Gonzaga star is singularly determined

In the days after his open heart surgery last month, Ronny Turiaf would wake up in his bed at Stanford University Medical Center to a beautiful sight.

OK, two beautiful sights. Daylight is pretty hard to beat, and so that’s the first.

The other was a Los Angeles Lakers jersey dangling above him.

“We brought him a uniform with his name on it,” said Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak, “and he wanted us to hang it up right in front of his bed so it would be the first thing he’d see.”

And it’s still the first thing – maybe the only thing – he sees.

The road to recovery has brought Turiaf back to Spokane and the extended family of Gonzaga basketball, and he is grateful to be returned to its embrace. But he is determined – no, he is certain – that it will be merely a detour, and in his first public comments since the surgery to repair a dilated aortic root this notion fell somewhere between message and mantra.

In fact, it’s been that way since the anesthesiologist put him under.

“Oh, hell, yeah,” he said Friday during a low-key media gathering in the Herak Room at McCarthey Athletic Center. “There was no way I was going to let that stuff hold me back from not playing basketball again.”

Later, he was even more specific.

“I know for a fact,” he said, “that I will wear that purple-and-gold next year.”

Well, now. We have come a long way in four weeks.

When Turiaf’s condition was revealed on July 22 – after he’d been selected by the Lakers in the National Basketball Association draft, signed to a million-dollar contract and shown well in the pro summer league – the feelings of friends and fans came crashing in one on top of the other: shock, distress, denial, fear. The details of the condition weren’t easily understood, but we knew it was his heart and we know that as trouble. Strong young men have died in the act of basketball because of undetected heart conditions; we were grateful that Turiaf’s had been spotted by the Lakers’ doctors before another tragedy could occur. And at a press conference in El Segundo, Turiaf himself wept, lashed out and then put on his best face to acknowledge that his Gonzaga education and his own innate gifts gave him options other than basketball.

Now it’s back to basketball, a gift that apparently has been given back to him – or at least been placed within his reach.

It is still difficult to fathom. The Turiaf who showed up Friday looked, as one guest put it, “like he did when he was a freshman.” His weight is down 25 pounds to 226. His rehabilitation regimen includes some biking – “for 10 to 15 minutes” – and dribbling a basketball at a jog.

“But my heart rate goes up pretty fast on a basketball court,” he admitted.

He cannot yet lift weights. He must monitor his fatigue with naps. Putting on his socks can be a struggle.

“And I’m crabby sometimes,” he said, “as usual.”

But his playfulness remains – he spoke of starting work on “six-pack” abs and being able to “go to the beach and not be ashamed of my stomach.” He revealed that his surgeon, Dr. Craig Miller, inundated him with Stanford gear – blankets, a hat, 4XL T-shirts – hoping to compromise his allegiances.

It didn’t work, but Turiaf was relieved to be in Miller’s care.

“He had the best interests for me,” Turiaf said. “He just wanted to get me back on the basketball court. We talked about it. I told him it was a blow for me and he said, ‘You came to the right place – I’m going to fix you up.’ Once he told me that, I knew I was in the right place.

“And after I play that first NBA game, he’d better get ready because I’m going to take him to dinner. And I’ll wear some of that Stanford gear, too.”

Kupchak, whose club heroically stepped forward to cover the costs of surgery and pre-operative care even after Turiaf’s contract was voided by agreement, conceded the strangeness of this now accelerated timeline, but noted that it was born out of lack of information more than anything.

“Our first concern, of course, was getting him to the point where his life was not in danger and that he could lead a normal life,” Kupchak said. “Anything beyond that, we’ve always considered a bonus.

“During the discovery of the ailment and the different methods of treatment, it was a pretty volatile three or four days. One day it was ‘He’ll never play again’ and the next day there was a good chance. But at the end of the day, the doctor who did the surgery didn’t see any reason why he could not play basketball – including professional basketball – again. And his timetable was less than half a year. He’s been very optimistic.”

And the Lakers?

“Our approach is, when he’s ready and able,” Kupchak said, “then we’ll look at the basketball side of things and we’ll proceed from there. We are very hopeful that he wears a Lakers uniform one day.”

Turiaf is neither reckless nor unrealistic about the time and struggle it will take for that to happen, but he looks at it more as an absolute.

“Why would they tell me that (he couldn’t play) if they fix my heart?” he said. “My aorta is not big. I don’t have high blood pressure. There is no question mark, so there is no need to tell me I can’t play basketball if my heart is fine.

“So I will play basketball. Unless you don’t want me to.”

There’s that playfulness again. Turiaf knows there isn’t a basketball fan out there who doesn’t want to see him playing, running the floor like a colt, timing an exquisite block, bringing Jack and Dyan to their feet with another ferocious dunk.

And yet…

In some haunting news on Friday came word that Kenyon Jones – the last non-Zag to be named West Coast Conference player of the year, as a center with USF back in 2000 – has died at the age of 27, of a reported heart attack. There were no details, no suggestion his condition was even remotely similar to Turiaf’s, no reason to think there’s a link or a parallel.

But he was a young man, with friends and fans of his own, and basketball gifts – he had played professionally the past four years in Greece. And now he is gone.

It again drives home the blessing that Turiaf’s condition was detected when it was and the grace that he played without incident before. That it was correctable, not as bad as it could have been, and would seem to give him the opportunity to resume what he’s so driven to do.

That doesn’t mean we won’t harbor some anxiety, even as we watch a beautiful sight.