Abraza el momento: Former Louisville favorite Kyle Kuric is playing well in Barcelona and savoring l

BARCELONA, Spain — Kyle Kuric is sitting on a couch in a common area inside Palau Blaugrana, the home arena for his club, FC Barcelona Bàsquet, on its sprawling campus on the outskirts of this lively city on the Mediterranean. He is scrolling through a page in the Notes app on his iPhone, reading aloud items he has marked off with the green check emoji on the bucket list he made four years ago.

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“Let’s see,” the 30-year-old guard from Evansville, Ind., says. “There’s an African safari, skydiving, riding an elephant, diving with great white sharks. I’ve been to Iran now, and Iceland. Oh, this is a good one: Have an out-of-body experience. That’s a funny story: It happened when I was in the coma after the second surgery .”

This isn’t where Kuric’s story begins — he starred at Evansville’s Reitz Memorial High, and he won homecoming king and a Big East Tournament title and reached a Final Four in four years at Louisville. He grew up in a tight-knit family, brother to Katie, son of Judi and Steve. Before he graduated from college, Kuric started a charity, Kyle’s Korner for Kids, which collects Christmas toys for in-need children in the Louisville area. He and Taraneh Momeni, a fellow U of L grad, married in 2013 and started a family.

But there cannot be a discussion about Kuric’s basketball career and his life without mentioning the harrowing few weeks in late 2015 that prompted him to write out his bucket list, with its 94 items, 43 of which Kuric has crossed off.

Next week will mark four years since doctors discovered a Grade I benign meningioma tumor in his brain and carefully removed the mass in a high-stakes surgery. Two days later, Kuric underwent an emergency follow-up operation to reduce swelling in his brain. Doctors then put Kuric in a medically induced coma, waking him up two days later. A third surgery in December finally put Kuric in the clear. He was back on a basketball court, playing professional hoops, five months after the initial surgery and five months before doctors ever imagined he’d be ready to return.

“There are times now when we look back and wonder,” Judi Kuric, Kyle’s mother, says, “Did that really happen?”

Kyle Kuric, then 26, was late for the bus to the airport. His team, CB Gran Canaria, had a flight from Las Palmas, the capital city of the Canary Islands, to mainland Spain for a road game. A scrambling Kuric drove to the airport instead, catching up with his team. Taraneh didn’t know what the episode indicated at the time, but she remembers thinking her husband’s tardiness was odd.

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“Kyle is never late,” she says. “He never misses the team bus.”

Throughout the day, Kuric repeatedly complained about headaches, another odd sign. The couple ate well and paid close attention to nutrition — as his hoops career progressed, Kyle spent more and more time learning the habits and routines of older professionals who maintained their health and took care of their bodies. Taraneh competed in fitness competitions too. Most of all, Kyle rarely if ever mentioned pain. Taraneh laughs now as she remembers the times Kyle hid or suppressed pain from injuries so he could keep playing.

At first, she suggested he eat an apple and drink some coffee. He was just tired, she thought. But when he said he was dizzy, “I knew something was really off,” Taraneh says. He missed his team’s game the day after his headache started. He missed practice a day later in Bilbao. Kuric text-messaged his father, who is a neurosurgeon, and asked for advice. Steve told Kyle to get an MRI to make sure he had nothing more than a migraine or a virus, but the doctors and nurses who initially evaluated Kuric didn’t think he needed the scan. On the third day of headaches, Kuric again sat out practice in Barcelona, opting to rest in the locker room with the lights off. He also visited another hospital, only to be told he should fly back to Las Palmas for more evaluation while his team played in Berlin. But, Kuric says, the doctors weren’t willing to write him a note OK’ing a flight home, nor would they give him an MRI.

Then, on the fourth day of headaches, the vomiting started. That finally pushed doctors to scan Kuric’s brain. What they found was a tumor with significant swelling in the front of his head. He sent the MRI to Taraneh and his dad. Kyle described his thinking at the time as, “OK, I have a brain tumor — whatever. I’ll have surgery and play in the game this weekend.” He never thought the tumor could kill him. All of the other Kurics are medical professionals — in addition to Steve, Judi is a nurse practitioner and Taraneh and Katie are dentists. Their reactions to the news were very different from Kyle’s.

“When he sent me that MRI, I fell to the ground,” Taraneh says. She called and awakened the Kurics, six time zones behind. The scan, Steve says, “was really bad. He needed to get in the hospital, and the neurosurgeon sent him there right away. If they don’t do that surgery, then he’s going to die — he’s going to die very soon.”

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Steve, who practices in Louisville, pauses as he thinks more about the scan, then says, “He could’ve been in real trouble, real fast.”

Louisville fans perk up at the mention of Kuric, who was a symbol of Rick Pitino’s hard-working, overachieving teams in the early 2010s. He remains a popular player among the more recent squads.

