Why Kansas’ win over UConn was extra special for KJ Adams

LAWRENCE, Kan. — It’s 2 a.m. on Saturday, and I’ve just finished re-watching every possession of No. 5 Kansas’ masterful defensive performance in a 69-65 win over No. 4 UConn. I was going to write about how the Jayhawks used a switching defense to disrupt one of the hardest offenses in the country to guard, but then someone sent this video of Bill Self telling his team in the postgame locker room that “this game belonged to one person.”

And I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do, but I want to celebrate KJ Adams and his mom.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them for the last two weeks. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write about them. I found out that Yvonne Adams had died while I was sitting in the sand in Honolulu hours after arriving to cover the Maui Invitational, and all I could think to do was call my mom. Happy times. Sad times. That’s always the call I make, and I cannot imagine a day when I can’t make that call to my best friend.

Last March, after Kansas lost to Arkansas in the NCAA Tournament, KJ did exactly what most of us would do after experiencing some heartache; he went to see his mom. He and his sister Brittany surprised her. Yvonne had been sitting outside on her porch watching NCAA Tournament games — getting some Vitamin D, she’d tell me later — and when she walked inside into her living room, she heard a familiar voice.

“How’s it going?” KJ said as he came around the corner.

Yvonne paused and her jaw dropped.

“What the hell?”

KJ was laughing, with a huge smile on his face as he went to hug his mom.

“Oh, it is so good to see you,” she said.

You wish life could go on like this. Let that family live that on a loop.

“They only stayed for 72 hours,” Yvonne texted me that next week, “but it was the best 72 hours I’ve had in a really long time.”

Yvonne sent me the video after I’d sent her a picture of my son Henry in a KJ jersey, taken before the game against Arkansas. It was his eighth birthday. I wasn’t there for it, because I was in Des Moines covering the game. Henry was born on the first day of the 2015 NCAA Tournament, and I’ve had to miss a lot of birthdays since. On Friday night, he had two games that I missed while covering UConn-Kansas. It’s the worst part of this job, missing those moments.

Henry loves ball just like his dad, and he cried hard after that Arkansas loss — just like I used to growing up whenever the Jayhawks would lose in the tournament.

Yvonne had shared her news of KJ and Brittany’s visit and talked about trying to get Henry to a game this season so he could get his jersey signed and a picture with KJ. I was so looking forward to seeing Yvonne again.

Once you knew her, you wanted to be around her. Last January, I met Yvonne for the first time at a hotel in Lawrence to interview her for a story documenting her and KJ’s relationship, his journey and her battle with cancer — and it’s the only interview where I’ve ever laughed and cried.

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Instantly, she was a friend. She had a way of making everyone feel loved. She got dealt one of the worst hands in life with her cancer diagnosis, but she didn’t let it stop her from loving to live.

And what she loved more than anything were the people in her life. Relationships meant so much to her that it kept her from being a college coach. She spent one year as a graduate assistant at Blinn Junior College.

“The recruiting was too much,” she told me last January. “Like you develop these relationships with these kids and families and then they tell you no. Ugh. I didn’t like that. Literally at the first no, I went into my head coach’s office, and I said, ‘I can’t do this.’

“I was pouring so much into those children, for them to say, actually, your school is not good enough for me, I was like, ‘Eh, I don’t like this.’”

Every story she’d tell was like that. She’d hit you right in the heart, and then make you smile. She even had a way of making her cancer diagnosis sound like a blessing.

“I’m super, super independent,” she said. “You don’t need to help me do anything. And my husband is a helper. Like, that is what he does. He’s a fixer. He’s a helper. And he’s been able to help in ways that I hadn’t let him help before. He needs to help me get up off the couch; he needs to help me remind me to take the medicine. So that’s been great for us, marriage-wise, and we’ve grown even stronger than we were before. So that definitely has been a blessing.

“Then the kindness that we’ve received since my diagnosis has been phenomenal. There are people that I’ve met or have been friends with for years, that have shown up in ways that I just did not expect.”

I’m tearing up now, just re-reading those words. We can never let those we love hear it enough.

And if I had one last chance to let Yvonne know how I feel, I’d tell her that since I wrote that story, KJ greets me with a big smile and a warm hello every time we see each other. I’d tell her those moments are the most rewarding of my career.

I’d tell her that she was an amazing mother. The type of mom that coaches dream about. Because sports parents can be difficult sometimes. They want the best for their children, but that can come out in the worst ways.

Not Yvonne. What she cared about was KJ’s body language, how he treated his teammates, how he reacted in adverse situations.

She was proud, because he never questioned his coaches. She was proud because he always kept a level head. “We always talk to him about not getting too high. Not getting too low,” she said. “Because you just never know.”

And those words were never more relevant in the last few weeks. Her baby was supposed to be headed to Hawaii on a Friday, only to find out on a Thursday that her battle was coming to an end. He flew home that next day to say goodbye, then was back on a plane three days later with his family, playing in a game hours after he landed in Honolulu.

“Can you imagine the stress that he’s been under?” Self said to his team in the locker room on Friday night, after Adams filled up the stat sheet — 18 points, five rebounds, two assists — and played such great defense that UConn’s coach was praising his abilities after. “And for him to play for you guys the way he did tonight, knowing he’s getting on a plane to go say goodbye tomorrow morning at 11 a.m.? Wow. Stud. Stud.”

The game could not have ended more perfectly, Self would tell his team, with KJ at the free-throw line with 2.4 seconds left and the Jayhawks ahead by two.

When KJ was growing up, Yvonne used to like to sit at the top of the bleachers away from everyone else where she could focus. I like to think she’s got the highest seat now. And she was above watching KJ play one of the best games of his life on Friday.

She got to watch him seal the game by making those two free throws. She got to see his joy and know he’s going to be OK.

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(Photo of KJ Adams: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)