Sealed with a kiss

The kiss was spontaneous and so was the eruption at the O-Dome Saturday afternoon when Keyontae Johnson dropped down in push-up position and then lowered his lips to kiss the Gator head that on the playing floor of Billy Donovan Court. The hinges that hold the roof on the O-Dome were strained to their limits. The roof barely stayed on. The noise was deafening and it kept bouncing around. If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like when you hear someone say, “In one ear and out the other,” then this was it.

The cheers from a mostly Florida – there were a couple thousand Kentucky fans in the arena, but they too were cheering – crowd said, “We love you!” a thousand times over. The kiss may have been symbolic, but it was like hearing voice of the O-Dome Tom Collette scream into his microphone, “I love you and I love everything about being a Florida Gator!”

That kiss said more than that, however. A whole lot more.

The kiss said farewell. Farewell to playing days as a Florida Gator for sure, but also farewell to an almost lifetime of dreams that had their origins when Keyontae Johnson was growing up in Norfolk, Virginia. These are dreams that grew stronger and more powerful as he learned the game and realized that he was a rare talent while earning national attention playing for the renowned Boo Williams Summer League AAU teams that seem to always finish among the nation’s best. After his sophomore year at Norview High School, he spent a year at IMG Academy in Bradenton and then his senior year at Oak Hill Academy, the same school that was a jumping off point for Kevin Durant and a whole host of NBA players.

At Oak Hill, Keldon Johnson (Kentucky, then NBA one-and-done) and David McCormack (Kansas) were supposed to be the big stars. Keyontae was the glue that held the Warriors together and that had everything to do with why Mike White recruited him so heavily.

“He was the only coach my senior year that constantly came up to Oak Hill,” Keyontae said Saturday. “He called late at night, constantly trying, showing how much he cared for me and wanted me to come. He never guaranteed me anything which was something I was looking for. I don’t want stuff handed to me, never let it get handed to me. Just the love behind him – he’s done a lot for me. Me kissing the court … this program basically changed my life. Me coming here changed everything for me. I’ll never forget it.”

There were no guarantees at Florida but that never stopped Keytonae from continuing to dream big dreams. After an All-SEC sophomore year, he was the preseason SEC Player of the Year for the 2020-21 season only to see his entire world turned upside down a month into the season when he collapsed on the floor at the Donald Tucker Center in Tallahassee just minutes into a game with Florida State on December 12.

Life hasn’t been the same since and will never be what it was, or at least what he dreamed it would be.

In the 450 days since the fateful collapse that took a medically induced coma to save his life, Keyontae has clung to his dream of regaining his health and playing basketball again but all the dreaming, all the wishing, all the hoping and all the prayers haven’t restored his health. He’s still on scholarship at UF but he can’t play. Doctors won’t let him. He’s become known as “Coach Key,” working as a student assistant for Mike White. He has been an asset to the UF basketball team – a real coach, big brother and father-confessor all rolled into one – but it kills him inside to know that if he could only play again at the level he was at before the collapse, the Gators would be so much better.

And his dream of playing in the league would be reach out and touch close.

I see him around the O-Dome on a regular basis. He’s quick with a smile and a hug. Always, I ask how he’s doing and always, the answer is the same: “Waiting for the doctors to tell me I can play again.”

Whether or not he knows exactly what’s wrong with him and why he isn’t allowed to play, he’s not telling. He has his reasons and so do the doctors who keep testing but haven’t released anything to the public to say exactly what happened back on December 12, 2020, what continues to happen and when, if ever, he will be allowed to play again.

The suspicion is that it has something to do with his heart. Given what we know about COVID-19, whose after-effects can be heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular related issues, the dots seem to connect since Keyontae tested positive for the virus in the months preceding his collapse. But we don’t know for sure, and Keyontae offers no clues. Waiting for the doctors is his story and he’s sticking with it.

While he’s been doing his “Coach Key” and being a normal student at the University of Florida, he hasn’t been able to play or practice. He still shoots. If you happened to arrive at the O-Dome an hour or so prior to any Florida home game this past season, then you saw him hoisting shots. Whatever ails him may have taken away his opportunities to run up and down the court and explode off the floor – the vertical was 45 inches plus prior to the collapse – but it hasn’t taken away his shooting eye or his touch. The ball still floats above the rim and then drops quietly through the net just like it always did.

That he is still able to drain the shots has to be one of the reasons this entire ordeal has been so frustrating for him. He smiles every time I see him. He always smiles. That’s almost his trademark, but his eyes tell a different story. Whenever he talks about “waiting for the doctors” his eyes almost shout out, “I can still do this. If they’ll just give me one more chance, I’ll prove it!”

We are required to trust the doctors on this one. There is a reason UF Health and Shands Hospital are so highly regarded, not just in this country, but internationally. They should put a giant-sized sign on the roof that says, “Some of the greatest doctors in the world work here!” We also are required to understand their reluctance to let Keyontae play again. The doctors know all about Hank Gathers. Nobody wants to see another Hank Gathers moment, not now, not ever again.

Keyontae Johnson isn’t much younger than Hank Gathers was when he collapsed on the court the first time in 1989 when Loyola Marymount was playing UC-Santa Barbara. An abnormal heartbeat was the diagnosis for which Gathers was prescribed a beta blocker. Over the next three months his medication was decreased. When he was allowed to play again later that season, Gathers was spectacular. He lit up Shaquille and LSU for 48 one night. The good times came crashing down on March 4. After one of his spectacular alley-oop dunks in Portland, Hank Gathers collapsed again. This time he didn’t get up. He died that night. Hank Gathers was barely 23.

No one is saying it out loud, but you have to know that no one at Shands or at UF wants to take a chance that Keyontae Johnson could be the next Hank Gathers. He’s too special a young man to lose him, not if simply never playing basketball again is all it takes to keep him with us.

