. I pulled off my sock to see that my big toe looked like a waffle. The weight plate had not landed on the toenail, but just beneath it, at the joint. The blow of the landing had created so much pressure that it had forced the entire nail, including the nail bed, to erupt out of its place, tearing through the flesh around it. I grabbed the base of the big toe and squeezed the life out of it. I didn’t move for ten minutes. I just sat there, choking the life out of my toe until it was blue with lack of blood. The flowing stream had stopped, and instead, a clear, yellowish ooze began to pour from the nail bed.
Coach Hohn finally came in and saw me sitting down. He walked over, about to ask why I had stopped working, but then went white upon seeing all the blood. “What the hell did you do?”
“Oh…I just dropped the plate on my toe,” I said matter-of-factly.
He went across the lot to get a trainer, who came in and awkwardly dabbed at my toe and bandaged it with gauze. I then hopped across the parking lot toward the training room, where I lay on the ground and propped my foot up against the trainer counter, sighing at the release of pressure. I was still in shock, but trust me, I still felt pain. So much pain that I was high and woozy. I drifted in and out of consciousness as people came and went from the training room, looking over at me and wondering what on earth I was doing lying in the middle of the floor, taking up all that space. I waited for a half hour for Joel Bass to get to the training room.
Joel was a hard-ass. He was as rustic and hardened as they come. But he is squeamish around blood, which is odd for an athletic trainer. When he came into the room, he dropped his equipment bag, short of breath, and walked over to me.
“What the hell did you do?”
Sounding drunk, and using a lot of hand gestures, I slurred out as best as I could the story of what had happened.
Joel had me get up on the counter, where he hesitantly unwrapped the initial gauze job, tilting his head away as though he was changing a dirty diaper. He kept one eye on the toe as he faced the wall, talking to another person to help him deal with the crisis. He dried and dabbed my toe as though it were diseased.
He called the team doctor, who recommended a hand surgeon. But the surgeon was currently in surgery, and so I had to wait. Why I was seeing a hand surgeon and not a foot surgeon is call for speculation, but the hand surgeon was a specialist in repairing damaged nail beds, and what does it matter whether it’s a big toe or an index finger you’re repairing in the grand scheme of things? While I was waiting for him to be available, I had to go get the toe X-rayed.
When I stood up to walk to my car, the pressure all went back down to my foot, and I nearly began to cry right there in the training room. But I wasn’t going to cry in front of all the pretty female athletes. I quickly limped out of the room, leaving a trail of bloody toe prints on the carpet and in the hallway, thanks to the ooze from the cowardly, half-assed taping job that Joel had given me.
Thankfully, the plate had landed on my left foot, so I could still drive, pushing gas and brake pedals with ease. A pool of blood formed on the floorboard beneath the gas pedal as I zoomed over to the hospital. I walked in with only one shoe on, my bare foot sloshing blood with each step. The receptionist at the desk gave me a look that said We don’t serve your kind here as she forced a smile. She pointed me to an office, where I was quickly serviced with an X-ray. I was sitting in the office, keeping my foot up, pinching the arch as hard as I could, when the radiologist walked in with a pitying smile.
“You did quite a number on yourself,” he said as he pulled up the X-ray. “You made mashed potatoes.” He showed me where I had broken the bone in my big toe in two separate places.
All I could think about was the season.
“How long am I going to be out?”
“These take some time to heal. But it’s all up to you really, and how much pain you can tolerate.” He was a good doctor, allowing me to envision my own timetable. He knew I was nuts and had a high threshold for pain, as I had just driven myself to the hospital. The booster part of the doctor knew I was the team’s senior and returning leader in scoring and rebounding, and he was thinking about Weber State, not just me.
He continued: “The thing we have to ensure is that the bone does not get infected. The skin that you have ripped and torn around your nail bed is so close to the bone that it runs a high risk of infection. And if your bone does catch infection, then we’re looking at a six-month absence.” He was very stern about this, and I filed the information in my head.
I sloshed out of the office, following my bloody footprints back out of the hospital. Two hours later it was time to go back to the hospital and meet the surgeon. Opting for a local anesthetic, I gracefully handled the large needles of Novocain squeaking in and between the joints of my toe. Metal sliding through the cartilage of your joint isn’t a pleasant feeling.
He asked me if I wanted to repair the nail bed or remove it entirely. Looking back, I wish I had asked him to remove it entirely. But the vanity in me couldn’t imagine my having a nailless big toe, and so I asked him to repair it. He warned me that it would most likely grow back mutated and defective, which it did, and to this day it irritates my foot when I play. Why do we even have toenails? Can anyone really say? If evolution is a true concept, then by now—given our present-day dependence on shoes—the human race should’ve evolved to the point where toenails no longer exist. The only thing toenails are good for, for me at least, is pain and discomfort. I’ve lost count of the many toenails of mine that have been mangled by people stepping on them. I often contemplate having surgery to have all my toenails removed. No kidding.
