IU’s Legend Returns: Landon Turner Joins Indiana Hoosiers as Special Advisor Congratulations Turner…..

IU’s Legend Returns: Landon Turner Joins Indiana Hoosiers as Special Advisor Congratulations Turner…..

IU’s Landon Turner and the crash that ended an NBA dream 40 years ago: ‘This must be a nightmare’

 

INDIANA — Landon Turner ran onto the court inside the Spectrum in Philadelphia to a booming crowd and adoring announcers as they called out the starting lineup for the 1981 NCAA championship game.

 

“Turner scored 20 on Saturday in the win against LSU,” the TV announcers boasted as Turner, an Indiana University junior, stood in his crimson warm ups, determination on his face.

 

As the game played out, those announcers watched as Turner, Isiah Thomas, Ray Tolbert, Randy Wittman and Ted Kitchel won the national title 63-50 against Dean Smith’s North Carolina.

 

IU coach Bob Knight watched, too, and what he saw was Turner finally coming into his own as a player. “I thought Turner was far and away the outstanding player in the NCAA that year,” Knight later told 20/20’s Lynn Shearer.

 

Indiana’s Landon Turner (32), hangs onto the rim while dunking the ball at the NCAA playoff in Philadelphia on Monday, March 30, 1981. In on the play are James Worthy, left, and Al Wood.

“Do you think IU could have won a national championship without Turner?” Shearer asked.

 

“There’s no way,” Knight told her. “He’s 6-10, could really run, had great physical qualities. So we’re able to play Turner on a kid 6-6 or a kid 6-7. He just thoroughly dominated them. And then he had this great touch and great agility, could shoot the ball from outside.”

 

Knight then told Shearer something that happened after that title. He was walking up to his office thinking about the player Turner, who had struggled his first two seasons at IU, had become.

 

“If nothing happens to this kid, if he maintains the same attitude toward everything that he now has,” Knight thought, “he’ll be the first player taken in the pro draft.”

 

If nothing happens to this kid.

 

Looking back, 40 years later, what Knight thought that day in 1981 was an eerie foreshadowing of something that would happen to Turner. Something that would end his basketball career forever — just four months after he had helped IU win it all.

‘Man, this must be a nightmare’

He didn’t want to go to Kings Island that day in July 1981. Turner, 21 and ready to enter his senior season at IU, didn’t have any money. Plus, he needed to study for his anatomy class that would complete his degree in physical education.

 

And he wanted to work out with Tony Brown, an IU guard. They had been training together, trying to work on Turner’s dribbling. Turner knew he needed the help, especially with his left hand. Too many times in a game, he would switch his dribble to the left and lose the ball.

 

But Turner’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Jones, whom he was still good friends with, wanted to go to the amusement park in Cincinnati. She coaxed other friends, David Collins and Elesha Storey, to help persuade Turner to make the trek to Kings Island with them, Turner recalled in his book, “Landon Turner’s Tales from the 1980-81 Indiana Hoosiers.”

Finally, Turner said yes.

 

Landon Turner is shown his junior year at IU, his last season before an accident ended his basketball career.

He got up early the morning of July 25, 1981, maybe 5 or 6 a.m., Turner wrote in his book. He saw Jim Ross, an IU administrator, across the street from Assembly Hall. Ross was outside with his boat, getting ready for a day at the lake. He asked Turner what he was up to. Turner told him he was getting ready to head to Kings Island down State Road 46.

 

That’s not the best way to go, Ross told him, ready to suggest another way. But Turner was set on it. He stopped at a Sunoco station for gas then he, Jones, Collins and Storey set off.

 

The next thing Turner remembers is waking up in a hospital, Turner wrote in his book, doctors telling him he’d been in a car accident, that he had broken his neck and that he was paralyzed.

“I didn’t believe that,” Turner, who didn’t respond to IndyStar’s requests for an interview, says in his book. “I tried to wiggle my toes and wasn’t able to…I was like ‘Man this must be a nightmare. I saw my dreams of playing basketball fly away.”

 

‘I went to pieces’

Turner had driven State Road 46 so many times before. He knew there were sharp turns in the two-lane highway between Columbus and Greensburg.

 

One of those turns was eight miles east of Columbus. At 8:45 that morning, Turner lost control of his 1975 LTD Ford, swerved off the road onto a grassy area, back onto the road then off again before hitting an abutment and flipping the Ford onto its roof, according to Bartholomew County sheriff’s records.

 

Jones was ejected from the car. The other three were still inside as it began to ignite in a small fire. Collins regained consciousness and crawled out a back window. Then he pulled Storey and Turner from the car.

 

“He saved my son’s life,” Rita Turner, Landon Turner’s mom, told IndyStar July 26, 1981.

 

Michigan Sate’s Jay Vincent tries to control the basketball under his basket while Indiana’s Landon Turner defends him during the Big Ten game played March 7, 1981.

