Mike Garland and the untold story of Michigan State's basketball season

Let’s start at the low point. These times are unsettling enough. Not that Mike Garland was thinking about the coronavirus and the effect it might have on his son.

He was just thinking about his son. And whether to immediately drive to Cleveland to see him when the plane he was on landed back in East Lansing.

It was a Sunday. The day Kobe Bryant died. That’s how Garland remembers. He needs moments or news to jar his memory. Because the games and days and dates blur together. It can get like that for a college basketball coach, especially when your mind is elsewhere, especially when your 35-year-old son needs a heart.

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He was flying back from Minneapolis, where the team he helps coach — the Michigan State Spartans — had just beaten Minnesota. It was in the evening, maybe 9 p.m. or so, and he was debating whether to jump in the car as soon as the team plane landed or wake up early and go.

His gut told him to go. His head told him to stay.

He stayed, weary of a late-night drive, relatively secure that his son, Ray Garland, was stable as he lay in a hospital bed at the Cleveland Clinic.

So, he slept, fitfully, until the phone rang at 5:30 a.m. It was Ray. His heart was failing. He had called on FaceTime as he was getting wheeled into surgery prep for a procedure to insert a pump into his chest called a left ventricular assist device.

Ray wanted to know where his father was. He was scared. Garland told his son to stay strong and hang in there. The surgeon grabbed the phone and told Garland he wouldn’t let his son die.

They hung up.

Garland fumbled around his house in East Lansing, tossing a few clothes into a suitcase, ran to his car, and took off for Cleveland. It was dark. Snow and sleet pelted the windshield. He didn’t care. He plunged his foot on the pedal and pushed toward 80 mph.

Sobbing. Fearing his son might not make it through surgery. Fearing he wouldn’t get there in time. Berating himself for not driving down when the team plane landed.

“That was the lowest feeling I’ve had as father in my life,” Garland said. “My son needed my support. But because I didn’t listen to myself, to what my spirit was telling me to do, I let him down.”

It didn’t matter that he’d just spent a week at the Cleveland Clinic, and had only rejoined the team the day before the Minnesota game. Or that he was the reason his son was at the world-renowned Clinic, that when his son had visited him in East Lansing in late December and had fallen ill with pneumonia, he took him to nearby Sparrow Hospital, and that when his son grew worse because of an underlying heart condition called cardiomyopathy — which had been diagnosed in 2011 — he pushed to get him transferred to the Cleveland Clinic, where his son’s cardiology team resided.

He had done much to protect his son and get him proper care. Yet he could only think about how he wasn’t by his side when his heart began to slow, and his vitals began to slip, and the doctors ordered an emergency procedure to save his life.

And the more he thought about his decision to stay the night, the faster he drove, fueled by guilt and adrenaline and anxiety.

Then his phone rang. It was Dwayne Stephens, a fellow assistant coach at Michigan State. Stephens had been worried, and as soon as he heard Garland’s voice — and heard the sobs and the panic — knew Garland was in as much trouble as his son.

“G,” Stephens bellowed, “slow down! You’ve got to make it there. If something happens to you on your way down, it’s going to kill both of y’all.”

For the next 45 minutes, Stephens stayed on the line, telling Garland it would be OK, telling him to breathe, to relax, that he was praying for him.

“Right now,” he told him, “your focus has to be on getting there. It's in God’s hands. You've done everything you can do.”

Garland began to uncoil. He eased off the pedal. He hung up with Stephens, back in control of his emotions.

Stephens had given him a gift. The same gift Garland gives to MSU’s basketball program every day.

That’s why he’s been around so long — Tom Izzo hired him in 1996. That’s why he’s called “G”, which is short for Garland, but also short for “OG,” which is short for original gangster, which is used as an honorific to describe the wisdom and life he passes out to everyone in the program.

He is indispensable to the Spartans' success. He is Izzo’s closest friend in the program, and one of his closest friends period — they finish each other’s sentences.

“He’s my guy,” Izzo said, “he would step in front of a bullet for me.”

