Joy in Holiday’s life not from hoops
Ask Jrue Holiday about his favorite highlight of this breakout season, and the New Orleans guard won’t even mention a ball.
He’s too busy remembering all those shared glances with his baby girl, Jrue Taylor, the 19-month-old he once feared he might never meet.
“She loves seeing me at certain instances in the game — if there’s a timeout, or there’s a break — and I can look up to her and wave at her and blow a kiss,” said Holiday, whose Pelicans tip off against defending champion Golden State in a second-round NBA playoff series starting Saturday at Oracle Arena. “I think there’s joy in just knowing that my family’s OK. Being able to know that my home life is fine, I feel like it reflects the way that I play. (It’s) just knowing that my daughter gets to watch me play and she gets to come to the games. I can’t even describe how much joy that brings me.”
To understand why the 27-year-old Holiday’s soul is good again, you have to know the fear that he faced with his wife, Lauren, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and FIFA World Cup champion soccer player who retired from the U.S. women’s national team in July 2015 with dreams of raising their family.
In the summer of 2016, Holiday was preparing for his return to the Pelicans training camp. He had come in hobbling in 2014, when right leg surgery required a six-month rehabilitation leading into camp, and his start was slow as a result. He entered the 2015 camp in similar fashion; complications from the surgery had required a second procedure in which a screw was removed from his leg.
But this time, he never made it to camp, and his reasons for being away from the team were much more serious.
Not long after Lauren decided to retire from the national team, doctors dis- covered the source of head pain she’d been feeling during pregnancy: There was a benign brain tumor behind her right eye. Mother and child were at risk, and Jrue — who met Lauren during his freshman year at UCLA when she was a junior — wasn’t about to head to work.
Surgery would be required to remove the tumor at Duke University, and the urgency meant they couldn’t wait for Jrue Taylor to come out on her own time. Labor would be induced early, and the plan called for Jrue, Lauren and their new daughter to stay in North Carolina while the Pelicans played on.
“He came to us and said, ‘You know, with Lauren being ill, I have to talk to the Pelicans and tell them that I’m going to be with my wife,’ ” Jrue’s mother, Toya, told Pelicans.com last year. “‘And if they don’t want me to do that, I probably won’t play basketball again.’ … We (Toya and Jrue’s father, Shawn) were both proud of him, (and said), ‘Hey, we’re standing behind you. It’s not a big deal. You can go back to school. We’re good with that.’ I was really proud of him, because he could have ran away from that.”
Added Holiday in that same video, “As much as I love basketball, I love my family a hundred times more.”
The Pelicans not only supported the Holidays but also gave him their blessing to miss camp, preseason and the first 12 regular-season games. They stopped by to check on the family, too, with general manager Dell Demps and coach Alvin Gentry visiting North Carolina during the recovery. The owners of the team — the late Tom Benson and his wife, Gayle — agreed to give Jrue all the time he needed.
“I have never quite known suffering like I experienced the last 6 months,” Lauren, now fully recovered, wrote on a social media photo of Jrue and Jrue Taylor after she was born. “I can remember countless nights repeating ‘there may be pain in the night but joy comes in the morning.’ I remember half believing it and half still in disbelief that this was my life.”
Before long, basketball began to matter to Jrue again because, well, his family was safe. This season it resulted in career highs in scoring (19.0 points), shooting (49% from the field) and rebounding (4.5).
Still, the humble Holiday hasn’t lost any perspective he gleaned from that terrifying time. Ask him about his tremendous play in the first-round sweep against Portland when he averaged 27.8 points and 6.5 assists, and he makes a self-effacing joke.
“I have people in my circle who tell me all the time how good they think I am, which I’m just going to say is my wife,” Holiday, who signed a five-year, $125 million deal last summer, said with a laugh. “She tells me all the time, ‘Good game, bad game,’ or how good she thinks I am. Obviously I value her opinion, because she’s probably the most successful athlete in my family.
“I have her. I have my brothers (Justin Holiday plays for the Bulls; UCLA’s Aaron Holiday is a first-round prospect). From my circle of people, and the coaching staff and teammates, they all have known — even through the hard stuff — how good they felt that I was.”
While Lauren and Jrue Taylor won’t be making the trip to Oakland, that doesn’t mean the Holidays won’t still be together. Their family Facetime session is always part of his pregame routine on the road, and Game 1 will be no different.
So Jrue will blow his kisses across the country this time over his iPhone, then clock in on the court. Lauren and JT will watch from home, knowing full well that — no matter what happens in this series — the Holidays are good again.