USC's Vincent Iwuchukwu goes in-depth on cardiac arrest recovery and return
Vincent Iwuchukwu remembers feeling very tired as the Trojans took a water break during that July 1 workout. He recalls sitting down and suddenly feeling dizzy, and then the memory blurs a bit.
At some point, he could hear USC assistant basketball coach Eric Mobley's voice cutting through the fog of his semi-consciousness in the most piercing of ways.
"I felt like in a deep slumber. I felt like in a void. Things in that void I can't really describe, but it was definitely something," Iwuchukwu says. "When I was starting to get back consciousness, I was starting to hear Mobley's voice. ... He was saying, 'Vince, come on. Come back, come back.' And then I heard, 'Vince, don't die on me.'
"That's when I was like, 'What the hell is he talking about?' I was like, 'What? I've got to wake up now. ... I've got to get back up.' And I did, I got back up."
About seven and a half months after suffering cardiac arrest on the court during that summer workout with his teammates, Iwuchukwu is not only back up -- he's playing college basketball for the Trojans, incredibly.
The 7-foot-1 five-star freshman had his best game yet with USC on Saturday night, scoring a season-high 19 points with 7 rebounds and 3 blocks in 26 minutes of action at Oregon State as he continues to again take full control of his own narrative -- one he's ready to share publicly.
After going through USC's Monday afternoon practice followed by a team meeting in the locker room, Iwuchukwu joins a small group of four reporters for his first formal interview since surviving that harrowing experience. He slides into a chair in a nondescript room on the first floor of Galen Center, makes sure to shake hands with and learn the name of each reporter and prepares to tell his story. His personality seems as big as his towering frame as he shares both his sense of humor with the group of strangers along with the most intimate details of the scariest moment of his life.
Iwuchukwu periodically adjusts the headphones resting atop his head, but he seems perfectly at ease and comfortable while responding with thoughtful perspective to every question lobbed his way over 35 minutes.
"Thank God for the training staff here, the coaches, I'm here talking to you guys now," he says, acknowledging head-on the gravity of it all.
He just as easily pivots from joking about how the downtime during his recovery allowed him to watch just about every available "K-drama" -- Korean-language television series -- he could find and to take a deeper dive into Drake's music, to talking about how the ICD (implantable cardioverter-defibrillator) he now has his in his chest to help regulate his heart rate makes him feel "invincible."
"I feel like a superhero" he says affirmatively in response to an Iron Man reference. "It definitely brings a sense of comfort."
Finding that comfort fully is a process that has taken most of these last seven and a half months.
"I mean, there's always going to be what-ifs," Iwuchukwu says. "I think there's what-ifs in everything that we do, but the what-if is honestly what stops people from progressing. Being able to not keep it away but accept the fact that it happened and it could happen again, that's the biggest thing. Acceptance is the hardest part about this whole process. I accepted that I was going to be out for six months. I accepted that things could happen again. It's crazy, but it could happen to anybody.
"I wasn't really afraid of coming back. Obviously, my first game back I was like, 'Man, oh my God, this is crazy. Like what if it happens again?' But once I touched the ball and actually just started playing basketball and not thinking about just the outside things, I told myself I was fine. Fear is the biggest obstacle to jump in this whole path. I think I've done a pretty good job and I've had good guidance from everybody around me to get over that hump."
'A life or death situation'
There's some small talk about finding his groove again on the court, his recent performance, etc., to ease into the questions everybody has been waiting to ask all this time.
It's hard to know how a 19-year-old freshman will handle talking about the scariest moment of his life, but Iwuchukwu puts up no barriers in the conversation, sharing openly and thoroughly everything he can recall from that day and the weeks and months since.
"I went to the workout pretty tired. ... I just felt off that day, off-kilter. I was having a great practice, [though]. Had some coaches in the gym, I think I was playing pretty well up until that point. It was a play, I got a rebound, passed it to the guard, running down the floor, caught a lob, after I caught the lob I came back down and was like, 'Man, I'm tired,'" he says. "We got a water break, sat down and then everything just became dizzy and I was like, 'Woah, it's crazy' and then [I collapsed].