Izzo would do the same for him, and did, in a way, when he told Garland, his confidant and counselor, his translator and enforcer, a second father to star point guard Cassius Winston, in the middle of the most emotionally challenging season he’d ever had as a head coach, to get to his son, to spend as much time as he needed, to focus on being a dad first.

***

When Garland arrived at the Clinic, his son was still in surgery. His wife, Cynthia Garland, was in the waiting room. Surgeons cut Ray open at 9 a.m. and weren’t finished working until almost 11 p.m. A leak had extended the procedure by a couple of hours.

The doctor surfaced close to midnight. He told the coach his son was strong. That his lungs looked clear. That his heart was pumping smoothly.

“You raise a kid up and you hope things you put inside them will carry them in life,” Garland said. “I raised my boys to be tough … and I think that saved his life. I really do — between God and how I tried to raise him.”

He got to see his son a little later. Tubes and wires nearly covered him. But he was awake. The father and son talked briefly. They didn’t need to say much.

Garland slept at the hospital that night. His wife stayed at Ray’s home. The next morning, when his wife returned, he took a shift at his son’s house, desperate for a shower and some shuteye.

For the next week, Garland spent most of his time next to his son in the intensive care unit. He stepped out to take calls from Izzo, to return texts from Stephens and Dane Fife, another MSU assistant, from players and managers and dozens of others within the Spartan basketball community.

The team was struggling, still trying to find its way after the death of Winston’s brother in late November. At no point, though, did anyone in the program pressure Garland, or tell him they missed him, or couldn’t wait for him to get back, even though that was true.

“That was by design,” Stephens said, “we didn’t want to put stress on him.”

A week or so after surgery, Ray took his first steps. To the nurses’ station and back. Garland recorded it. He sent the video to the team.

“That was sweet,” said Izzo, who has known Ray since he was born, and known Garland since they met at Northern Michigan in 1973, when they were freshman basketball players. “He was the first person I met. We roomed together on the road.”

The updates helped keep Izzo and his staff and team connected to Garland. So did the daily talks.

Izzo wanted to be Garland’s friend first. In a season centered on the unpredictability of life, this was more proof. He tried to use the lessons with his team. Though unlike the tragedy Winston was navigating, Izzo couldn’t talk about Garland and Ray’s struggle. Not publicly.

In its own way, Garland’s absence — and the seriousness of his son’s illness — had altered the season as much as the loss of Winston’s brother. No coach relates to players like Garland. Or tells stories like Garland, as he does in the team hotel the night before games, when he gathers the players in his room.

No one understands Izzo like Garland does, either.

“He lets me be the good cop at times,” Izzo said. “He knows when to step in. When to pull a player aside.”

He knows when to console and when to cajole. He knows when to wrestle or let the team rub his shaved head for luck and how to spot what the team is missing.

“He self-scouts,” Izzo said.

He also provides the jet fuel at practice, propelling them forward, unleashing truth and motivational fury in equal measure.

“Where I come from those are the old, wise people in your life,” Stephens said of folks like Garland. “If you want to learn something, go ask him. He's just one of those people. He’s the guy at the high school that every kid loves. Because he impacts every one of their lives. The same is true here.”

For almost three weeks, the Spartans missed that energy, those talks, the one-on-one gab sessions about life. Winston missed them the most. Followed by Rocket Watts and Gabe Brown. Watts because Garland is his mentor; Brown because Garland grew up and lived where Brown had, in Ypsilanti and Belleville, where Garland coached for 16 years after playing at NMU before Izzo convinced him to join his program.

When Garland’s son began to walk, doctors moved him from ICU to a step-down unit. And while his son’s vitals were improving, he still wasn’t ready to go.

Meanwhile, MSU kept losing. Three of the four games Garland missed. Izzo finally asked Garland if he would consider returning once his son was stable.

“There are times in life where you have to choose one thing over another,” Garland said. “The love is there both ways. You’ve got to weigh which one needs you most at the time.”

After talking with Izzo, Garland approached his son.

