NEW YORK -- Isaiah Austin was involved in one of the most unforgettable moments of the NBA draft last June. Then, on a chilly Thursday this week, almost six months later to the day, he was back in New York after finishing the last of his five final exams and taking a late-night flight from Dallas.
Austin admitted he was a little weary as he folded his 7-foot-1 frame into a chair in an out-of-the-way seating area in his Manhattan hotel. A middle-aged man walked out of the hotel gym, did a double-take, and then extended his hand toward Austin, without asking his name, and congratulated the former Baylor center for being "an inspiration" to so many people.
This did not happen daily when Austin was still playing basketball. Only since Austin -- a 20-year-old college sophomore with a lanky build, a soft-spoken disposition and a Bible verse from Corinthians tattooed on one arm -- found out just five days before he might've been a first-round pick in the NBA draft that his playing career had to abruptly end because of Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that could've killed him had he overexerted himself or even taken a sharp blow to the chest.
"I was lucky," Austin insists.
How's that?
"If I had found out when I was younger I'd have never been blessed with playing as long as I did, or all the experiences I've been able to have," he answers. "Or I could've literally collapsed [and died] on the court."
If you speak with Austin for any length of time it's clear the stranger who approached him in the hotel was right: Austin is someone worth emulating.
"I am going to have a successful life -- I will have a successful life," he told an interviewer not long after his life-changing diagnosis. Sports can often over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to inspirational stories. And in the mere 180 days since his career ended, it's been breathtaking to see what Austin has undertaken. He's shown more grace and determination, genuine perspective and piercing common sense than people three or four times his age ever summon. And -- it's funny how this works -- the outpouring of support that's flowed back his way has lifted him.
As Scott Drew, his coach at Baylor, says, "It was like he was wearing a 50-pound weighted vest. And then he got a set of wings."
And to think the pivot in his life all started because of happenstance: An attentive doctor who was assigned to perform Austin's physical at the NBA's Chicago scouting combine noticed some abnormalities in his heart and ordered more tests.
Austin's final diagnosis didn't come until just five days before the draft. Knowing he'd be devastated, his parents Lisa and Ben -- who got the news before him -- immediately drove overnight from their home in Kansas to Baylor's campus in Waco, Texas. Once there, they assembled a support group at a family friend's house where Isaiah lived. He'd just returned from a trip to visit the Toronto Raptors, one of the 13 NBA teams that had worked him out, and he didn't know any of this was happening until his high school coach, Ray Forsett, drove him home at about 9 p.m. after they'd spent the day together.
When Austin saw the 10 or so cars in the driveway, he turned to Forsett and asked, "What's going on?"
"Please just go in the house," Forsett told him.
When Austin saw his mother standing in the living room with tears welling up in her eyes he had his answer. "I thought my world was ending," he admits. He saw his dad and Drew were also there. So were two church pastors. His girlfriend. His younger brother and sister, and a handful of others. When Austin started sobbing, his younger brother and sister started sobbing, as well. And right then, Austin says, is when something in him "got redirected."
"My little brother and sister look up to me more than anyone in the world," Austin explains, "so I got up and went to the bathroom, composed my face. And when I came back out I was calm. I'm a person of strong faith. I told everyone that everything was going to be all right. And that our family was going to be all right."
The rest of the night they talked. They prayed. By the time the group began to break up near midnight, Austin already knew he needed to re-imagine his path in life. His agent, Dwon Clifton, was there and promised to stick by him. Drew told Austin not only would his scholarship be honored, but he pulled a whistle from his pocket and asked Austin to remain on the team as a student manager, saying, "We need you." Austin texted Cory Jefferson, his best friend and Baylor teammate, and Jefferson said, "I'll be right over."
The two of them had taken great joy in declaring for the draft together and it wasn't supposed to end like this. During a long walk they took alone, Jefferson decided it wouldn't. "We'd walked and talked for a long time and finally ended up at this lake and sat down. And it just came to me: I told him I was going to change from 34 to 21, his number," says Jefferson, who now plays for the Brooklyn Nets.
Because you feel like you're playing for both of you?
"I do," Jefferson says. "Every day I pull on my jersey now, I think of him and want to be better for both of us."
Austin spent a sleepless night in his room thinking, "I wish this were all a dream but it's not. ... This is so surreal."
But what Austin has accomplished since has been nothing short of breathtaking.
Austin accepted Drew's offer to work for the team -- "I think he'd make an outstanding coach someday," Drew says. He also accepted spokesman's roles with the Marfan Foundation, which experienced a tenfold increase from 50,000 to 500,000 hits a day on its website once Austin's story became public, and the Haier Achievement Award for college students who have confronted adversity.
In addition, Austin gives motivational speeches and started a foundation bearing his name, with the hope of raising money and saving lives. The foundation's mission statement -- helping people "dream again" -- is the same as the title of the autobiography Austin just finished despite taking a full load of courses this semester. The book is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around Father's Day.
Austin is also exploring broadcasting. He'll do some work for the NBA as part of the league's All-Star weekend events this season. And he was asked to go to the Bay Area for a video-game shoot for "NBA 2K15," an NBA-licensed game in which he plays himself and will appear on the roster of players that gamers can draft, sign and put in their lineup.
