On July 1, 2009, a Saturday morning, the phone rang at the home of Keith and Charlene Jordan in Columbus, Ga.

Tom Walter never hesitated when asked to take the tests to find out if he was a match. Brian Westerholt/Sports on Film

The call came during the first moments of the first day that the NCAA allowed college baseball coaches and their recruiters to reach out to rising high school seniors. On the other end of the line was Tom Walter, who had been head coach at Wake Forest for all of 16 days. Walter asked to speak to their son, Kevin, a left-handed hitting machine of an outfielder whom the coach had taken a liking to as a "below-the-radar talent." The Jordans had met Walter briefly once before and all agreed that, in Keith's words, "sometimes you can look a man in the eye and you know if he means what he says and he says what he means." Of course he could talk to Kevin.

Initially, Walter's official sales pitch wasn't much different than all the others that Kevin would hear over the coming months. The coach hoped to convince the young man that the decision to come to play ball at his university was the first step in a lifetime of success.

What neither Keith nor Charlene could have possibly known at the time was that the call was much more than that. It was the first step on a path that would eventually save the young man's life.

On Feb. 7, 2011, a Monday morning, Walter and Kevin Jordan chatted again, this time in Atlanta's Emory University Hospital. Then Walter was wheeled away into his operating room.

By day's end, one of the coach's kidneys would be inside the player's body.

The natural

Kevin Jordan was always a great athlete, too good at too many sports to become baseball-specific. Because of that, it took a little while for the college and pro scouts to catch on, despite the fact that as a sophomore he was named to the Columbus Journal-Ledger's All-City team.

Kevin Jordan hasn't yet taken the field for Wake Forest, but he has an indelible bond with his coach. Brian Westerholt/Sports on Film

But Tom Walter was a coach known throughout the college baseball community as someone who could see a bright future in places where others wouldn't even bother to look. In 2002, he'd led George Washington University to its first NCAA tournament appearance in a decade and just its fourth since 1959. Three years later, he guided the New Orleans Privateers through the ordeal of Hurricane Katrina, moving the team to three different cities over four months before moving back onto campus. Then he led UNO to back-to-back tournament berths before moving to Wake Forest.

So when Walter heard that "Jordan's never focused enough on baseball," he just laughed. He had seen the kid's smooth stroke at the plate and he was in love.

"I like athletes," he'd said last fall as he discussed his incoming class. "I can't teach a hitter how to run fast, throw hard, or track a pitch at 95 mph. I can teach him how to utilize those skills, but the ability itself comes from God and no one else. Kevin Jordan is a kid that was blessed with those tools."

Five of them, to be exact. He'd turned heads with his explosive arm, speed and swing. He further proved that point on Oct. 24, 2009, when he finished second in the Bo Jackson 5-Tool Championship, winning the Power Hitting portion of the contest and officially erasing any remaining shreds of "under the radar."

Still, two weeks later he announced he would be attending Wake Forest, choosing the long-struggling Demon Deacons program over the more powerful likes of Vanderbilt, Arizona State and Auburn. Why? Because he liked Wake's reputation for academics. And he really liked Walter. Even as his buzz began to grow with pro scouts, he stuck with Wake.

"It's very important to note here that Wake Forest also stuck with Kevin," his father is quick to interject. "Even as he developed his medical problems."

'He didn't feel right'

Through the middle of his senior year at Northside-Columbus High School, Kevin inexplicably began to slow down. At first, just he noticed that he was fatigued easily and that he wasn't reacting as quickly on the field. As it worsened, his parents caught on. "He didn't feel right, but he still wanted to compete," Keith Jordan said via telephone last week, recalling his son's final prep baseball season. "He didn't do as well as he had in earlier years but they still made the playoffs and he actually got some of it back by the first of April, but you knew that something still just wasn't right."

The initial diagnosis in January had been the flu. But by April Kevin had lost 30 pounds, so his local doctors sent him to Emory for answers. A series of tests revealed that the 18-year-old suffered from ANCA vasculitis, a condition of autoimmunity, in which one's immune system begins attacking the body's own healthy cells. In Kevin's case, ANCAs (anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies) were attacking the walls of the small blood vessels in his kidneys, creating swelling and leaking blood and protein into his urine. As a result, his kidneys were operating at 15 to 20 percent of their abilities. They were failing quickly.

That spring he began taking 35 pills a day. By summer he was on dialysis three times a week.

On June 8, the Yankees took Jordan with the final pick of the 19th round of the MLB draft, the 595th selection overall. Keith Jordan says that rumors about his son's health (the description that made it onto the official draft reports was "strep throat that led to an infection") didn't factor into the negotiations with the Yankees that followed. But it is hard to find a draft analyst who doesn't think that such chatter is what led to his drop in stock.

Walter would hear none of it. He assured Kevin that his scholarship to Wake Forest was still there.

On campus

That August, Kevin enrolled at Wake for the fall semester. His parents worried about sending their ailing son more than 400 miles away, but his confidence calmed their concerns. "His focus was, 'I want to live as normal of a life as I can,'" says Keith. "It was his decision to move forward with it."