The Riverside Press-Enterprise
`I GOTTA WAKE UP NOW'
USC'S Iwuchukwu, who survived a scary cardiac event last summer, is back
LOS ANGELES >> As USC’S players walked around the perimeter of the Galen Center court, shaking hands with fans following a win over Colorado, everyone wanted a little extra time with a player who had not recorded a single stat.
People stopped Vincent Iwuchukwu, the 7-foot-1 freshman who had just made his collegiate debut six months after suffering cardiac arrest at practice. They offered words of encouragement, and Iwuchukwu nodded politely, said thank you, even picked up a couple of babies like a political candidate.
But Iwuchukwu was waiting to get to the end of the procession. His parents, Anastecia and Vincent Sr., waited with four of his five sisters. When Iwuchukwu arrived, the family embraced.
“Having my mom and dad there and having my sisters there was everything,” Iwuchukwu said. “They are my rock.”
“That hug was a moment for us,” Vincent Sr. added. “We all told him, ‘We told you it was going to happen one day.’ We thank God for everything. It was a moment.”
The day of
A collective memory can be a tricky thing to get straight. Especially after a traumatic situation, when adrenaline spikes and details begin to blur together. But these are the generally accepted facts of July 1.
It was a summer workout. The team had lifted weights in the morning, and in the afternoon was going through an hourlong practice. As the team concluded its second period of action, assistant coach Eric Mobley noticed something different about Iwuchukwu.
The 19-year-old freshman had been having a good practice. But his energy was starting to lag, and when he caught a rebound,
the slap of hand against leather didn’t come with its usual pop. So as the team paused for a water break, Mobley suggested that head coach Andy Enfield check on Iwuchukwu.
“I was like, ‘I know he’s tired but there was something in the eyes,’” Mobley said. “I just watched him the whole time.”
Enfield dribbled a ball while speaking to Iwuchukwu, who was seated with a cup of water on USC’S bench. The freshman had started to feel dizzy soon after sitting down. When he began to shake, even Mobley thought Iwuchukwu was simply goofing around.
“Because he jokes all the time,” Mobley explained. But then Iwuchukwu began to slump over to his side. “When the water spilled over, I knew it was serious. I ran over here as fast as I could.”
Mobley had been on the court for a similar incident with a more tragic ending 33 years previously. Mobley was a captain on the Portland basketball team when it played Loyola Marymount in the 1990 West Coast Conference tournament. During that game, Mobley was being guarded by Hank Gathers when his opponent collapsed to the court, shaking and convulsing with a fatal cardiac event.
So Mobley recognized Iwuchukwu’s loss of motor function and rushed forward. In that moment, the rest of the USC staff realized it had an emergency on its hands and training kicked in.
Mobley helped move Iwuchukwu into a laying position on the Galen sideline. Enfield and graduate manager Jack Gentry rushed to retrieve the automated external defibrillator (AED) from the wall in the tunnel leading to the locker room. Director of basketball operations Michael Swets pressed the silver button on an emergency call box outside the locker room, connecting him to university emergency services. Meanwhile, strength coach Kurtis Shultz called 911 as a backup.
And director of scouting Kurt Karis ran to the training room to find athletic trainer Jon Yonamine, who had left the court during the water break.
All converged around Iwuchukwu, now lying on his back on the court. The rest of the USC players were sent to the locker room as Yonamine and trainers Erin Tillman and Lauren Crawford of the women’s basketball and volleyball teams began to administer CPR.
“To see our trainers perform CPR in a life-anddeath situation, they deserve just amazing accolades for what they did,” Enfield said. “They did an incredible job.”
USC declined to make Yonamine available for comment on this story.
As the rest of the studentathletes were directed to return to the locker room, Yonamine placed the pads from the AED onto Iwuchukwu’s chest. All the while, Mobley was trying to encourage the semi-conscious freshman.
“I was just hitting him, yelling at him, ‘Vince don’t leave me.’ I don’t know what I was saying,” Mobley said. “I was like, ‘Stay awake,’ shaking him, tapping him. You could tell that he was kind of hearing me but he was like trapped in a box.”
Somehow, the assistant coach’s encouragement got through to Iwuchukwu.
“I felt like I was in deep slumber, in a void. Things in that void, I can’t really describe but it was definitely something. When I was starting to get back into consciousness, I was starting to hear Mobley’s voice,” Iwuchukwu said. “And then I heard, ‘Vince, don’t die on me.’ And that’s when I was like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ So I was like, ‘I gotta wake up now.’”
Yonamine charged the AED and deployed it. Iwuchukwu’s eyes opened. He was back.
“First thought was I had woken from a long dream, then I saw the court in front of me. Like, ‘Oh, I’m on the court,’” Iwuchukwu said. “So from there, I was like something really serious must have happened.”
Waiting
As all this unfolded, Iwuchukwu’s teammates sat in the locker room. Some prayed, others stared into space, wondering about the freshman’s fate. Mostly in silence.
“We all just had a little talk, keeping our spirits high,” freshman guard Tre White recalled.
But for 15 minutes, the Trojans waited, hoping for good news. Then Enfield and other coaches came into the locker room to tell them: Iwuchukwu was awake. He was stable. He was going to the hospital, but he was going to be OK.