"A lot of people ask me if there was pain in that moment. No pain in the moment, just felt really, really dizzy, just thought I fainted. ... I woke, started saying, 'I need my parents, need my sisters.' I kind of had a feeling I knew something had happened. My first thought was I woke up from a long dream, and then I saw the court in front of me. I was like, 'Oh, I'm on the court.' Kind of from there I was like, 'OK, something serious must have really happened.' I had paramedics around me."
In a separate conversation, USC basketball coach Andy Enfield picks up the story from the perspective of the coaching staff and players, which was one of reflexive instincts and surely a great deal of panic.
"When we realized that he was not OK, the thought was ... there were really no thoughts. It was just a reaction to a situation ," Enfield says. "Coach Mobley, the coaching staff and players were helping Vince, our strength coach Kurtis Shultz called 911 and DPS (USC's Department of Public Safety) and immediately I went in the tunnel with a manager to get the AED device (Automated External Defibrillator) off the wall. One of our staff members went in the training room to get our trainers because JY (associate athletic trainer Jon Yonamine) had just left the court because we were in a water break at the time.
"When it first happened, we didn't have time to think. Everybody tried to do the best they could to get the immediate care to Vince. When we came back with the AED device and trainers, the coaching staff were putting Vince on the floor and the trainers started CPR. The trainers did an amazing job. They gave Vince the proper care about as quickly as possible in a situation like that. Not only was CPR performed, but the AED device was right there and they were able to put it on immediately."
Yonamine, who has been with the USC basketball program for the duration of Enfield's decade-long tenure, was assisted by USC women's volleyball trainer Lauren Crawford and women's basketball trainer Erin Tillman.
"He's been amazing in all aspects of his job, and in this case performing life-saving CPR," Enfield says of Yonamine, while also singling out Crawford and Tillman. "... And this was under the utmost incredible pressure because it was a life or death situation."
Enfield noted that the coaches get CPR certified every two years, while adding, "You hope you never have to use your training." He knew that if Iwuchukwu was indeed having a heart-related issue, time was precious retrieving the AED device.
"When you have somebody that's going into cardiac arrest, CPR helps push the blood to the organs and the brain, but really to restart the heart you need an AED device or some kind of electrical shock," Enfield says. "The longer it takes to restart the heart can cause serious issues, so the incredible thing about the situation with Vince was our trainers were able to give him almost simultaneous care. In the first 30-45 seconds, CPR was being performed and the AED device was unwrapped and connected to him within a minute of the initial event. Therefore, it was about as quick of care as you could possibly do."
The initial fears were somewhat assuaged as Iwuchukwu regained consciousness and his big personality started to re-emerge on the way to the ambulance.
"Walking him out to the ambulance gave me a sense of relief that he was very aware of his surroundings -- didn't remember what happened, but you could tell he was back to the Vince that we knew as far as his personality, how he was interacting with us," Enfield says. "And then visiting him in the hospital that day and the following day, he seemed to be fine in all aspects."
Iwuchukwu, meanwhile, continues the story from inside the ambulance ...
"It was crazy. I was in the ambulance, I called my mom and told her, 'Mom, I think I just had either a heart attack or cardiac arrest.' And she was like, 'You're lying, stop joking around.' I was like, 'No, mom, I think I'm pretty serious about this.' She kept denying it," he says, adding that he then asked the paramedics to get on the phone. "They were like, 'Yeah, your son collapsed.' I didn't really find out what happened until like two days after. That's when they confirmed, like, yeah, he had cardiac arrest.
"When I found out, it was kind of like expected/unexpected. Expected because I knew something happened, unexpected because I didn't know it could happen to me specifically. It was tough to deal with at first. Because at the time I was told I wouldn't be able to play again."
As for what caused the cardiac arrest?
"Just ran a lot of tests, did a lot of tests and they just said it was an event that, almost like [Buffalo Bills safety] Damar Hamlin's, it's just a freak accident," Iwuchukwu says.
That initial prognosis that he'd never play basketball again came from the first doctor Iwuchukwu met with at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but he didn't see him again as the hospital staff changed over for the July 4 weekend. A different doctor who had familiarity with similar situations in athletes offered fresh hope that basketball could still be part of his future.