A 6-foot-4 wing, Kuric appeared in 118 games over four years, playing various roles. He was a career 37.7-percent 3-point shooter, a clip that helped him average double-digit points in his last two college seasons.

Numbers, however, don’t quite capture what Kuric meant to the teams he was on. He was a scrapper, always seemingly “an underdog,” his mom says. So many of his key plays or moments make up highlights Louisville fans still love: a ferocious dunk at Notre Dame; 22 points, all in the second half and capped by an exclamation-point dunk, in an upset of No. 1 Syracuse in the last game at Freedom Hall; the game-sealing layup that capped the Cardinals’ “Miracle on Main Street,” a rally from 18 points down to beat Marquette.

Former Louisville assistant Mark Lieberman said earlier this year that Kuric was the guy the team could count on to do “a little bit of everything.” As a senior, Kuric played the small-ball power forward before the small-ball power forward was so common, helping Louisville make a surprise run to the 2012 Final Four as a No. 4 seed.

Reflecting on his college career now, Kuric grins and says he almost never dribbled, that he “stayed in the corner and shot 3s and got some dunks.” This undersells the work he put in to get to that level.

The Kurics spent “countless hours” at Chuck E. Cheese, where young Kyle practiced on the pop-a-shot. Kyle shot at anything to practice his mechanics, one time walking up to the offering plate at church and, from five feet away, tossing money into the bowl and shouting, “Swish!” The priest laughed; Kyle endured “mild trouble” for his shot, Steve says with a chuckle.

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At home, Katie and Kyle constantly went toe-to-toe. Judi banned Monopoly from the household because of the battles between her children that the game spawned. When the two agreed to play sports outside, they resolved to split their time between Kyle’s preferred game (basketball) and Katie’s (soccer, which she played at Louisville.) But, Katie adds, Kyle always managed to persuade her to play basketball first, a move that often meant they’d only play hoops that day.

“It’s so funny because he’s quieter than most, but that’s when you know he’s planning and strategizing and thinking,” Katie says. “Then he just does what he was planning to do. I had to learn that as a kid. He’s so determined.”

In Europe, Kuric encountered a totally different style of basketball, forcing him to “really change my game to be more than just a spot-up shooter and to be more aggressive and attack off the dribble.” He logged hours and hours watching workouts and trying new drills with trainers, hoping to adjust to his new hoops landscape. European basketball, Kuric says, is “a lot more technical,” and it is harder to score, requiring good squads to pass and space the floor well to break down defenses. His ongoing efforts to evolve have paid off in the form of a steady rise through European hoops.

He spent two seasons at Estudiantes in Madrid, where the team finished mid-table in Spain’s Liga ACB, the top domestic hoops league. In 2014 he joined Gran Canaria, a regular top-10 finisher in the league. There Kuric helped the club win its first trophy, the Supercopa, and qualify for the EuroCup, the second-best European club basketball competition.

After a season at Zenit St. Petersburg, Kuric signed with Barcelona, giving him the chance to play at the highest level in European basketball. FCB competes in the EuroLeague, the continent’s premier event.

“I’m not sure I’ve completely figured it out,” Kuric says, “but I have improved year-to-year.”

Katie Kuric made PowerPoint slides shortly after her brother’s ordeal to preserve her memories of what happened. The progression of time, she says, “can make something like that seem less real.” She takes her time as she discusses this part of her brother and family’s story, giving thought to each word. “I never want to forget how blessed we are to have him.”

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Two days after Kyle’s first surgery, which was successful in removing the tumor, his medical team expressed concern about his recovery. Kuric’s heart rate was low — “like, extremely low,” Taraneh says — and it was not just because he was an athlete. His pupils were “fully dilated and non-responsive,” Taraneh wrote in a Facebook post in 2015. The pressure in Kuric’s brain was “lethally high.” For a family of medical professionals, there was “no hiding behind ignorance,” Katie says.

“I watched my dad cry,” Katie says, “and that absolutely terrified me.”

Before that news, the Kurics thought they were in the clear. Kyle even woke up from surgery and asked his mom if she had booked his flight to Gran Canaria’s next game.

Once the second surgical process started, the Kurics agonized as they waited. The three hours of surgery “were torture,” Katie says. They prayed together. In those moments, Katie remembers feeling a sense of calm, “not that Kyle was going to be OK or that he wasn’t going to be OK — just that no matter what, he’d be with us.”

Taraneh got an Airbnb near the hospital, and she remembers receiving so many “you’re so strong” messages or comments from well-meaning acquaintances, family, friends and even strangers, “but I was dying on the inside. I was a mess.”

As Kyle lay in the medically induced coma, his family split up their time in his room. Katie and Taraneh sat by his bed in the mornings. Steve manned the afternoons. Judi got the evening shift. There, each family member describes the solemn, quiet duty of watching a monitor and keeping vigil by Kyle’s side. They spent eight hours each staring at the four numbers on a monitor “telling us Kyle was alive,” Katie says.