She and Turner’s dad, Adell, along with 30 relatives and friends gathered in the waiting room of IU Health Methodist’s emergency department. The three others in the car didn’t sustain long-term injuries.

 

As doctors told those in the waiting room the extent of Turner’s injuries, people began to weep, according to an IndyStar article at the time.

 

“I just sort of temporarily went to pieces,” Rita Turner later said. “It was just something very hard to cope with. But, he was alive.”

 

He was alive. But would this NBA prospect, who Knight and many others were predicting would have been a top pick in the draft, want to be alive without basketball?

 

‘There were so many tears’

Mike Woodson had played at IU during Turner’s freshman and sophomore seasons. He was home in Indianapolis that summer in 1981 after playing his first year in the pros with the New York Knicks.

 

He doesn’t remember exactly how he found out, but he got the news: Landon’s been in a bad accident.

 

“I went right to the hospital not too long after,” Woodson, now IU’s coach, said this week.

 

Turner didn’t know Woodson was there. He doesn’t remember any of the dozens of visitors who poured into his room, he says in his book. He was unconscious for five days and it was a scary five days.

 

He had a tracheotomy and a halo, a device inserted into his forehead and the back of his skull with screws to stabilize his neck. His left lung had collapsed.

 

“A lot of people thought I wasn’t going to make it,” Turner wrote in his book.

 

At the hospital, teammate Randy Wittman was devastated. He had never seen anyone he was close to lying in a bed with trauma and injuries like this.

 

“That scene, it was a very sobering experience,” Wittman said. “Still today…it still haunts you, memories that will stick in my mind forever.”

 

Aug. 27, 1981: IU coach Bob Knight and some of his former players staged a home run hitting contest at Bush Stadium with proceeds going to help pay Landon Turner’s medical costs.

Knight was on a fishing trip in Idaho when Turner’s accident happened. Inside a friend’s home, the phone rang for Knight. The player he was counting on to be his star next season couldn’t walk.

 

He immediately went outside, stunned and sat underneath a tree to collect his thoughts, Knight wrote in the foreword of Turner’s book.

 

“The tremendous loss I felt was not for you as a basketball player,” he wrote, “but for you as a person.”

 

Knight headed to Indianapolis and walked into Turner’s hospital room. “You know, I can still close my eyes and picture him there with the different things they had attached to him,” Knight said in 1991.

 

The doctors had been asking people who visited to talk to Turner to see if they could get a response. When Knight started to whisper to Turner, the doctor shook his head no. Talk to him like you would at practice.

 

“And I look at the doctor like, ‘Are you sure you know what the hell you’re doing?'” Knight said in 1991. “And then the doctor said ‘Shake him.’ And I said ‘Landon, Landon, Landon, can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ And that was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”

 

Turner didn’t wake up.

 

Indiana University players Isiah Thomas (left) and Ray Tolbert bask in glory at Assembly Hall on March 31 1981 after winning the NCAA championship

But he did wake up not long after, when teammate Ray Tolbert called his name.

 

“A lot of people claim they were there when Landon opened his eyes for the first time following the accident, but it was me,” Tolbert says in Turner’s book. “I grabbed his hand and said ‘Landon, wake up. It’s big Ray.’ And he came around. It was a very intense time.”

 

First, Turner started crying, Tolbert said.

 

“There were so many tears in his eyes but he couldn’t communicate because he had the tracheotomy thing in his throat,” he wrote. “He was trying to talk with hand gestures.”

 

It was frustrating to be so weak. Turner, after all, was 6-10 and 250 pounds. He was the player IU assistant coach Jim Crews said “was built like a Greek god and amazingly strong.”

 

And yet at that moment, he was helpless.

 

“Emotionally, it was a tough thing to see,” Wittman said. “Knowing what his dreams were of playing in the NBA one day.”

 

‘A lot to learn’

Four months before, Turner had been on top of the world, cutting down the nets after an NCAA title. But that glory had been a long time coming in his first two seasons at IU.

 

He had been a standout at Arsenal Tech, where he was the leading vote-getter for the AP all-state team as a senior in 1978 and second in the Mr. Basketball vote after averaging 22 points and 17 rebounds to help lead his team to the semistate final.

 

He was named a Parade All-American and McDonald’s All-American. But at IU, Knight didn’t think he was living up to his potential.

 

Arsenal Tech’s Landon Turner (50) blocks a shot attempt by Todd Nelson of Columbus East in 1978 regional action. Tech defeated The Olympians 61-58.

“During your first two years you never did dedicate yourself to the game in such a way as to allow you to get the most out of your considerable abilities,” Knight wrote in Turner’s book. “While there were individual games and flashes of great play on your part, there were also many games where you played way below your talent.”

 

His freshman and sophomore seasons Turner had played in most games, but averaged 5 points and 3 rebounds as a freshman and 7 points and 4 rebounds as a sophomore.

“Landon was well groomed, but he still had a lot to learn from a basketball standpoint,” Woodson said of the early IU Turner.

 

Turner thought he was giving his all, as did most players when they came to IU, Woodson said.

