Steven Bartkoski

Bryant Nash, former Kansas men’s basketball player, stretches his right knee during rehabilitation exercises at the Lawrence Surgical Center last Wednesday afternoon. Nash injured his knee gradually while playing basketball for the American Basketball Association team, the Colorado Storm. He played two games for the Storm this year before having surgery Feb. 11. Nash is taking classes this semester and will graduate in May with a degree in sociology.

Editor’s Note: Kansan sportswriter Frank Tankard will profile a former Kansas men’s basketball player each day this week, leading up to the Jayhawks’ first game on Friday. Each player featured took the court for the Jayhawks sometime during the last four years. This is the second installment of the five-part series. Tomorrow, Tankard will profile former forward Jeff Graves.

He leaned on the rail and limped down the steps one by one.

He eased into the wooden bleachers six rows behind the players’ bench and propped his long right leg up on the next row. After tip-off, he spent more time talking on his cell phone, text messaging and fiddling with his afro pick than he did watching the game.

Bryant Nash can’t stand to watch. It hurts too much. The only reason he spent his Friday night in the stuffy gymnasium of Johnson County Community College was his friend Tony dragged him there to see their friends Jeff and Robby Graves play for the Kansas City Knights.

After halftime, Nash ran into his biggest fan, a 7-year-old boy wearing a black headband over his ears and oversized basketball shorts.

Nash smiled and gave his pal a big handshake, recognizing the boy from past Kansas basketball camps.

Nash carefully drew the right leg of his jeans up to his knee and showed him his scar.

“I had surgery, but it’ll be better in a couple of months.”

• * *

• When his Kansas basketball career ended last spring, Nash didn’t exactly go out on top. Never proving to the coaches that he was a consistent player, the 6-foot-9 forward played less as a senior than he did as a freshman, averaging just 4.9 minutes per game.

After the season, he traveled to camps in Tulsa, Okla., and Westchester, Ill., to scrimmage against other professional wannabes with the hope of impressing scouts. But all he got was a few empty promises and one insultingly low offer.

Nash said camp directors and people claiming to have connections to Europe kept telling him that teams wanted him, but nothing materialized.

One team from Switzerland offered him a spot on its roster, but would only pay him $1,000 a month. He considered it, though he didn’t know how he would afford food.

He called coach Bill Self for advice, and Self told him that he’d be better off finishing his sociology degree.

Thinking back on how hard things would have been in Switzerland, Nash said he was glad Self steered him back to Kansas.

“He looked out for me,” Nash said.

He enrolled in a couple of fall classes and kept his eye out for an opportunity.

• * *

• In January, Nash caught a break when he ran into Eric Stamps, a former assistant coach at Emporia State. Stamps knew Antonio “Tree” Adams, coach and general manager of the Colorado Storm of the American Basketball Association.

Nash said when he told Stamps he was looking to play, Stamps called Adams and put a word in for him. Adams told Stamps to send Nash to a hotel in Kansas City at 7 a.m, where he would meet him.

Nash said he went to bed nervous. When he woke up the next day in his Lawrence apartment, he looked at his clock: it was already past seven. He called Stamps and begged him to ask Adams for another chance. Adams refused.

But soon after, when the team came to Kansas City to play the Knights, Adams told Nash that if he came to the game, he would play. This time Nash showed up.

He did good enough to earn a road trip with the team. In the next couple of games his right knee, which had been bothering him since the summer, really started to hurt. The injury soon became obvious to his coach and teammates.

When the Storm returned to Kansas City, Nash embarrassed himself with an ugly missed dunk.

“Everybody was laughing at me,” he said. “It got to that point, and I was still trying to play on it.”

The team released him after his fifth game. As soon as he got back to Lawrence, he went to the Kansas training room to see what was wrong with his knee. Trainer Billy Cowgill l had X-rayed it over the summer when Nash first started feeling pain but hadn’t seen anything wrong.

This time, Cowgill discovered that two pieces of bone had broken off inside Nash’s right knee and his meniscus was torn. The X-ray taken in the summer had apparently not been held to the proper light, and the injury had gotten much worse over time.

Nash needed surgery.

• * *

• Grendia Forshee, Nash’s mother, had the surgery delayed a few days so she could come up from Coppell, Texas. She wanted to be in the recovery room to hold her son’s hand when he woke up.

She said that when Nash was little, he was scared of everything: butterflies, piggy banks, you name it.

She remembers one time when he was three years old and they were living in Chicago. She received a call from her sister, who was baby-sitting little Bryant. He just wouldn’t stop crying.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Forshee said. “She said he was looking at a straw that was sticking out of a vase. He saw the shadow of the straw, and it scared him.”

Yes, he was even afraid of shadows.

Luckily, his family was there to care for him while he grew up in Lake West apartments, a housing project in West Dallas, where he lived from preschool to middle school with his sisters Conchetta, who is two years younger than him, and Michole, who was born when he was 14.

“Most people don’t believe me, but it was pretty rough,” he said. “Cops patrolling the neighborhood all the time, gangs and stuff.”

Nash’s parents got divorced when he was about 10, and after that he only saw his father, Bryant Sr., a couple of times a week at most. But his mom was always there, along with a support crew of aunts, uncles and grandparents.

“As strict as my mom was, she kept me away from all that stuff,” he said. “If she wasn’t there, I was with my aunties, and they would whoop my butt when I was acting bad.”

• * *

• Sitting on the balcony of the Wagnon Student Athlete Center, Nash told a story about being stuck in an elevator during his trip to Sweden.

He was on a tour of Europe with a Big 12 Conference all-star team the summer after his sophomore year. As the team was about to leave a Swedish hotel for a game, Nash stepped into the elevator alone. It abruptly stopped between floors.

Afraid of being left behind, he called back, he picked up the elevator phone and called the desk clerk.

When someone finally opened the door, he ran out as fast as he could.

Since his knee surgery, it’s like he’s back in that elevator: stuck in place while everyone else is out there playing.

These days, he takes it pretty easy. He’s taking his final two classes: “Introduction to Social Research” and bowling. He spends a lot of time with Ashley Michaels, his girlfriend of nearly three years and a senior middle blocker this past fall on the Kansas volleyball team.

He said the bad part was that he had way too much time to think about basketball.

“Oh God, I talk about it like three, four, five times a day,” he said.

The doctors say his knee should be healed by May 11. Eleven days later, Nash will receive his diploma for a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

He could be back playing for the Colorado Storm next fall. The team recently told him it wants him around next season.

“Unless something better comes along, I might take that,” he said.

For now, all he can do is watch.