The doctor took the nail bed and sewed it back in. He then clipped off what used to be my toenail and made a little shield with it to protect the damaged skin. He took the flaps of torn skin that were still salvageable and wrapped them around the nail shield to keep it down. Yes, I’m trying to gross you out.
I went home to Salt Lake City that night and slept. I woke up on Mom and Dad’s couch in the middle of the night screaming, as the local anesthetic had worn off and my body was no longer in shock. That was the rawest, most cruel pain I have ever felt, yet it was superficial pain. What is a broken toe and nail in the grand scheme of things? Nothing—but man, does it hurt! I couldn’t put my toe in ice water, which is my favorite painkiller: the stitches couldn’t get wet, lest they come loose and carry bacteria down beneath the skin, increasing the risk of the real worry, which was infection to the bone. I had to make do with a bag of cold vegetables, which hurt because of their weight on the toe. It was just miserable.
A week later, I laced up my shoes and walked onto the floor of the Dee Events Center, ready to play Southern Utah. A week into an estimated six-week timetable of recovery, I was back out on the court. People have called me a lot of things and will continue to do so, but no one who knows me can call me soft. Crazy maybe, but not soft.
I had eighteen points and seventeen rebounds that night, but to no avail, as we lost. It was a hard and humiliating defeat. Coach Cravens came into the locker room and chucked a whiteboard eraser to the back of the locker room, near Danko Barisic, who, having grown up in what is no longer Yugoslavia, instinctively flinched and covered his head. Yet the terrified look on Danko’s face said he was anything but war-hardened.
By late December, we were on a terrible losing streak. The only bright spot at the time was the national attention I was getting for leading the NCAA in rebounding. Andrew Bogut, who was at my former school, the University of Utah, and I put on an interesting show for the world to see. Throughout the season Bogut and I battled for the national rebounding title, going back and forth in a seesawing race. When we played head-to-head I came in with twenty and he had twenty-two. But he had seventeen rebounds that game and I had only seven. It was a pretty frustrating game, as their team scouted us well and knew we always sent two guards back on defense immediately when the shot was taken. So his teammates at the guard spots would come and block me out on either side, and Bogut chased down the rebound. I was inclined to dislike Bogut, but I knew he and Coach Rupp had a good relationship. If he was a friend of Rupp’s, he was a friend of mine.
How often does the basketball world get to see two big men, at universities only a half hour from one another, battling for an NCAA rebounding title? Not often. It was a special year.
As the regular season ended, I held the rebounding title at 12.4 rebounds per game. We had pulled off a great turnaround at the end of the season, winning our last seven conference games.
The next game, my second to last, was against tournament host Portland State. I got into quick foul trouble with two terrible calls. Terrible. I have the film to prove it. I was sent to the bench in the first two minutes of the game, where I sat and watched as my team destroyed Portland State. I ended up with three rebounds that game, and played only a few minutes. Coach and I agreed it was best that I sit out and watch, to spare my energy for the championship game the next day. For the sake of my team, hoping to better our chances of winning the tournament, I risked my rebounding title.
I lost both.
We played the University of Montana in the championship game. It was televised nationally on ESPN. We came out strong and led at halftime by ten, by which time I had also secured my twenty-first double-double of the season, with twelve points and ten rebounds at the half.
We lost by two. Jamaal Jenkins missed a last-chance Hail Mary from thirty-five feet out. I finished with twenty-four and twelve in my final collegiate game.
I went into the locker room and sobbed. My collegiate career was now over. Six long years. I was twenty-four years old.
I loved my teammates at Weber. But I was also glad to move on. Six long years of collegiate basketball, with coaches monitoring my actions 24/7, holding my hand and walking me to class, evaluating and judging everything I did, giving their two cents on each and every issue, whether I asked for it or not.
But I also knew that with it I’d be losing that camaraderie in the locker room, that rapport with my teammates. Since then, I have traveled around the globe with no team or home to call my own.
Many of the locker rooms I have occupied since college have been empty and cold. They can be like morgues, rusty, dripping faucets making the only noise as we all lace our shoes up in silence, with nothing to talk of or share other than the common denominator of money. No longer would I be laughing and mocking the coaches and those on the outside looking into the locker room. No longer would I be posting pictures of look-alike celebrities above the lockers of my teammates. No longer would I arm-wrestle on the floor as teammates wagered bets. No longer would I smile with my friends and peers—a team of men who committed and sacrificed for a game they love, without hope of pay or financial reward. Money didn’t talk in that locker at Weber. Only we talked.
The locker room, as I was warned so many times, is what I miss the most of my college days. We thought we were men, and we were, but we were also innocent.