Former Mr. Basketball Kris Wilkes On Returning To The Game

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Five years ago, former Indiana Mr. Basketball Kris Wilkes had his world turned upside down as he prepared to enter the NBA.

The morning of the NBA Draft, Wilkes woke up without feeling below the waist, and was unable to move his legs. What followed was a battle with a rare auto-immune illness, called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, that would see him have to re-learn how to walk. Despite being told his professional career was over before it began, Wilkes never gave up on his NBA dream.

Now, five years later, Wilkes has just finished a string of workouts with his hometown Indiana Pacers for their summer league training camp. Only 25, Wilkes is hoping to restart a career that never got the chance to get off the ground. While he won’t travel to Vegas with the Pacers for their Summer League games, just getting on the court again, in a professional setting, can be counted as a win.

During the Wednesday edition of The Ride With JMV, Kris Wilkes joined John, and spoke about what he experienced back in 2019.

“Leading up to the draft, my last couple of days I had workouts for a team, and I felt really bad during the whole entire workout, and when I finished, they found out I had strep throat, and that my fever was maybe 101 degrees or so. So I went to the hospital, I end up getting sent back home really just to wait out for the draft in the next couple of days. Leading up to the draft day, I just had real, real, real bad back pain that led me to kind of go to the hospital to kind of figure out what was going on, and they gave me a catheter and send me home, and had me come back the following day which was going to be the draft morning. On that day, I woke up and couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.”

Kris gave some insight into what the lowest moments for him were while trying to recover from this issue.

“Coming back from that, especially in the beginning, playing guys that still were continuing their game after I got hurt, and just playing them in gyms and losing to them and getting beat, and stuff like that, and knowing [that] my body [was] limiting me from doing as much as I really wanted to do, so yeah that was definitely really tough, but like I say, just doing what my parents instilled with me, and just believing in God and trusting the process and keep pushing forward, that just really stuck with me throughout the whole time and the whole process.”

One of the more storybook-like aspects of this story is how Kris bumped into Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan, which led to him working out with the team for the summer league training camp.

“So I was in Carmel, I was with one of my best friends and he was getting some food, I had just gotten some food from somewhere, so I was just kind of hanging out with him, and Chad’s wife had approached me and she’s like ‘Hey, are you Kris Wilkes?’ and I was like ‘Hey, yeah I am!’…On the way out, she was right there by the door, and as we were walking out and talking a little bit, there he was sitting in the car. We just talked back and forth for a little bit, and I told him I was trying to get back to playing basketball again, and I was still signed with my same agents. It was something quick, a little 30 [second] to a minute [long] conversation.”

Listen to JMV’s full conversation with former Indiana Mr. Basketball Kris Wilkes and more down below, and tune into The Ride With JMV weekdays from 3-6pm on 93.5/107.5 The Fan!

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