In between, there were some tough conversations with his parents, who flew in from Texas to join him at the hospital, about whether he could or even should return to the court. It was really then that Iwuchukwu realized how much the sport had come to mean to him.
"It was crazy. My parents were there, I was like, 'It's fine. I've only played basketball for four years. I don't really need it that much.' After I said that, I just broke into tears. It's so crazy thinking that for four years I could be attached to something so much," he says. "Yeah, I mean, a lot of my time has been put into basketball and for me to have said that really took a toll. I hadn't cried until that point. That was like 3-4 days after the whole incident. ... That moment was when everything just flowed out."
'The positivity was what I needed to stay sane'
Speaking over the phone, Enfield asks how the interview with Iwuchukwu went and says he's glad his star freshman was comfortable talking about it all, as he feels everything that has transpired since that scary moment July 1 has become a story worth sharing.
Iwuchukwu was already a compelling story before any of this happened, though.
He was born in Mannheim, Germany, as his father Vincent Iwuchukwu Sr. was in the military. The family later moved to South Korea for three and a half years, back to Germany for about a year and then to San Antonio, Texas when the younger Iwuchukwu was 14 years old.
He was mostly a soccer player growing up, rejecting his early introductions to basketball while in South Korea.
"Honestly, I first was introduced to basketball when I was in Korea, so my seventh-grade year. And I hated it" he says. "I played like three games. We lost a game ... coach told me we lost the game because of me and I was like, 'Well, I don't care, I don't like the game anyways.' After two games, I was like, I'm done with the sport."
But when he moved to San Antonio before high school, he said soccer wasn't a big deal in the area and that his school didn't even have a boys soccer team.
"I was like, unfortunately we're going to have to stick with basketball, because I was too skinny and too long for football," he jokes.
"When I started again, I hated it again. The reason why I kept playing, I played AAU my eighth-grade summer going into my freshman year and this one coach told me I would never be good. I just took it as a challenge. I didn't really like his son, so I was like, 'As soon as I'm better than your son I'm done.'"
Iwuchukwu draws laughs from the reporters while telling the story as the 35-minute conversation winds back to more light-hearted matters.
Eventually, he says, he found himself finding his love for basketball. He would end up as one of the most coveted recruits in the country, a five-star prospect and the No. 16-ranked recruit nationally.
Iwuchukwu was the latest premier big-man recruit for Enfield and his staff after NBA lottery picks Onyeka Okongwu and Evan Mobley and second-round draft pick Isaiah Mobley. He was expected to be an immediate factor as a freshman this season as part of a two-bigs lineup with 6-foot-11 redshirt junior Joshua Morgan.
But after the July 1 scare, his basketball future was not a primary concern for the USC staff.
"We didn't even think about the game of basketball at that time. We just were concerned about his health," Enfield says, adding that the conversations and decision about whether he could or should play again were left to the family and medical professionals.
Says Iwuchukwu: "I never felt like they abandoned me at all. They gave me a sense of security -- even if I didn't play basketball again I could still come back to USC and still be welcomed."
If he was going to play again, he faced a long road back.
Iwuchukwu read up on Keyontae Johnson, a fellow highly-rated basketball recruit who collapsed on the court in a game for the Florida Gators in December of 2020. Per the New York Times, Johnson was diagnosed with "athlete’s heart,” or an increase in cardiac mass because of systemic training. He never played another game at Florida as the school would not clear him to return to court, and he later transferred to Kansas State, where he's now playing a starring role for the Wildcats this season.
Iwuchukwu didn't know if he could sustain two years without playing if it came to that.
"I just felt like I didn't have a purpose. That was the toughest thing to deal with," he says of not being cleared to do anything physical after he left the hospital.
Meanwhile, he talked to Jared Butler, a former star at Baylor who played with the Utah Jazz and is now in the NBA's G League, who before college was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which causes the walls of the heart chamber to thicken.
"He's really been my go-to when it comes to certain questions I had," Iwuchukwu says.