Judi found solace in scrolling through the hundreds of messages of support for her son. Steve was in charge of the family updates on social media. Taraneh and Katie rarely slept overnight, and even though they weren’t allowed in the room to see Kyle until 7 a.m., they’d show up at 6 in the hopes the medical staff might let them in early. Taraneh read and reread her last texts with Kyle. She thumbed through their photos on her phone and watched videos of him.

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Kuric came out of the coma two days after the surgery. He doesn’t remember much about those initial experiences, but his family says he was disoriented, even aggressive, which is very much unlike his personality. He wanted his computer so he could check email. He was concerned about Kyle’s Korner, his charity, sending off confusing notes to contacts in the States.

None of that mattered to his family. He needed a final surgery in December to implant a plate to solidify his skull after the first two surgeries, but he was out of the hospital a few weeks after the initial diagnosis, a survivor of a harrowing experience. That was all the Kurics wanted.

“I really didn’t grasp how serious all of it was until afterward,” Kyle says now. “I really understood it when I tried to sit up after surgery and I couldn’t. I had to have people help me sit up out of bed. The first time I stood up, I had two nurses hold me up.”

The rest of the story is a happy one for the Kurics.

Katie, Kyle and Taraneh put together their bucket lists in the days after Kyle left the hospital. Katie’s list includes 75 items split into two categories: experiences and travel. Kyle’s list is longer, though he says he needs to edit some choices now that he is four years older with some different priorities. (He slyly grins at the mention of sports-car-related items on his list.) He and Taraneh look at the list often, and they’re already planning to check off more items next summer.

The bucket list reflects a personality trait Kuric had before his surgeries but now stresses with greater urgency. There is no time to waste to do what you want to do, Kuric says. “What I want to get out of life changed a lot,” he adds. “The timeline of everything sped up.”

That determination played out with his rehabilitation too. Kuric insisted on keeping the mentality that he’d return to basketball much faster than the 10-month timeframe his doctors gave him. His parents suggested he take some time off to recuperate and rest, but “that’s just not Kyle,” Judi says. “He told us he was going to play a lot sooner than anyone thought he would.” The first day he could, he walked a hallway. The next day he walked two hallways. “That attitude kept me going,” he says. When he returned home, he engaged with his former trainer at Gran Canaria, working out twice a day with him. They hiked. They paddle-boarded. They hit the pool. They ran the beach. They did unconventional and conventional sessions alike.

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Kuric lost 22 pounds during his surgeries. Over time he started regaining his strength and conditioning. By April he was practicing with Gran Canaria again. He felt ready to play, even if he “never felt consistent.”

At Kuric’s first game back, Taraneh watched from the stands with their two sons and with tears flowing. She filmed his first entrance into the game — his team’s first substitution — and sent it back to Judi, Katie and Steve. “There is no word to describe the emotion of that moment,” Taraneh says, echoing sentiments from the other three family members. Judi sat there thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening.” They all felt what Katie described as a stomach-clench, the pulling fear that something or someone might set Kyle back again.

“You’re just feeling like, please don’t hurt him,” Judi says. “Don’t block his shot. Give him a three-foot radius. Don’t guard him. With everything he went through, the rehab, my husband and I waited and waited for that dreaded call, like, ‘I can’t get my balance right’ or ‘my vision is wrong.’ We never got that call. Then he goes back and plays. Crazy. Just crazy.”

Kuric drew a charge on his first sequence in the game. He bagged his first 3-pointer and finished 3-of-4 from the field, with nine points. A few months later, he played in the NBA Summer League with the Phoenix Suns. That fall, around when doctors thought he might be making his first appearance on the basketball court since his initial surgeries, Kuric won the Supercopa MVP in guiding Gran Canarias to a trophy.

Now he plays on one of the best teams in Europe, chasing a EuroLeague crown, back in the city where he earned a new lease on life. Humorously enough, Kuric checked off a bucket list item in returning to Barcelona. He is regular for Barcelona Bàsquet, averaging 9.7 points and 2.4 rebounds through 10 games this season. Taraneh and Kyle’s two sons are 4 now and going to the club’s school, playing on the same sports teams as the club’s soccer stars.

Life is back to normal.

“I cannot believe,” Katie says, “that it’s been four years.”

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Oh, and the out-of-body experience Kuric referenced on his list? Check that one off too. While in the coma, he dreamed of the doctor telling his family that Taraneh was expecting a daughter. The couple already had the twins, but they were only months old. When Kyle woke up, he questioned Taraneh, wondering if she’d been keeping her pregnancy from him. Everyone was confused by Kyle’s premonition.

Three years later, the Kurics had their daughter.

Another green check on the bucket list.

(Top photo: Mike Kireev/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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