There is also an element of common sense involved here. Keyontae has a $5 million insurance policy that he can collect at the end of this season. Every time he thinks about playing again and every time the doctors say no, there is that $5 million reminder. In a weak moment, if you gave him the option he might walk away from the money. Every star athlete I’ve ever interviewed tells me the ability to perform at a high level is so addicting that they’d do it for free.

As impossible as it may be for dreams to die, sometimes they have to be ignored. Sometimes you have to realize that even if you’re healthy, playing basketball will come to an end one day anyway. Just in Keyontae’s case, coming to an end is sooner and not later. Keyontae will be 23 on May 24, same age as Hank Gathers. Hank was a marvelous young man, too, but he’s gone. We still have Keyontae with us.

When Keyontae Johnson was the last Gator senior introduced at the annual Senior Day celebration before the Gators played 7th-ranked Kentucky Saturday afternoon, the O-Dome erupted. Love was a two-way street, flowing to him and flowing back at the fans screaming “Key! Key! Key!” Before he walked out of that tunnel for the Senior Day ceremony he made a vow.

He broke it even before he emerged from the tunnel.

“I wasn’t trying to cry in front of the team and just be sad,” he said. “Once I saw the videos of my God-mom and my sisters telling their speech, it just hit. Walking out with my parents, just hearing the crowds, it was the best feeling I had in awhile.”

So many emotions. It couldn’t have been easy. When he came to UF as part of that celebrated recruiting class in 2018, he dreamed about winning championships. Saturday standing there at midcourt with his parents, and looking at the line of adoring coaches and teammates, it was a grim reminder. He’s the last one standing as a Gator from that 2018 class. Andrew Nembhard left for Gonzaga. Noah Locke left for Louisville. Omar Payne left for Illinois. The four of them still talk, but it isn’t the same and never will be.

Even when he couldn’t play, Keyontae Johnson stayed in Gainesville rather than go home to Norfolk. With so many unknowns regarding his health, so many unknowns regarding the possibility of playing again and being so far away from family and friends in Norfolk, going home would have been all too easy. Instead, he stayed. Some of it had to do with the doctors at Shands. They’re really, really good, but they have lots of good doctors in Norfolk, too. Still, he stayed.

Staying in Gainesville had a lot to do with love. Keyontae loves being a Gator. He loves his Gator teammates, even the newbies who he never got to suit up and play a game with – the four transfers from the portal and the three new freshmen. They’re his brothers by different mothers, just like Colin Castleton, Tyree Appleby, Anthony Duruji, Jason Jitoboh and Niels Lane, who were there in Tallahassee when he collapsed.

After the Senior Day ceremony ended, Keyontae went into the locker room and slipped into his familiar No. 11 jersey one last time. When he trotted onto the court and went through the layup line a couple of times, the buzz in the O-Dome was electric. When he was introduced as a starter, the O-Dome lit up once again. No one knew it was only for a symbolic opening tap that would all be over in 10 seconds.

It didn’t matter. Keyontae Johnson was on the court wearing his Gator uniform one more time. Seeing him there, 450 days were erased. He looked every bit as fit and healthy as he did prior to the collapse. Oh what we would have done to see him leap high above the rim and dunk it so hard that the backboard shook one more time.

Kentucky coach John Calipari felt the same way. He had offered to let it be more than just an opening tap to Keyontae. Cal said let him score even if it was just walking the ball up the court.

“It was a 40-minute game,” Calipari said on Kentucky’s postgame radio show, telling the audience that if those two points had been the difference in a win or a loss, so be it.

A lot of opposing fans despise Calipari. I’ve known him for years. He’s a classy guy and that gesture proved it. If you don’t believe he has a heart of gold then give Dick Vitale a call and ask about the millions for cancer research that Cal has helped him raise over the years.

Cal wasn’t the only one who wanted to give Keyontae a going away score. Tyree Appleby suggested one last alley-oop. A throw-down like that and I doubt any of us, whether at the O-Dome or watching on TV, would have had a voice on Sunday. And then we would have cried. Happy tears. Lots of them.

As much as Mike White would have loved seeing Keyontae score two final points, everyone from doctors to administrative people said no. They were okay with the ball being tapped to him, okay with maybe a dribble or two, but that was about it. Nothing more.

So when those ten seconds were over, Keyontae handed the ball to zebra in charge Pat Adams then one-by-one hugged his Florida teammates and then the five Kentucky starters.

Then he kissed the court.

It was I love you and farewell combined into one gesture that spoke to the heart of everyone who has a favorite college team, but especially to Gators. There is something all college sports fans feel about loving our school and living vicariously through our teams. For a few fleeting years they are with us and then they are gone, off to the real world. Some of them have the opportunity to extend their playing careers to the professional level. Most of them join the rest of us who were never as athletically talented in the real world, holding down jobs and trying to understand everything that life throws at us.

We will probably never know why tragedy struck Keyontae Johnson at a point in time when the world was about to be his own personal oyster, but we can know this: For all he has had to endure the last 450 days, for all the hopes and dreams that have been crushed and for all the uncertainty that he has had to wear like a migraine that won’t go away, he has never forgotten to smile. He has never forgotten to be polite. He has never forgotten to be a great teammate even though his teammates get to play the game and he doesn’t. He has never once forgotten to be the marvelous young man that Mike White loves like one of his own sons.

There is a bond between those two that no solvent will ever dissolve. When I chatted with Keyontae at the Florida-Oklahoma gymnastics meet at the O-Dome a couple of weeks ago, I asked about the relationship between coach and player, and player and school.

“If I ever play college basketball again, it will be for Coach White,” he told me. “If I ever play college basketball again, it will be for the Florida Gators.”

Seal that with a kiss.