Next steps

As he lay in the ambulance en route to CedarsSinai, Iwuchukwu called his mother, at work in San Antonio. She, like her son’s coaches, was initially skeptical of his story.

“He says, ‘You can’t hear the ambulance?’ I said, ‘I can hear the ambulance but the ambulance might be passing by or what,’” Anastecia recounted. “And then I guess one of the paramedics took the phone from him.”

Realizing the severity of the situation, Anastecia looped her husband into the call. At that moment, no one knew if Iwuchukwu had suffered a heart attack or cardiac arrest. Just that he had undergone a life-threatening situation, and that Yonamine and the rest of the USC staff had brought him back.

“It’s not only the quick reaction, what they did at that moment, it’s something that none of us will forget,” Vincent Sr. said. “The school as a whole throughout this recovery period, everybody was there with him.”

With the incident occurring on the Friday before the Fourth of July, Iwuchukwu’s parents could not get on a flight that evening. Vincent Sr. left the next day, then Anastecia and Iwuchukwu’s sisters joined him in Los Angeles.

So it was hours and days of waiting to see their son, with one comfort.

“The good thing is that he called,” Anastecia said. “Imagine someone else calling. It would have been more trauma.”

As Iwuchukwu stayed at Cedars-Sinai for four days, doctors ran tests. They determined he had suffered cardiac arrest, but could not find a cause. An idiopathic, freak event.

This led one doctor at the hospital to tell Iwuchukwu that he would likely never play basketball again.

“I told my parents, ‘It’s fine, I only played basketball for four years. I don’t really need it that much,’” Iwuchukwu recalled. “After I said that, I just broke into tears.”

While his parents are from Nigeria originally, Iwuchukwu was born in Germany. There, he learned to play and love soccer. It wasn’t until seventh grade, living in South Korea, that Iwuchukwu played basketball for the first time, and discovered he hated it. He soon quit and returned to soccer.

But when his family moved to Texas, his new school did not have a soccer team. Given his long, lean body type was a poor fit for football, Iwuchukwu reluctantly started basketball again. In the summer after eighth grade, an AAU coach told Iwuchukwu he would never amount to anything in basketball.

Taking that and his disdain for the coach’s son as motivation, Iwuchukwu set a goal: Get good enough at basketball to beat the son in one-on-one, then quit. He achieved that goal, then discovered something.

“That process of beating his son was fun, and that’s when I started falling in love with the game of basketball,” Iwuchukwu said.

That’s why the doctor’s proclamation broke Iwuchukwu. After days of trying to stay strong for his parents, he cried. Vincent Sr. tried to pat him on the back, but he too had to excuse himself from the room, crushed at seeing his son’s dreams ended.