LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Wesley Cox tells the story from his freshman year at the University of Louisville. His new coach, Denny Crum, comes up to him in old Crawford Gym and says, “Wes, I have two stories for you. I have a good story and a bad story. Which you want first?”
Cox told him to give him the bad. “Well, I didn’t get a 7-footer to play with you,” Crum told him.
The good? “Freshman are now eligible to play right away. Can you play center?”
Cox looked Crum in the eye and said, “Can you coach?”
Crum smiled and walked away. Cox could play center. In fact, people who watched him play at Louisville would tell you Cox could do anything. Al McGuire, who coached against him, called him Superman. At 6-5, he dealt with bigger players every night, and finished his U of L career as one of the top scorers in school history and an All-American.
He played on one leg with a bad hamstring in a national semifinal against UCLA and still pulled down 16 rebounds. He played his entire basketball career with exercise induced asthma that nobody really understood until late in his U of L career.
He just kept going. It’s what his dad taught him.
“You keep going. Until your heart stops beating, you keep going.”
Cox repeated those words on Thursday. From a wheelchair, where, at age 68, he’s dealing with the amputation of both legs just below the knee. Diabetes and poor circulation took the first leg around a year ago. He lost the second about 2 months ago.
I asked him, did he ever have a moment of “Why me?”
“No sir,” Cox said. “I didn’t. Because that’s a part of being defeated.”
Being defeated is not in Cox’s DNA. Never was. If you go back and read the sports pages of the day, Cox was criticized at time for being sluggish or disinterested.
In reality, he was struggling with asthma. It curtailed his NBA career, and he came back to Louisville, where he worked as a supervisor for Metro Parks and in the city's economic development office. He took classes at night to get a city job in a legal support capacity.
His health problems are many. He’s on dialysis. Now he needs prosthetics, with which he hopes to walk again. He needs help.
“I always had the determination to finish because my father always told me if you still had some, you need to finish it,” Cox said. “I had asthma. But I didn't know that, you know, to deter me, because he said, ‘Once you get out there, you can't find no excuses. You have to do just what everybody else does. If you have to have to run 4 miles, you have to run 6 to compensate. you have to compensate. So that's what I've been doing.”
There are challenges. But he has had former teammates around, and people from the community, as well as family. He's leaning on his faith. He's a Sunday school teacher at Highland Park Missionary Baptist Church, where his brother Byron is pastor. About a dozen people there are waiting to be baptized until Cox can leave the rehab center to share the experience.
“God, I'm going to have to tell you, that's my only source,” Cox said. “Because my brother, he's a young preacher over here at our church, he keeps me straight. A lot of people in my family keeps me straight. And it's just something that you got to do. I just can't wake up and say, ‘Woe is me.’ I never I was never that type of person. I say, ‘OK, what do I have to do?’ And they told me what I needed to do. And I'm doing it doing it slowly, but I'm doing it.”
One thing Cox needs is financial assistance. His rehabilitation, prosthetics, dialysis and other care cost more than his insurance will pay. A GoFundMe page has been established here. In three days, more than $5,000 has been raised. He’ll need much more.
“I'm grateful,” Cox said. “I mean, they don't have to, but I am grateful. I wish I could thank everybody personally, but I mean, I might not know everybody, but it's a blessing to know that you're in a community that really cares about you. I've talked to guys who played ball and they never went back for nothing. But here is like a big family.”
And as those close to him respond to help, Cox will keep doing what he has always done, attacking oversized challenges with his own brand of determination.
“I'll learn to accept what has happened to me,” he said. “It is slowing me down but it's not going to stop me. It's just one of those things where you just have to make the adjustments.”
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