Gillispie meets woman who will save his life

SAN ANTONIO – For more than two decades Billy Gillispie has been coming to the Final Four, whether it be in search of jobs, connections or glory. But this year, the longtime college basketball coach came mostly to meet a woman who on Friday night wore a red dress and a radiant smile.

Standing near the center of the room at a private party she was hosting, the woman called over her two young sons to meet Gillispie.

“He’s the guy I’m giving my kidney to,” she said.

While the men’s basketball teams from Loyola-Chicago, Michigan, Kansas and Villanova went through final preparations for their games Saturday at the Alamodome, a quiet moment was unfolding nearby. Gillispie and Ericka Downey, a 33-year-old mother and wife of a Division II college basketball coach, were meeting for the first time before kidney transplant surgery, tentatively set for April 24 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

In December, Gillispie, 58, was diagnosed with kidney failure. Within six months, his doctor told him, he would need to begin dialysis — unless he had kidney a transplant. Gillispie later learned there were more than 100,000 people waiting for a healthy kidneys, and about 4,000 people a year who don’t get them soon enough die.

But there was no such conversation on Friday night in front of Downey’s sons, 12-year-old Drew and 6-year-old Bryce.

“Do you play basketball?” Gillispie asked.

The son of a Texas cattle truck driver in and a self-described workaholic, Gillispie ascended the coaching ranks and led teams at Texas El-Paso and Texas A&M to the NCAA tournament three times in his first five years as a college head coach. And in 2007, after guiding Texas A&M to the Sweet 16 in for the first time In 27 years, it was off to Kentucky, where Gillispie took over one of the most hallowed programs in college basketball.

He was fired in 2009 after two seasons. Arrested later that year on charges of drunken driving. Accused in 2012 of overpracticing players at Texas Tech after just one season at the school.

Citing health concerns, he left Texas Tech.

Gillispie ended up at at Ranger College, a community college about 90 miles west of Fort Worth, where he was in his third season when he checked into the emergency room on Thanksgiving with a persistent cough and bad headaches. He said he thought a steroid shot would solve the problem before a battery of tests a nearby hospital.

“When the hospital personnel come in and they start saying, ‘Do you have a will’ and ‘What is your religious preference,’ that gets your attention in a big hurry,” Gillispie said. “I said, ‘Do what?’ They said we’re not concerned it’ll go down that fast, but this is serious. You’ve got a serious condition here.”

Less than four months later, here he was meeting Ericka Downey.

“And you’re getting my left kidney,” she told Gillispie as the room begin to fill up with college coaches. “Left is my best side.”

The two eventually drifted into different parts of the room and Gillispie reflected

on all that has transpired over the past four months.

“I don’t know why and what would prompt anyone to do that other than that it’s God’s grace,” he said.

***

On Dec. 16, a Saturday, Ericka Downey was home in Tahlequah, Okla. Her husband is head coach at Northeastern State, a Division II college, and Ericka was cleaning a cluttered bedroom closet when she decided to take a break and picked up her phone.

That’s when she read story in the Dallas Morning News.

Gillispie has been told he needs a kidney transplant “ASAP,” the newspaper reported.

“I was aware of who he was, but I’d never seen him coach, never seen a game with him on the sideline,” she said.

But Ericka Downey said she felt a calling to help, and she did her best to circulate the story on social media before she became part of it. With no potential donor candidates emerging, Downey talked to her husband about exploring where she could be the donor.

“He told me I was crazy, which we knew,” she said. “And we laughed about it. But I really felt like it was initiated in faith. That was the initial pull.

“So I was like, ‘All right, I think this is how it’s going to go. If it’s not God, if he’s not involved in this, then I won’t be a match and we’ll continue to advocate for coach Gillispie. But we’ll know that it’s not meant to be, that I’m not supposed to be the donor. And as my husband says so often, everything just kept coming back positive and positive and positive.”

Then in January, Ericka Downey got a message on Twitter from Josh Mills, one of Gillispie’s former assistants. Mills told her she had seen the efforts she was making on social media to help find Gillispie a kidney donor.

“I’ve shared with Coach what you’re doing and he wants to say thank you,” she recalled Mills writing. “Here’s his cell (number). Will you reach out to him?”

She called, but there was no answer. So then she texted, and Gillispie texted back.

“He was so thankful,” she said. “But he didn’t know I was a donor at that point.”

In mid-February, Ericka Downey heard from the Mayo Clinic and texted Gillispie again.

“We match,” she wrote, adding that she would be going to the Mayo Clinic, where Gillispie had extensive medical tests, to undergo a battery of tests that would determine if they were compatible for the surgery.

Friday night, at the party Ericka Downey annually hosts for up to 50 coaches — those she and her husband have worked with and gotten to know over the years — a man in a dark blue suit and a red-and-blue blended tie looked a little unsure of himself as he stepped into the room.

Mark Downey guided Gillispie to Ericka, who stood near the center of a private room filling up with coaches. Last year, she said, she smoked cigars with legendary coach Bob Huggins, and so she looked right at home. But time froze for a moment when she was introduced to Gillispie.

The two embraced.

“I’ve always had teams that really were sacrificing for each other,” Gillispie said. “And she’s making the ultimate sacrifice.”