This story about Orlando Antigua appears in ESPN The Magazine’s Nov. 11 College Basketball preview.
DON’T CLOSE your eyes.
Halloween night, 1988. He was 15 years old, on a gurney in the back of an ambulance as it sped down Fordham Road in the Bronx, sirens stacking atop one another like pages in a book.
Fifteen, with a bullet in his head, listening to the paramedics radio ahead to the emergency room. The language of panic: “GSW near left eye. Entry, no exit.”
Don’t close your eyes.
He repeated those same four words to himself, over and over, like a prayer. A child’s logic: If you can see, you can’t die. A child’s fear: If you close your eyes, darkness wins.
Simple solution.
Don’t close your eyes.
Walter Cornett, of Glendale, Kentucky, is the owner and operator of Walter’s Wildcat World. He founded WildcatWorld.com in 1998 making it one of the oldest Kentucky basketball fan sites in operation today.