(Smiling now, Austin says he got an advance copy and "I just signed myself and played last night. The Lakers are my team and we played San Antonio." So you schooled Tim Duncan? "Aw, we lost," Austin shot back with a laugh. "But I did have a double-double.")
Part of Austin's book details how even before being diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, he'd had to overcome another career-threatening setback: He was hit in the eye by a baseball at age 10 and endured four hours of emergency eye surgery that same day. He eventually had to endure three more operations -- one after he dunked in a middle school game and "a curtain of red blood" blurred the vision in his right eye. Each time during his recovery, he had to lie facedown for three weeks on a massage table with his face in the padded halo, rising only to eat or use the restroom, to avoid undoing how doctors had surgically reattached his retina. He finally declined a fifth operation as a high school sophomore though he knew it would leave him blind in his right eye.
Had someone thought to check Austin for Marfan, which occurs in about one in 5,000 people and affects the body's connective tissue, Austin might've had to quit sports then. Instead, the eye problems were the first hint that Austin has an extraordinary ability to adapt and respond to adversity.
"I think having gone through that helped me handle this," Austin says.
Austin already had a lot on the line: He was among the top five high school recruits in the country. But his depth perception was so adversely affected he needed to re-train himself on how to do nearly everything, from shooting a basketball to pouring a glass of water or shaking hands and not missing his intended target. His parents urged him not to make excuses and he used none. But how?
Austin hoisted literally hundreds upon hundreds of shots a day. Even as a high schooler, he figured out by himself how to move constantly and position himself on defense, shuffling his feet, "keeping my head on a swivel." He shrewdly used the sideline or baseline as an aid to eliminate areas in his peripheral vision he couldn't see. When he went to college and started playing in domes or with glass backboards all the time, he had to re-calibrate everything again.
Still, few knew his secret.
"Honestly, I don't know how I was able to do it -- just the grace of God," he says now with a shrug. "It's mostly muscle memory. Like, I know where the goal is. I tell myself I just have to get it there."
Baylor was already recruiting Austin before he lost sight in his right eye. Drew, with a tinge of fresh amazement now, laughs and admits, "We tried to find a weakness in his game that college people might exploit if they knew. But we couldn't. Defense, offense, he was equally good on the right block, the left block, the perimeter. I mean, you couldn't tell."
Austin hid his sight impairment so well it wasn't public knowledge beyond the Baylor team until last January, when he did an interview with ESPN's Holly Rowe.
And guess what? The NBA scouts agreed with Drew: You couldn't tell.
A couple of teams told Austin they might draft him in the first round. He says he'd always dreamed of going to the NBA draft and hearing his name. So when the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, offered him and his family an all-expenses-paid trip to attend anyway after his Marfan diagnosis, Austin definitely wanted to attend, despite the pain it might evoke. "It wasn't about me at that point," he insists. "I had friends and teammates in the draft and I wanted to be there to support them the way they supported me."
But, to Austin's surprise, Silver's kindness didn't stop there. Silver paused between the 15th and 16th picks of the first round -- right around the spot where the most optimistic projections had Austin being taken -- and told the crowd the nutshell version of Austin's career-ending diagnosis.
Silver added that the league still wanted to make part of Austin's dream come true, and ended by saying, "So, it gives me great pleasure to say, with the next pick in the 2014 NBA draft, the NBA selects Isaiah Austin from Baylor University." There were a lot of damp eyes in the house as Austin rose to put on a cap with the league logo and walked across the stage to shake Silver's hand and take a photo like everyone else. The capacity crowd gave Austin a rousing standing ovation. By the time Silver -- who was also visibly emotional -- whispered in Austin's ear, "You will always be part of the NBA family," Austin was shoving away a few tears, too.
Silver told Austin that if he finishes his college degree the NBA will have a job waiting for him. And that offer still stands.
"He's a heartfelt dude," Austin says.
In the six months since that day, the stories have kept spinning outward and outward around Austin from there. He's found basketball was something he did but people love him for who he is. And he's dreaming again, all right. Part of his message is anyone can re-purpose their life, same as he has.
He says of all the things he's pursued so far, he likes his speaking engagements best. He says he had no idea "people found me inspiring" until "all the support I got after my story came out." But he's since heard from parents who said his diagnosis helped save their own children's lives, and he's gotten emails from folks who say they didn't think they could hurdle their challenges until they saw his example or listened to him speak.
Now, Austin says, "I like telling my story. I like being able to inspire somebody else to be great. The Marfan syndrome? That's secondary. The first thing I want to do is just be able to inspire people by pointing out everybody has their own obstacles and their own roadblocks in their lives. And it's a different story every time I go to speak somewhere. What happened to me is nothing compared to what some people go through in their life. I mean, I couldn't imagine losing a family member, you know? Losing a 3-year-old son. I couldn't imagine something like that, and yet I've met families that have lost everything and remained positive. I've met some of the strongest people in this world."
It's only natural when confronted with such stories to ask how much any one person can bear. The answer is almost always more than you imagine. Life has undeniably dealt Isaiah Austin some difficult twists. But as Drew put it, Austin is soaring on new wings now. And he hasn't come close to approaching his ceiling yet.