As the Trojans turned to preseason practices in the fall, Iwuchukwu was initially limited to riding a stationary bike and later allowed to start lifting weights but not to the extent of full team workouts. He says that he wasn't even permitted to dribble a basketball then, with a trainer making sure he abided by the guidelines for his recovery at all times.
All the while, Enfield would highlight Iwuchukwu's positivity in the face of those challenges whenever he was asked about the freshman big man.
"The positivity was what I needed to stay sane," Iwuchukwu says of the mindset he adopted.
He notes multiple times that instead of feeling bad for himself he felt it for his family and teammates and coaches that they had to go through this ordeal with him.
"If anything, I feel more toward my coaches and my teammates and people who had to see that happen to me than for myself. That's a tough situation to deal with looking at someone go lifeless," he says.
In late November, he was allowed to start shooting and dribbling and during the Christmas break he took part in his first true full-speed practice since that July 1 workout. He jokes that he felt like an old man with how hard it was on his body trying to ramp back up again, but he's gotten stronger and stronger while bringing his remarkable return to the court to fruition.
Enfield is asked if he's surprised Iwuchukwu is starting college basketball games now -- just seven months after that scary moment in July.
"To an extent, I am surprised. But through this process we learned so much about the incredible medical care in this country as well the technology of these devices and also the fact that many athletes are able to come back from this," he says. "There are many examples around the world and in the United States of athletes coming back from this type of event to have success in their athletic careers and live long happy lives."
'The goals don't change'
Iwuchukwu's first game back was Jan. 12 against Colorado. He subbed in 5 minutes into the game and logged 5 total minutes, while going 0-for-2 from the field. Still, the reception he received that night overwhelmed him.
"I felt like Kobe when he played the Jazz in [his] last game. The standing ovation was crazy," he says. "... It was exhilarating. It was super surreal to really think that I'm coming back on the court and playing my first game."
When Enfield went to tell Iwuchukwu to get ready to enter the game, it was all business.
In Iwuchukwu's head, it was anything but ...
"Andy told me, 'Don't forget your assignments,'" Iwuchukwu says of the blunt message, again drawing laughs from his audience Monday night. "... He definitely made sure to make sure I had my head in the game, but honestly my head was not in the game. I was like, 'Oh my god, I'm playing again.'"
He's now played nine games and started three, taking the place of Morgan, who is out with a bad ankle sprain. The 26 minutes he played Saturday night vs. Oregon State, along with his 19 points (9 of 9 on free throws) and 7 rebounds were all season-highs. That's about the max minutes he's cleared to play right now, and a staff member monitors his heart metrics during the game.
"Yes, it's a good step forward, but still a lot more steps that I've got to be taking," he says.
Says Enfield: "It's an incredible comeback for a young man. He's worked so hard at it, he's had such a positive attitude -- he's very inspirational. He's very inspiring to all of us. I know he gets frustrated when he may not do something that he's capable of doing, but he doesn't understand that he's just missed so much time. He's doing a great job, he's getting better and better, but he's not where he would be if this didn't happen."
It may have taken Iwuchukwu a while to find his love for basketball, but he feels it more than ever now.
"I love the little things now," he says. "I used to hate running, I used to hate boxing out, I used to hate setting screens, but man, those things are things I missed doing."
And he still dreams of reaching the NBA, believing in that potential as much as he ever has despite the significant ordeal he's endured, not even knowing seven months ago if he'd even play the game in any capacity again.
On this point, he's adamant.
"The goals don't change. The process to get to the goals might change, but the goals don't change for me," he says. "I always want[ed] to be a NBA player. I've been working toward that. ... The course to get to that goal has been shifted a little bit, but the goal doesn't change for me."
Everything is indeed ahead of Iwuchukwu, and for that reason he doesn't spend a lot of time looking backward. He was willing to do so Monday, though, to share what is truly one of the most significant stories in college sports this year.
To wrap up the 35-minute conversation with reporters, he's asked if he ever has flashbacks to July 1, to hearing Eric Mobley's voice pleading for him to wake up.
"I haven't really thought about that moment, to be honest with you," he says. "For me, it's like it happened, I can't change it, no one can change it for me. ... So no, I don't think about it. Unfortunately it did happen, but it happened. I can't do anything about it so you've just got to keep moving forward."