Doyel: Arlington grad Turk overcomes paralysis to coach

Karl Turk can still run in his dreams. He plays basketball, just like he did at Forest Manor Middle School – just like he hoped to do for Arlington High School – and his dreams are so real that he wakes in the morning and struggles to get to the bathroom and he doesn't know why. And then he remembers.

"Oh," he thinks, as his left leg thuds on the floor. "That's right."

In his childhood dreams, Karl Turk was going to be a basketball coach. He learned to read at breakfast with his grandfather, who slid him the Indianapolis Star sports page and asked Karl how the Pacers or "the mean ol' coach" – Bob Knight at Indiana – had done the night before. Turk fell in love with the game. When he was five, he announced at the table that he was going to become a basketball coach. The dreams of kids, you know?

The dreams, they don't know.

They don't know that a boy can go to bed one night watching the Pacers playing the Bulls on television, and wake up the next morning unable to walk. Our dreams don't know that the boy can struggle to get up the stairs in his house, the struggle scaring his mom so badly that she's spanking him to hurry up because the alternative, that something has gone badly wrong with her son, is too hard to accept.

Dreams don't know that the boy can end up in a hospital bed at age 14 with inflammation pinching his spinal cord, a one-in-a-million case of transverse myelitis causing sudden paralysis that starts in the feet and spends the next few hours heading up the body. To the legs. The bladder. The bowels. A few more inches and it'll be in the heart, and a paralyzed heart stops beating.

Dreams don't know that doctors can tell his mom that he's going to die before morning, and that even after he does survive that night – and the next 65 nights in intensive care – that he will leave the hospital in a wheelchair, with doctors saying he'll never walk again.

Karl Turk dreamed of being a coach. But our dreams – they don't know what they're asking of us.

***

RIP to the poor cane. To another cane, rather. Karl Turk has gone through so many canes, made of titanium but unable to withstand the wrath of an angry basketball coach, that he's lost count. Most of the ruined canes are back home in Indianapolis at his mom's house – and the rest are in the trunk of his car in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the 34-year-old Turk is coach of the state powerhouse at West Oso High School.

Turk ruined another cane last week, slamming it against the floor during a loss when a West Oso player tested the resolve of his coach and discovered what a bad idea that is. No need to name names, but one of Turk's better players, a senior, made a mental error – "tried to dribble through a triple team," Turk says – and was taken out. On his way off the court, the player muttered, "Don't put me back in."

Now it's late in a close game and West Oso is down to seven available players because of a combination of fouls, injury and suspension. Another West Oso player fouls out, and Turk has two choices on the bench: the senior, or a freshman who rarely plays. In a scene straight out of "Hoosiers," the senior starts walking to the scorer's table.

"Sit down," Turk tells him.

West Oso loses 58-55.

"I hope that move pays off," Turk says. "If not this season, then in (the senior's) life."

Toughness like Karl Turk has, it comes with practice. Fall down in front of a crowded gym, have high school kids on the road waving paper canes at you, and you get tougher or you get the heck out of this profession. Karl Turk got tougher. Also, he learned to coach while perched on his rear end.

"I'm always falling down," he says.

So he coaches from his backside, hollering and prodding and don't you dare try to help me up when I'm telling you something, son! Get back on defense!

To be a coach, to listen to those dreams that wouldn't stop whispering to him – I'm gonna coach, gonna coach, gonna coach – Turk has had to adapt. Instead of playing for Arlington, he became a student manager. He kept the stats, filled the water bottles, called The Star with the box score. He went to Indiana State, took a basketball class from the Sycamores coach himself, Royce Waltman, and pestered Waltman until he became a team manager. By then Turk had climbed out of the wheelchair and peeled off the knee braces, but the cane went where he went.

The cane went with him to Terre Haute South, where he was a volunteer assistant for the winningest active boys coach in the state, Pat Rady Sr., now at Cloverdale. The cane went with Turk to Southwestern High School in Hanover, where he was an assistant to Pat Rady Jr.

The cane went with him on a trek all over the Midwest, after Turk was told that if he was serious about being a basketball coach, he needed to work summer camps. As many as he could. Lots of guys want to coach, Karl. How bad do you want it?