 

“Those of us who played for Bob Knight, we all thought we were playing hard, but there is another level,” he said. “A Bob Knight level.”

 

Wittman said he knew if Turner could just get to that level, this team would explode.

 

But as the season began, Turner wasn’t getting there — and Knight was ready to let him go. Knight told Turner before a home game against Northwestern that he was planning to meet with Turner and his parents to tell them he should file a letter with the NBA to enter the draft after his junior year.

 

That conversation never happened. Turner, whom Woodson called “very coachable” started playing the way Knight wanted him to.

 

With 10 minutes left in the Northwestern game, Knight put Turner in and he immediately missed a blockout that allowed Northwestern to score. Knight was furious, he wrote in Turner’s book, and he took Turner out.

 

But a minute later, he decided to put Turner back in to give him “one last chance to prove himself.”

 

“For a little over nine minutes, you played the best basketball at both ends of the floor I had ever seen you play,” Knight wrote.

 

Turner began to flourish.

 

Bittersweet victory

“It finally clicked in that year,” said Wittman. “There’s not a championship. We never win the championship if it wasn’t for Landon’s play in the tournament.”

 

Turner had begun to play defense in a monstrous way. He spread out, moved his feet. He was this unstoppable power.

 

“Landon Turner put it all together, became this dynamic force, a shooting power forward,” said Jake Query, a longtime Indianapolis sports broadcaster. “Literally, the light switch had turned on for him.”

 

IU began to show itself to the college basketball world, winning its final 10 games that 1981 season.

 

Turner led the team in scoring three times. He shut down Buck Williams in IU’s opening tournament victory over Maryland, scoring 20 points. He was named player of the game in a win against St. Joseph`s. He scored 20 points and 8 rebounds against Louisiana State.

MVP Isiah Thomas with a piece of net around his neck hugs Randy Wittman (24) after IU beat North Carolina 63-50 at the NCAA finals in Philadelphia on Monday, March 31, 1981.

In the NCAA championship against North Carolina, Turner held James Worthy to 7 points and scored 12 points and 6 rebounds of his own.

 

“You know, you win by the little things and Landon Turner did the little things to make us a championship basketball team,” Thomas told ESPN in 2010. “Had it not been for his play we couldn’t have won a championship. I don’t care if I would have scored 40 or 50 points.”

 

Looking back on that game, Query said, it’s bittersweet.

 

“The ultimate irony is everything came together,” he said, “when Turner figured out how to get his body all fluid in one motion.”

 

It was a way his body would never move again.

 

‘Life is precious’

After the accident, Turner went through months of painful therapy. He would look at the photo hanging in his hospital room of him and Tolbert hanging on the rim after the NCAA title.

 

“It would break me up because I remembered how wonderful it felt to win the national championship,” Turner wrote. “In my mind, I knew I would never be able to enjoy that feeling again…I would find myself in tears.”

 

After a while, though, Turner got tired of crying and feeling sorry for himself.

 

Landon Turner is an “inspiration to all of us,” said IU teammate Randy Wittman.

He regained movement in his arms and got a specially-equipped vehicle so he could drive. He earned the degree he had been so worried about when he’d balked at going to Kings Island that day.

 

Before the NBA draft in 1982, Knight got together with the Boston Celtics’ Red Auerbach. Had it not been for Turner’s accident, Knight told him, Turner would have been drafted on a team. With their final pick in the draft that year, the Celtics selected Turner.

 

Turner went on to play wheelchair basketball, a team Knight funded. Playing the sport in a wheelchair didn’t have the same appeal and Turner eventually moved on. But he refused to look back at what might have been.

 

“I looked at it this way: I was alive, and the Lord blessed me to be alive,” Turner wrote in his book. “So I needed to take advantage of it.”

 

Turner has spent the past four decades as a motivational speaker and advocate for people with disabilities.

 

“You get dealt different hands in life and they don’t all include aces,” Knight said in 1991. “And I think so many people can play aces and play them well. Turner learned how to play his aces and then he had to learn how to play threes and fours. And he’s been awfully damn successful at threes and fours.”

 

Landon Turner, show here in 2012, went on to become a motivational speaker and advocate for people with disabilities after his accident.

Turner’s strength and perseverance still amazes Wittman every day.

 

“You see a lot of people that mentally cannot accept living the rest of their life like that. He has turned it all into a positive. That’s a credit to his faith and his belief,” he said. “He’s an inspiration to all of us. How he’s handled it, that’s as impressive to me even more so than who he was on the basketball court.”

 

There once was a picture of Turner on the basketball court hanging on the refrigerator of Knight’s ex-wife, Nancy.

 

Query, who went to IU and was friends with the Knights’ son, Pat, was at a dinner in Nancy’s home when he saw it. The photo showed Turner getting an award during the 1981 season — standing up.

 

“Nancy caught me looking at it,” Query said, then she explained to him. “‘That’s my reminder that life is precious.'”