Wednesday, September 10, 2008 11:09 PM CDT
Lake Land freshman loses his finger, but not his touch
By RICK DAWSON, Staff Writer
MATTOON -- When he first saw Kyle Blair work out on the hardwood, Lake Land men’s coach Cedric Brown imagined he had a zone-busting big man, a lithe, 6-foot-8 athlete who would begin his college career as a power forward before drifting to the wing.
The fact that he didn’t have a little finger on his shooting hand was nothing more than an afterthought. Mere months ago, though, Blair was all but certain it would put an end to his basketball future.
Near the end of his senior year at Castle, a suburban Evansville, Ind., high school, he was one of the first players off the bench on an enormous frontline. Two taller teammates – 6-9 Luke Sprague and 6-9 Sean Stevens – and guard Jared Gray moved on to join college programs this fall, while Blair mulled a few options in-state.
“And we had another probably 6-5 player,” he said. “He wasn’t too big but he was bulky. We had a pretty big team. We were decent.”
With time to ponder his own future, he found himself working in a machine shop during the late spring. Operating an engine lathe one day, he cut his finger and asked his foreman for a pair of gloves. When he returned, he began polishing a piece of metal on the lathe as he neared the end of his shift – too casually, as he now recalls the
incident.
“It grabbed a hold of my thumb out of the glove and just wrapped my arm around the machine,” he said. “I pulled my hand out as fast as I could … I pulled my hand out of the glove and I didn’t have a pinky.”
Some memories, including the ones that immediately followed, are easier to replay in his head. Bleeding profusely, he collapsed to the floor and wrapped a towel around his hand, waiting for emergency personnel to arrive.
“I didn’t know whether to yell, cry, scream,” he said. “I just sat there. I sat on the floor with a towel in my hands. In the ambulance, the lady said, ‘three minutes.’ If I’d sat there for three more minutes I would have probably died from loss of blood.”
The finger remained in the glove, leading his family to seek out a specialist in Louisville to consider reattachment. Told there would be about a two-percent chance of success – the tendon had snapped back; reattaching the finger, in any event, would likely leave it motionless – he opted to go through surgery to seal the wound instead.
“I was pretty much drugged up that whole week,” Blair said. “I don’t remember anything after that.”
The one thing his doctor did tell him was that the other fingers on his right hand would soon appropriate some of the motion he lost with the severed pinky. Sure enough, it came with time. One day during the summer, he picked up a basketball and told his mother he was going outside to shoot.
At first, dribbling was awkward and he was cautious about exerting himself too much. Within two weeks he discovered that he still had the same soft touch he always had. The biggest ordeal involved keeping coins from slipping out of his grasp.
“The fact that he lost a finger, if you think about it, it really doesn’t even affect his shot,” Brown said. “Your index finger is the finger that should touch the ball last, so it doesn’t even matter. And his guide hand is next to his index finger. Your pinky doesn’t even touch the ball, really, anyway.”
Several weeks after the accident, Brown received a call from Blair’s father, Darryl. He understood that scholarship money might not be available at such a late stage, but there were family members living in central Illinois. In fact, Blair discovered that Lake Land might be an option during a trip to his grandmother’s house in Effingham.
His mother, formerly Becky Braun, played at Teutopolis High School and once held a number of scoring and rebounding records for Lake Land’s women’s basketball team following her graduation in 1983. Impressed with Brown after coming in two weeks before the start of classes, her son, a slender forward with room to grow, accepted a chance to walk-on and has since crashed the weight room.
“Kyle is a kid that has a lot of heart,” Brown said. “He knows he has some limitations. We’re working on some lateral movement things for him. We’re working on some explosive things for him, some plyometric-type stuff. We’re working on his ballhandling skills. But one thing Kyle Blair can do is shoot the basketball.”
Like he had from the start.
Contact Rick Dawson at rdawson@jg-tc.com or 238-6855.
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