Basketball may be in past, but Ronny has a future

The news is terrible, crushing. A life is turned upside down, a dream fractured.

And the first thing you do is give thanks. Because it isn’t worse news.

Because it isn’t the worst news.

The basketball part of Ronny Turiaf’s life may well be over and that is an utter shock, but there is still a life yet – marked by the same transcendent spirit and preternatural glow that seduced the Gonzaga community and pretty much all of Spokane these past four years.

But had Thursday’s news not been so desperately awful, we might have learned too soon how truly horrible it could be to not be able to say just that: That there is still a life.

“As hard as this is for Ronny,” said his Gonzaga coach, Mark Few, “this is a blessing, too.”

Turiaf, the oft-proclaimed Pied Piper of Gonzaga basketball, will come before the cameras and microphones in Los Angeles today and try to explain the inexplicable – how a strong and vibrant tower of a man has been betrayed by a faulty heart at the age of 22.

He will be asked to detail his emotions upon learning that he has an enlarged aortic root, that he faces open heart surgery sometime within the next six weeks and that his basketball career – ever more promising after the Los Angeles Lakers picked him in the second round of last month’s National Basketball Association draft and only last week signed him to a two-year, $1 million contract – may be history.

At Gonzaga, Turiaf showed himself to be a soul possessed of almost too many emotions.

How can he possibly make room for so many more?

At this point, there are only questions and no bottom line, though on Thursday evening Lakers spokesman John Black tried to trace an outline of optimism.

“Our hope for this,” Black said, “and my understanding is if the (aortic) valve does not have to be replaced in the surgery, that there is a chance he will be able to resume his playing career.”

Obviously, there is a dark flipside. Valve replacement, Black suggested, figures to end Turiaf’s career.

That shadow has been lurking for some time, though it was a secret Turiaf and his confidants apparently kept to themselves, perhaps not wanting to contemplate the worst.

Everything else about him was pretty much on display for all to see. Arriving from his native Martinique via high school in Paris just four years ago, the 6-foot-10 Turiaf grew into the public face of Gonzaga basketball – and only in part because he was three times an all-league player and last year’s West Coast Conference player of the year. His trademarks were as outsized as he was – thunderous dunks, windmill blocks, crazy expressions, that incredible hair.

His character grew bigger beyond the court, to the point that he was on a first-name basis with an entire city. Turiaf became a virtual campus mascot – instant friend to every secretary and security guard, a caring listener and general life-enhancer.

But what Turiaf never told us is that there was something wrong with his heart – the actual heart, not the metaphorical one that characterized his play.

Black said Turiaf had been cleared to play by doctors at the NBA’s pre-draft camp in Chicago in June and years before that in France, though an abnormality had been detected. In Chicago, he’d been diagnosed with a dilated aortic root – which the Lakers were aware of on draft day – but doctors there concluded that it shouldn’t prevent him from playing.

But a physical to validate the contract he agreed to last week prompted the Lakers to send him to four different doctors for opinions, and all agreed he shouldn’t play basketball.

“We felt that his condition was much more serious than what the doctors in Chicago and France saw,” Black said. “Obviously, he’s known that there’s been something abnormal for a while on this, but he’s been assured by the doctors who gave him those physical exams that he’s fine.”

Few said the doctors in France “said he had a large heart, but he’s a large person” and that he was never given an indication Turiaf might be at any uncommon risk.

They might call it medical science, but it’s not an exact science. It’s pointless to suggest one doctor may be too skittish or another not cautious enough, and far better to applaud the prudence of this latest consensus.

One only has to remember the tragedy that was visited upon Loyola Marymount’s Hank Gathers in 1990, when his heart virtually exploded in a game at the WCC tournament in Los Angeles and died in front of a horrified crowd.

It was as grisly a scene as sports has ever witnessed, and it need not be repeated.

Black told reporters at the Lakers’ El Segundo training facility that “one of the doctors said to me that (he thought) there was probably a 75 percent chance that within a three- to four-year period, (Turiaf) probably would have had a serious episode, a potentially fatal episode – just through everyday living – without this being corrected by surgery.”

And obviously, an NBA regimen is not just everyday living.

“By our doctors finding this,” Black said, “we believe we’ve saved his life.”

This is the perspective that Turiaf is no doubt trying to comfort himself with today, even in the wake of the personal high of being picked by the Lakers, signed to a contract that guaranteed him at least a year in the league and the opportunity to play for a future Hall of Fame coach in Phil Jackson.

“I talked to him today,” Few said from Las Vegas, where he was on recruiting business. “He was in good spirits, considering.

“I told him I’d jump on a plane and come down there and be with him and he just said to hold off until he knew what he was going to do. ‘Then we can all make plans,’ he told me.

“He said he was going to be all right.”