“It was like, you see people have that like gravity and then all of a sudden there’s no gravity. It’s like everyone has a spin in their step,” redshirt junior center Joshua Morgan said. “Because we were just waiting on, ‘Is he OK? Is he not?’ The suspense, that’s someone’s life. That’s one of your teammates that you’re going to go a couple years with.”
Enfield thanked the players for their cooperation during the emergency, and told them they could reach out to Iwuchukwu while he was in the hospital. As Enfield returned to the court, Robin Scholefield from USC’S Department of Sports Psychology spoke to the players. Always a fixture with the team, she helped any players as they processed what they had witnessed.
“I didn’t see what the coaches and everyone else felt,” Iwuchukwu said. “If anything, I felt more toward my coaches and my teammates and people who had to see that happen to me than for me myself. That’s a tough situation to deal with, looking at someone go lifeless.”
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.
Not so fast
The next day, a new doctor was on duty. One who specialized in cardiac events with athletes. And he told Iwuchukwu a different story. He pointed to other athletes, like Kansas State’s Keyontae Johnson, who had suffered through cardiac arrest only to return to the court. There was still hope. When Iwuchukwu returned home from the hospital, USC sprung to action much in the same way the basketball team’s staff had done the week before. Athletic director Mike Bohn coordinated the effort as the university’s medical staff and specialists examined Iwuchukwu. Coaches drove him to appointments at Keck and the Mayo Clinic. He had a procedure to put an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator in his chest, to slow down his heart if it ever reached dangerous levels again.
All with the hope that Iwuchukwu would be able to return to the court, but also the understanding that it might not happen.
“(USC) supported him, encouraged him. I had one of them say, ‘Even if you don’t play again, you’re still going to have your education,’” Anastecia said. “All those words will make you feel OK and it sure meant a lot.”
But those first few months after the cardiac arrest were the hardest for Iwuchukwu. His goals of reaching the NBA in limbo, he felt aimless, unable to even dribble a basketball. He listened to music _ a lot of J. Cole and Drake _ and watched Korean television shows.
“I felt like I didn’t have anything to really look forward to. As an athlete, you look forward to getting better and going to practices every day and training,” Iwuchukwu said. “I started to miss those things so much and I felt like I didn’t have a purpose.”
Even as those issues weighed on Iwuchukwu’s mind, he tried to downplay them. He was at practice every day, cheering on his teammates from the sideline. Goofing around, talking trash. Just being Vince.
“I’ve never seen him come into the gym with a sad expression on his face,” Morgan said. “You really can’t tell that he was down.”
Iwuchukwu felt that was his responsibility to the team, to not be a detriment as he went through his internal struggle.
“The positivity was what I needed to stay sane,” he said. “The positivity kept me in a good place because there were a lot of negative thoughts and negative times.”
All the while, the question of whether Iwuchukwu should play again, even if the doctors cleared him, weighed on everyone’s minds. He and his parents did the best research they could, and had some hard conversations.
“My parents are so loving and understanding,” he said. “They have put a lot of time into research and talking to other people, into certain knowledge from other sources for us to make the decision that it’s OK for me to play again. Honestly, they trust in me and I trust in them.”
The return
It began slowly. First the stationary bikes and lifting weights. He stalled there for an interminable length of time. Then after Thanksgiving, Iwuchukwu could dribble again and shoot. In middecember, he was dunking, running the court, practicing five-on-air.
During Christmas break, Iwuchukwu was allowed to do full contact.
“That part was something else,” he laughed. “I felt like an old man. I couldn’t move.”
Then on Jan. 5, Vincent Sr. received a call from Enfield and Yonamine. Iwuchukwu had been cleared to play in his first game, albeit on a minutes restriction.
So again, Vincent Sr. and Anastecia had to schedule a flight to Los Angeles, under much happier circumstances. They were in the front row by the USC bench when Enfield paused in front of Iwuchukwu before spinning around and tapping the freshman on the shoulder, telling him not to forget his assignments.
“He definitely made sure that I had my head in the game. But honestly, my head was not in the game,” Iwuchukwu said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m playing again.’ It was so fun to be out there again.”
“It was very, very emotional. Especially when he was going through his rehab and it was hard to think about coming back or stuff like that,” Vincent Sr. added. “But seeing him doing what he was doing, it was a great moment for us.”
Iwuchukwu was clearly rusty in that first game, but is starting to round into shape. He played a career-high 26 minutes Saturday against Oregon State, and also set career marks with 19 points and seven rebounds.
“Just to see him running up and down, being crazy, being Vince, that’s what he’s here for and it’s just crazy to see full circle,” White said. “But I’m always watching him now, the whole team always just making sure he’s ok. Off the court, too, because that’s a traumatic experience.”
Iwuchukwu understands that, and USC is still taking precautions. A trainer is present when Iwuchukwu gets in extra work with Mobley during the mornings and between classes. He wears a device under his jersey to monitor his heart rate, which Shultz tracks at the scorer’s table during games.
But Iwuchukwu is still pressing forward, his goals of reaching the NBA still in mind after nearly having them taken away by chance.
“There’s what-ifs in everything that we do. Whatifs are what stops people from progressing,” Iwuchukwu said. “But once I touched the ball and actually started just playing basketball and not thinking about the outside things, I told myself it was fine.
“Fear is the biggest obstacle to jump in this whole path. I think I’ve done a pretty good job and I’ve had good guidance.”