Life Is Not an Accident Read Free

home where the meeting had taken place and I climbed on my bike as we continued talking about this and that.
    â€œYou shouldn’t be riding that thing,” he said.
    â€œKevin, I shouldn’t be doing a lot of things,” I said.
    A few minutes later, I was bleeding to death.
    T HERE WEREN’T A lot of people around when I was driving away, but I revved my engine anyway. Kevin was still standing in the doorway watching, and I wanted to make sure that he heard my new exhaust. As I coasted down the street, I revved the bike twice—the second time louder than the first. Then, in the middle of my third rev, I heard a click-click sound and the bike popped up and shot off. My first thought was that the gears had slipped and I had to control the situation. If I had just let go of the motorcycle, chances are I would’ve walked away with some bumps and bruises. Maybe a broken arm. But I held on.
    My hands were already on the handlebars; the front tire was in the air, and I was almost trying to wrestle it to the ground. My grip tightened as I tried to hold on, and maybe that even revved the throttle a little more. I must’ve accelerated by 20 miles an hour in a split second as the back wheel aggressively spun out of control, abruptly redirecting me to the right while forcing me tolean backwards, which was the last thing I wanted to do. I was terrified that I was going to slip off the back and have the bike fall directly on top of me. Looking back, that would’ve been a way better scenario. But I leaned forward, looking down, trying to use all my weight to get the front wheel back down . . .
    And then I saw it . . . the pole.
    It was too late. All I could do was tense up, prepare for the impact, and hope for the best. I distinctly remember that in the split second between recognizing I was about to hit the pole and making contact, I actually thought, This should happen to me. During that year, I had constantly lied to the people I cared about. I had cheated left and right on the woman I loved. I had become infatuated with the money, the lifestyle, and the constant attention that came with being an NBA player. It took less than a year to become someone I didn’t recognize, and I thought in that fraction of a second that I didn’t deserve an outcome different from the one that was coming.
    I couldn’t tell you which pole I hit, but the crash sounded like two cars colliding head-on. I couldn’t turn my body completely out of the way, so I ended up clipping my entire left side, which flung me into a horizontal spinning motion parallel to the ground. In those seconds, everything seemed to slow down. While in the air, I remember thinking, You’ve seen this before. You lived this before.
    And I had, incredibly, in a dream four years prior, a dream so strange it had stayed with me. . . .
    It was the night before the first game I ever played for Duke—in Madison Square Garden, no less, at the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic—and I was trying to sleep in my bedroom at theMarriott Marquis high above Times Square. In the hotel, my teammates and I were separated from the rest of the world: it was our safe haven, where we could focus on the mission at hand.
    But I was too anxious to fall asleep. I was about to play Stanford in the Garden , the place I had dreamed of playing at since I was a little boy growing up in Plainfield, New Jersey, just 25 miles away. I was heading into my first game starting for a Hall of Fame coach who had just lost the national championship to UConn only seven months prior, in a game his team was expected to win. I was about to play the biggest game of my life in the shadows of all the Duke greats. Guys like Grant Hill, Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Johnny Dawkins. And I’d be playing before the nation, on ESPN.
    Finally, after hours and hours of tossing and turning, I dozed off. Soon I felt this magnificent, incredible breeze on my face. But I was getting dizzy.