“I looked at Ray and said, ‘I know you’re still in (the hospital), but I’ve got to go back. They need me. He said, ‘I know, dad.’ ”

It was two days before MSU was to play at Illinois. That morning, Garland got up and drove back to East Lansing. He went straight to the Breslin Center. Izzo called, not knowing Garland was in his office.

“Chief was walking in the hallway going to get food when I told him, ‘Hey, I’m here,’ ” Garland said.

Izzo stopped. Stepped into Garland’s office. And bear-hugged his life-long friend.

***

Garland isn’t sure how long his son’s LVAD pump will work. Neither are the doctors. But they know it bought him time. After its implant, Ray was moved down from the highest priority on the donor list.

He will still need a new heart.

He was eventually released from the hospital and sent to his home in Cleveland. Cynthia stayed to help.

Meanwhile, in East Lansing, Garland’s return helped settle things. Izzo was trying to figure out how much to push his players in the wake of Winston’s loss. Getting Garland back removed some pressure and allowed Izzo to slowly find his voice again.

MSU beat Illinois on the road. Lost at home to Maryland. Then ripped off five wins in a row, the last one over Ohio State at home to secure a share of the Big Ten title.

The team was whole again. Winston was learning how to play through his grief, and said he was finally experiencing joy again on the court.

Garland’s son was getting better, too, and had been cleared to travel, though Cynthia kept that news from him at first. She wanted to surprise him with a visit and bring Ray to East Lansing for the Ohio State game, for senior day, for his first visit since December, when he’d come down with pneumonia.

When she told Garland she was driving home, he was irritated. He wanted her to fly. She didn’t like driving distances anyway.

But he gave in and on March 6, a Friday, he walked to his driveway and couldn’t believe his eyes: there was Ray, sitting in the front seat.

“He looked great,” said Garland, who broke down when he spotted him. “He’d lost all that fluid — almost 50 pounds — because his heart was pumping properly.”

Turns out the whole team and staff knew. Everyone except Izzo, who can’t keep a secret.

“Yeah, they know me too well,” he said.

The next day, Ray made at appearance at the practice gym, where the team was finishing up preparations for the Buckeyes.

“And when we all saw him walk down those steps … that was pretty cool,” Izzo said.

Garland stayed at the Kellogg Center on Saturday night with the team, like he always does, and had invited the players into his room to tell stories, like he always does. Almost four months earlier, he’d walked out into that same hallway to meet Winston moments after he’d heard about his brother. Now they were here again, each the survivor of their own difficult journey, on the cusp of the biggest game of the season.

The next day, Winston played his best game of the season, capping a liberating performance with a step-back 3-pointer in the final minutes, turning and staring at his brother, Khy Winston, who was sitting in the stands, then bounding back down the court.

Garland watched from the bench, standing and howling, feeling liberated in his own way, too, knowing that back up in the basketball offices, tucked inside the film room, Ray was watching on television.

And though he couldn’t risk sitting with the crowd because of his weakened immune system, he was plenty close enough. After the game, and after the senior day ceremonies on the court in front of a crowd that hadn’t left, after team photos and confetti and banner raising, Garland made his way down the Breslin Center tunnel and up the steps to his son.

That night, Ray and Cynthia drove back to Cleveland. Garland began preparing for the Big Ten tournament, a tournament that was canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak. The NCAA tournament was canceled, too.

[For the first time in decades, Tom Izzo isn't exactly sure what to do]

This time of year is the busiest for Garland and coaches who make their living in college basketball. But the lack of a postseason has given him time to think.

About organ donors — he is about to become one. About fate. About loss. About life. About accepting that the coronavirus is keeping him from seeing his son anytime soon.

He can’t control whether his son gets the heart he will eventually need. But he can control how he thinks about it. And what he chooses to take from this season, and failure of his son’s heart.

Garland once left MSU for the head coaching job at Cleveland State. He spent three years there. He didn’t win. But he was there long enough that it became his son’s home.

“I’ve been thinking about why I failed there (as a coach),” Garland said.

And he often prays when he thinks about the narrative turns of his life. What he realized is that God didn’t send him to Cleveland to coach basketball.

“He sent me to Cleveland so he could save Ray’s life,” he said.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.