“Honestly, if I’d known that it would have ended like this, I probably wouldn’t have come back this soon,” Mourning told NEWSWEEK, “but you can’t stop because you’re afraid of failure. You don’t get anywhere like that.’’ With a long-term prognosis that is at best uncertain, Mourning must now grapple with a reality he has so far managed to dodge: he may never play another season of pro ball. “I don’t want to think about not playing basketball again. I can’t think like that,” he says. “In my mind I will play again. My spirit tells me I will play again.” Yet those closest to this baller–his family, friends and physicians–quietly wonder how many defeats he can take.
Six months ago, any return to the court seemed impossible. His disease, called focal glomerulosclerosis, attacks the small filters of the kidney that remove waste from the blood, causing proteins to spill into the urine and scar the organ. The disease can be genetic, though Mourning says no other family member has it. His doctors put him on a regimen of 14 pills a day to combat the disease, but the potent cocktail made him lose his appetite, and he dropped nearly 60 pounds in a matter of weeks. For the first few months, physical activity was off limits. “My face had sunken in so much that people could barely recognize me. I hated to leave the house because of the pitiful looks I got.” Mourning’s wife, Tracey, had three questions for the doctors: “Is he going to die? How will this affect my children–since I just had a baby? And how do we get him better?”
For Alonzo, there was one more question. “Will I play basketball again?” His doctor, Gerald Appel of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, told him that answer “was up to me,” Mourning says. Mourning took up yoga and started eating healthier, eliminating all salt from his diet; his wife tried to follow along for moral support, but found herself sneaking into the pantry to put a pinch of salt in her food.
In mid-March, something surprising happened: his blood work revealed that the disease had gone into remission. “The doctors were clear. This could be as good as it gets,” Mourning says. “So, knowing that–which means not knowing what the future brings–I decided that I should play now.''
Rejoining the Heat late in the season proved tricky. “I was nowhere near the player I used to be,” says Mourning, who had to submit to daily blood and urine tests to monitor his health. The team, which had acquired several new members, never quite jelled. “I guess I was naive,” Mourning says. “I thought I could contribute much more than I did. But it didn’t happen.” Those who know Alonzo well say the return, successful or otherwise, was necessary. “Basketball gives Alonzo hope, and he needed that with his illness,” says his former coach at Georgetown University, John Thompson.
It remains unclear if Mourning will continue to have the one thing that has provided security in his life–basketball. Doctors keep giving the player new combinations of pills to stave off the disease, but they say it will be an additional five months before they have a good idea if the remission will hold; they also don’t know whether the return to heavy physical activity might be doing him more long-term harm than good. Nonetheless, Mourning will spend the summer increasing his workout routine with spinning classes, weights and more yoga. Then he’ll await a decision from the doctors. “If I’m able to play again, this time I want to be ready,” he says. “Back to the player I used to be, with no excuses.”