"He wanted it as bad as anyone I've ever seen," says Pat Rady Sr.

As proof, I submit an index card that Turk still keeps in his office (along with the last leg brace he used before shedding it for good). The index card lists schools and dates from the summer of 2004, seven camps in two months, from Indiana State to Butler – where he befriended a young assistant named Brad Stevens – to Taylor to UIndy to a pair of schools in Texas. He had a dream and a Jeep Cherokee, and he had a cane that nobody knew about until he showed up, having talked his way into a role as a camp counselor by phone. What were they going to do, send home the kid with the cane?

"They were stuck with me," he says, giggling.

Well, not all of them. Karl Turk was rejected once, by a school he won't name other than to say it was a women's basketball team in Indiana. The coach told Karl, "I can't sell that," as if Turk's cane was a product or a detriment.

All it was, was a detail.

"'I've seen him get down into a [defensive) stance," says Rady Sr. "I mean, I see it all the time. He throws down the cane and gets into the stance. He's as serious a coach as I've ever seen."

***

The details I could give you about this coach. About the night job he took at a Red River Inn in Texas when he was working as a grad assistant at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in 2006. About the seasons he spent out of work in Corpus Christi, 2008-09 and 2009-10. About another index card he has, this one he wouldn't show me, with the names of every school – and every coach – who refused to give him even an interview in those years.

"My hit list," he calls it.

More details. Going back to age 14, when he was hospitalized for a month, unable to walk, utterly demoralized, and the door opens and in walks an enormous man who looked a lot like an Indiana Pacer. Karl Turk stammers, "Aren't you … you?"

Reggie Miller smiled and said, "I better be me," and stayed two hours, telling Karl about his own childhood difficulties – hip issues had him in leg braces for years – before leaving the room with a revitalized Karl Turk beaming in bed.

Details? So many details. When he was a student playing pickup at Indiana State, a guy on the other team said, "I know we don't need him out here gimping around." Turk didn't know what "gimping around" meant, but he knew it wasn't good. He buried a few jumpers and said, "I know he doesn't need people gimping around hitting jumpers in his face."

Another detail: Karl Turk is a great shooter. He's from Indiana, you know. A lefty. He outshoots the kids on his West Oso team because he's a ringer. He has a key to the gym and a shooting apparatus for rebounds, and he'll pop in a Michael Jackson CD and start shooting. He's been there on Christmas morning. Basketball junkies never get their fix, and Turk's hooked.

That's why the athletic director at West Oso, Roy Williams, decided in 2010 not just to hire Turk as an assistant – but to make him the coach-in-waiting. Williams made that decision after peeking through the window several times to watch Turk, then an assistant, in action. The first time he peeked, Williams noticed the cane.

"I never noticed it again," Williams says. "Believe me, if Karl Turk is coaching you, the cane is the last thing on your mind."

When head coach Arnold Flores retired after the 2013-14 season, Turk took over a program that hasn't lost a district game in 10 years. This is a basketball powerhouse in a football state, and Turk coaches it with fire and passion and the occasional stumble. He walks the sideline, his left leg swinging out and around like a metal detector sweeping the ground for coins.

"It's tight quarters on the sideline and I'll trip on a foot or chair. I'll totally fall," Turk says, giggling at himself. "I can remember calling out plays from the ground, and trying to get up again. To the kids it's not a big deal. They've seen it 100,000 times. A road game, it's kind of different.

"In my life, in general, my biggest trepidation or fear is to introduce my disability to people. In my mind, I don't have it. I forget. To see what other people see sometimes, I wonder what they think. I'll be working a camp, and I get totally in the role – get down in a stance, teach block-out positions, leverage, all the stuff. And I fall. I totally fall. The first time I fell I remember how quiet the gym got. You feel the weight of the world. Everybody's looking at you."

When Karl Turk falls in practice, practice keeps going.

"He'll get up yelling," says senior Jasiah Patterson. "And if you're not still working hard, he might throw that cane across the gym."

Someone always gets it for him. Usually it's a manager but sometimes a player follows the cane as it clatters across the floor, picks it up, brings it back.

"I've fallen every stop I've been," Karl Turk says.

And keeps getting up. Dreamers – they don't know when to stay down.

Please find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel