PAY DIRT

This is the conclusion to a two-part series chronicling what turned out to be the last season of basketball for Luke Zumo, the university’s first scholarship athlete. In part one, published in the last issue of The Wolf Magazine, Zumo misses out on beating Tulane University’s basketball team on his last try, a goal he coveted; and he realized he had a decision to make: move on to physical therapy school and retire, or come back for another year, and set the school career scoring record.

In this conclusion, Zumo makes up his mind and takes one last shot at earning the payoff many feel his career had never gotten.

March 1, 2008

A most curious thing happened when there were three seconds left in Luke Zumo’s last home basketball game for Loyola University.

The Wolfpack, vying for what would be a record-setting 16th win of the season, found itself tied 66-66 with Tougaloo College, the third-best team in the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference. Tougaloo point guard Sean Johnson pushed the ball up the court on what could haveve been the game’s last possession, on the possession that could have handed Loyola its fourth losing GCAC season in its fourth season in the league.

Johnson eyed the game clock, waited for it to tick under the five-second mark and dribbled hard right toward the basketball goal. He beat his defender Torry Beaulieu to the lane and found himself wading in a chaotic soup of teammates and enemies.

Johnson could’ve pulled up and shot the game winner. Or, sensing a desperate Loyola defense collapsing on him, he could’ve kicked it out to a Tougaloo teammate the scrambling defenders left unmarked and let him take the game winner.

Instead, Johnson decided to expose the ball to six flailing, enemy palms on a dribble meant to get him closer to the goal, closer to the heroic, buzzer-beating shot.

One of those enemy palms belonged to point guard Sean Bennett of the Loyola Wolfpack. And it swatted at the bottom of ball, jostling it free from Johnson’s handle.

The ball looped in an arc from Johnson’s right hand to airspace about five feet above his head.

The basketball fell directly into Luke Zumo’s palms, the one place in the planet the Loyola men’s basketball program would want it to be.

Zumo, who had scored a game-high 26 points and made eight 3-point shots so far that night, was standing near the three-point line, his back turned to the goal Tougaloo was defending. All five of his opponents were in front of him when he caught the ball, and the hundreds of fans watching Senior Night in The Den exploded simultaneously in guttural howls demanding he “Go! Go! Go!” They desperately begged him to not just stand there.

The university’s first scholarship athlete secured the ball and realized he had at most one heartbeat to process two decisions:

1. He could reach the half-court line and heave a low-probability, 40-foot desperation shot that you commonly see Hollywood actors make in a slow-motion take.2. He could try to try to sprint 85 feet in under four seconds, all the while trying to maintain a controlled dribble, and enough body control to execute a buzzer-beating lay-up..

After Senior Night’s longest heartbeat, Zumo frantically about-faced and sped off toward the half-court line, a stampede of Tougaloo defenders in hot pursuit behind him. Approaching the line, Luke nodded a hasty glance up toward the shot clock, and he glided past it.

Luke Zumo never smiles during basketball games.

Not since his junior year at Catholic High at least, when both he and his parents realized that any type of physical activity exhausted him way more than it exhausted his classmates or teammates.

A quarter of basketball for Luke did to his stamina what an entire game of basketball would do to the nine other players in the game.

“It looked like he had gone swimming,” said Peter Zumo, his father, “and all the other kids still looked real fresh.”

Hard practices of varsity ball at Catholic, in which he was running whenever he wasn’t sprinting, drove him to the point of surrender. For his body, it was like packing in four practices at the price of one.

“I remember we used to sit in the living room in despair,” Peter Zumo said. “So we took him to the doctors to see what was wrong.”

Elaborate tests involving treadmills and electrocardiograms didn’t reveal anything. Because his breathing was laborious, they hoped he had exercise-induced asthma, which they hold they could solve by prescribing him an inhaler.

When that wasn’t it either, doctors drew a blood test and finally arrived at the root cause.

They informed the Zumo family that Luke was dealing with the side effects of a blood condition called thalassemia minor, which both his mother and grandmother had.

Thalassemia minor affects a person’s hemoglobin, which is the molecule that carries the oxygen in blood cells Hemoglobin is made of two alpha chains and two beta chains. In beta thalassemia minor, one of the beta chains is faulty. The hemoglobin molecules that are faulty therefore can’t carry oxygen as well, said Dr. Charles P. Steuber, director of the hemotology oncology fellowship at the Baylor College of Medicine,.

“If he is significantly anemic, his stamina may be affected,” Steuber added.

The condition was clearly taxing Zumo’s stamina, and armed with that bit of knowledge, both father and son talked about walking away before he had a chance at winning his district’s MVP trophy as a senior. They talked about shelving the sneakers and the privileged jump shot seasons before he ever accepted Loyola University New Orleans’ first-ever athletic scholarship.

“He asked me if it was worth dealing with, and I told him that was a decision he had to make,” Peter Zumo said. “He felt it was worth dealing with.”

Given the significantly anemic symptoms Zumo said he experienced throughout his four-year career at Loyola, it was a decision he re-evaluated sometimes in the middle of the most exciting games he took part in as a member of the ‘Pack.

First, his vision got so that he felt like he was staring down a tunnel. Then, waves of blackness would overcome his vision before his surroundings would slowly fade back in and color in the blackness.

There were times where he’d rest his palms on his knees and bend over at the free throw line, literally waiting to black out for a second then return to so he could shoot his attempts.

It explained why Zumo would, at times, nail several 3-pointers to start a game, but then when the symptoms began to take hold, he’d miss from the same spots he was so hot from earlier.

On the eve of All Saints Day, when he played the archrival Tulane Green Wave for the last time in his career, Zumo rattled off five 3-pointers and a game-high 17 points in the first 29 minutes of play. His symptoms began to kick in at that point, and in a desperate attempt to hold them off, he ate a chocolate bar and swigged on a Powerade bottle during a timeout.

“An athletic trainer told him that false energy might help,” Peter Zumo said.

It didn’t, though. Luke wouldn’t score the last 11 minutes of the game.

The basketball situation he found himself in at Loyola demanded that he play extended minutes. Zumo not only was the best player of his team, he was one of the best scorers the program had ever seen He was also one of its best defenders. Often, his blackout episodes began to toy with him at crucial junctures of crucial games, where a big 3-pointer or a big defensive stop could sway the momentum in Loyola’s favor. So it was no wonder Luke never volunteered to sub himself out, when doctors had told him that a few minutes of complete rest would most likely allay his spells.

“He pushed through a lot of the times, at his body’s expense, because he didn’t want to stand out from the group,” Peter Zumo said. “He didn’t want to give the impression that he was getting special treatment.”

After his team’s 10-5 start to the season, with the blood condition taking its toll on his body for another season of college basketball, Zumo assessed the option of returning for another year of basketball, which he was eligible for.

The allure of another two semesters of college around his best buddies; of playing a game he loved while taking the minimum required electives to graduate; of breaking the career-scoring record, which he would if he had played the half-season Hurricane Katrina deprived him of; wasn’t as alluring after all.

“Honestly, physically, I just wonder if I can do this another year,” said Zumo, who lost 15 pounds from September to January of his senior year. “We’re working hard, and it’s paying off, but I haven’t been this light since I was a senior in high school. Physically, I wonder if I could do this again.”

In the last 18.2 seconds of their game against Southern University New Orleans on Jan. 19, either the Wolfpack was going to play overtime against the winless worst team in the conference, or they were going to walk out of The Den into the Uptown night with a home win and status as a 4-2 contender.

Some 4.4 seconds earlier, a languishing Zumo had surrendered a 3-pointer from SUNO’s Dominic Perry, relinquishing both his team’s 71-68 lead. Perry, freeing himself behind the 3-point line off a pick a teammate of his set on Zumo, lay enough distance between him and the Wolfpack’s star to afford himself a clean look at the basket. Zumo still got there, thrust his palm into Perry’s face, but the moments he lost shifting past the pick were enough to cost his team the lead.

Zumo had done what he could to stave off the symptoms, had done what he could to keep a slowed, tired gait from costing his team too much. At halftime, he frantically dug in his locker for a Snickers chocolate bar. A SUNO defender had scratched his arm and broken skin, drawing a line of blood beads on his forearm that the trainer wrapped up with gauze and medical tape.

One arm he stretched out to the trainer; the other he used to stuff the chocolate bar down his mouth. Three large bites later, Zumo (who had scored half his team’s 39 first-period points that night) had scarfed it. His hands freed but trembling, he uncapped a Powerade bottle and swigged as much as he could from it before the second half resumed.

“It’s all mental,” he’d say later. “I doubt that actually does anything, but as long as my mind thinks it does.” On top of that, he said he had spent the better part of the week battling a chest cold.

Perry, whether Zumo’s mind thought the Snickers bar did anything to combat his blood condition, had all the same cashed in on a crucial shot afforded partly at the expense of his defender’s fatigue.

Now, Zumo had 18.2 seconds after his team’s timeout to remedy it, or he’d have to expose his weakened body to at least five more minutes of abuse. What was worse is that it was against the conference’s only winless team – which, in Zumo’s mind, meant they were the hungriest.

After play resumed and his program’s jittery supporters stopped hopping around in the stands and stomping along with the drums in AC/DC’s intro to “Thunderstruck,” coach Michael Giorlando dialed up an elaborate play that ended with Sean Bennett firing a pass into Zumo’s chest with under four seconds left.

Zumo caught the ball and immediately bent his knees, squared his body toward the goal and cocked his elbows for a 3-point shot. Perry, juiced up from his 3-point shot on the other end of the floor, anxiously bore down on Zumo.

Expecting him to catch and shoot, Perry leapt into the air with his arms stretched skyward in hopes of swatting Zumo’s shot through The Den’s walls.

Zumo braked just short of jumping off wood, however, and Perry barreled past him in mid-air. A boulevard of floor lay out before Zumo, and he attacked it with two brisk right-handed dribbles as The Den shot to its feet and audibly ooh-ed in response to Zumo’s easy, calculated dispatching of Perry.

SUNO’s remaining defenders collapsed on Zumo, but before they got to him, he rolled the ball off his palm and floated up a lay-up. The ball crossed from his right hand to the left lip of the rim, where it bounced, then banked to the back block and delicately fluttered through the net with 3.2 seconds left on the clock.

SUNO called a timeout as a New Year’s celebration seized the bleachers.

Torry Beaulieu intercepted SUNO’s desperate inbounds pass when play resumed, and The Den’s speaker system punctuated the coup by blaring KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Celebration.”

A SUNO player dressed in a blue warm-up suit with yellow bordering screamed at the referees huddled by the scorer’s table. He waved a towel at them animatedly and threw the towel by his white basketball sneakers. His lip then quivered; his face scrunched up; and he dried the tears welled in his eyes with the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

The largest player in the game — possibly in The Den all season — was SUNO’s Jefney Henderson, who towered at 6-foot-10 and bullied a 300-pound frame around the court with abandon. Henderson, moments after Zumo’s game-winning lay-up, lined up along the sideline by the scorer’s table where the teams would shake hands in a show of sportsmanship.

KC – or someone in the Sunshine band – belted out, “We’re gonna have a good time tonight … it’s all right,” as Henderson cupped the dome of his head with his palms and interlocked his fingers. He bit the bottom of his lip with the top row of his teeth as tears trickled down either one of his cheeks.

Luke Zumo had literally made grown men, giant men, cry.

He had infused an apprehensive crowd with euphoria at the behest of a gutsy drive and lay-up. But he didn’t swagger past the cheerleading squad and off the court dripping in cool once the game was over. His face wasn’t broadcasting a suave, self-assured smirk. He didn’t glow triumphantly, nor did he resemble much of a hero to the naked eye.

A colorless Luke Zumo limped off the court as he sagged his shoulders forward. Beads of sweat dotted the bags under his eyes, dotted his cheeks and dripped down his bangs. He kept his chin inward and eyes locked onto the hardwood floor, looking up only to punctuate meek smiles for those who approached him to congratulate him.

Once Zumo made his way to the lockers, teammate Robert Manson immediately bear-hugged him around his waist and lifted him off his feet. Manson, his face contorting in mock pleasure, then began to thrust his pelvis against Zumo’s legs suggestively.

The rest of the Wolfpack erupted in laughter at the non-consensual act unfolding before their eyes and slapped each other, whooping in celebration of their fourth-straight win to improve to a 4-2 start in conference play.

Zumo, however, just hung limply, his arms just wilting at his side and his legs dangling like dead weight, in Manson’s amorous arms.

When Manson put him down, Zumo just shook his head slowly, raised the corner of his mouth in a weak smile as if to say, “You dog, you,” and walked toward his locker. After scoring 25 points and playing in all but two minutes, Zumo plopped down on his stool and simply listened to what his coach had to say.

On his way out to speak with reporters of The Maroon, he was asked how it felt.

Zumo let out a deep, rumbling chest cough.

He wetly sniffled, shook his head, composed himself and said, “I feel like sh-, man. I’m desperately trying not to pass out.”

Aside from his family and his girlfriend Katie Henry, Luke Zumo’s sole off-court focus throughout his senior season was gaining admission into LSU’s physical therapy school in New Orleans.

That process, the achievement of which was the only thing that could lure him away from one more year of involvement in the game of basketball, one more year on athletic scholarship and easy fifth-year senior living at the school he met some of the most important people in his life.

That process and the way Zumo lived it, however, was maybe as agonizing as playing college-level ball with thalassemia.

The deadline to apply for the physical therapy department at LSU New Orleans was Nov. 15, two weeks after his All Saints’ Day showdown with the Tulane Green Wave. Zumo toiled through his application package and mailed it in by mid-September.

“I’m just nervous like that,” he said. And, after receiving a confirmation e-mail shortly after he entrusted his materials to the school’s mail clerks, he played the waiting game for all of November and December.

He was hoping to schedule an interview before he drove to his hometown Baton Rouge for the Christmas break. But by the time he exchanged presents, unwrapped them, then returned Uptown for basketball practice Dec. 26, he still hadn’t gotten word. Troubled, Zumo decided he would call the admissions office. But he didn’t want to seem pushy, didn’t want to seem desperate. So he decided to wait a couple of more weeks.

By Jan. 2, however, Zumo got word from other applicants that they had scheduled interviews. At that point, the only thing that stopped him from furiously dialing the admission’s office’s number was that he started making excuses.

“I figured they were going by the alphabet,” he said. “Since I’m the ‘Z’ guy, I thought they just hadn’t gotten to me yet.”

But it nagged Luke’s mind too much, so he finally called the office, heard a secretary on the other end of the line, and explained the situation to her.

He heard silence. Then typing. Then he could hear her looking at her computer screen confused.

Some more typing.

Then silence.

“Let me transfer you to someone who can help,” she said. “Just one moment.”

Zumo found himself repeating the situation to Jane Eason, a member of the admissions committee at LSU New Orleans.

Typing. Silence. Audible confusion. More typing.

Then, Eason finally said, “It appears we never got your application.”

Startled, Zumo explained, “But Student Affairs had sent me an e-mail confirming they had gotten my application.”

All Eason could offer was, “We’ll call you back.”

Luke frantically dialed up his parents and Katie, and began his panicky venting with, “They don’t have my stuff!”

The other line buzzed in after 15 minutes, and when Zumo clicked over, it was Eason. She explained to Luke that his application materials had been sitting in a bin, somehow overlooked by everyone in the office in the last few months’ shuffle. No one had forwarded it to the admissions committee simply because everyone had overlooked it.

There was, however, good news. Eason, while Zumo was lamenting his compromised future to those closest to him, had quickly examined his application.

She saw that he had earned distinction as a Daktronics NAIA scholar athlete, awards given to varsity athletes that maintain high grade point averages; that he was president of the on-campus faith group COMPASS; that he was cruising his way to graduating with a psychology degree in May.

“You’re definitely the kind of student we want,” he remembers her telling him. “And I’m so glad you called when you did.”

The deadline for interviews was on Friday, she said. It was the Wednesday before.

“Can you come Friday?” Zumo remembers her asking him.

“Thank God I was available,” Zumo said, months later.

Luke Zumo’s interview for a position at LSU New Orleans’ physical therapy school unfolded without incident on Jan. 4. The next night, he played and lost against the Belhaven Blazers, where his brother Jacob was a reserve guard, and given the attention everyone gave to the sibling rivalry, the week’s dramatics slipped his mind. He figured he’d have to wait a couple of months to hear back from the school, anyway.

On Jan. 28, 26 days after he narrowly rescued his physical therapy school application, his mother, Lisa, called him at the usual time she always did. He was eating dinner and watching television in the living room of his Carrolton Hall apartment.

When he answered, she told him, “We got a letter from the school.”

Zumo was expecting it to be an update on the application process, nothing better (an acceptance letter) or worse (a rejection letter). It was a small envelope, not the trove of material he fantasized his acceptance package would be all these months.

“What do you want to do?” she asked him.

“Open it and read it,” he remembers telling her. “I doubt it’s a big deal.”

So Lisa tore the envelope open and recited the text in front of her.

“Dear Luke,” it started. “The admissions office of the department of physical therapy has completed a review of applicants, and you have been selected in the DPT class of 2011.”

“It even had an exclamation point,” said Zumo, chuckling, several weeks later. “I knew right then that was my sign. That’s where I wanted to be. If I didn’t get in, I’d come back for another year of ball. But if I got in, that’s what I was going to do.”

His mother congratulated him as he let out a sigh of relief and let himself savor the personal victory.

Seven months from that moment, and five months after playing his last game for a program where he had made history by becoming its first scholarship player, Luke Zumo would begin learning how to become a physical therapist, how to live out a vocation.

Luke Zumo would be learning to live life after the game of basketball, a sport that had yet to give him the reward so many thought he earned long ago.

The reward many weren’t sure whether he’d get or not.

Six steps after sailing past the half-court line, time zooming to the 0.00 mark, Luke Zumo took flight near the basket and tried to apply the finishing touch to his dramatic fastbreak.

Closest to him was Keithdrick Harris of Tougaloo, who barreled his elbows and forearms over Zumo’s left shoulder as he tried to thrust his ball toward the ball and slap it to the apprehensive crowd in the stands.

Harris missed the ball but altered Zumo’s shot enough for him to bank the lay-up off the far side of the rim. The ball limply bounced off the orange iron and rolled off it, plodding to the hard court as the game-ending buzzer sounded off.

The crowd sighed, “Aww,” their maroon and gold pom sticks falling to the sides of their deflating owners.

The players on the court and the coaching staffs on the bench, however, were a different story.

Coach Michael Giorlando threw his arms up in confusion and marched onto the court in the way of the referee closest to the basket. His players leapt up and seemingly filed behind him.

All 20 eyes on the court locked on the referees and pleaded with them – everything hung on their next move. Either the officials’ crew let the play stand and chalk up what happened under the basket between Zumo and Harris as gritty defending and they play an overtime period, or they whistle Harris for a shooting foul.

Realizing that the referees were convening to discuss the play under the basket, the crowd began to scream bloody murder. Zumo argued his side as he slapped his forearm with his palm, mimicking the foul Harris committed on him in case the officials missed it the first time around.

The head of the crew blew his whistle and delivered his call.

Shooting foul, No. 22, Tougaloo. With 0.00 seconds left on Senior Night at The Den, No. 22 for Loyola was going to shoot two.

This time it was Tougaloo coach Lafayette Stribling, dressed in a cream yellow suit with light blue pinstripes, that shot up to his feet and audibly wondered what the hell the referee was calling as wild cheers bounced off The Den’s walls.

The referees shooed all but one player away from the area under the goal closest to The Den’s weight room and to the sideline near their respective bench. Several Tougaloo players doubled over, their hands cupping their kneecaps, their eyes locked the hardwood beneath them, their heads wagging from side-to-side in disbelief.

Though Zumo had set a school record by making 18 free throws in a road game against Dillard University earlier in the season, he had made it through 40 minutes of basketball the night of March 1 without trying a single free throw.

Now, the school’s first scholarship athlete needed just one to help his team grab its first 16-win season in men’s basketball since the school re-instated athletics in 1991. Now, with 0.00 seconds being all the time he had left in his career’s last home game at Loyola University New Orleans, his privileged shooting form was on display a few more moments at The Den, and the weight of history rested upon it.

He stood isolated and alone on the playing surface of a sport that had taken much from him and his body but given little back.

Luke Zumo had two chances from the foul stripe to ensure that Senior Night against Tougaloo College was the day Luke Zumo got paid.

On the elevated joggers’ track, behind a General Construction Service sign hanging from the rails, Peter Zumo paced nervously.

Once Luke, the only player on the floor, took his spot at the foul line, Peter neared the curtain dividing the two courts in The Den and gripped the cold metal in front of him.

He was filling up, he later said, and if he lost it, he was going to lose it behind the curtain, where no one in the stands saw him. Not his wife Lisa. Not his daughter Theresa. Not his son Luke, who he once called a “godsend.”

“You know how many boys will say their father is their hero?” Peter once said. “I got it backwards. He’s my hero.”

All the colors Luke wore paraded through Peter Zumo’s mind. The clothes he’d wear when he was just four, dribbling figure eights through garbage cans and lawn chairs strategically placed on their driveway. The purple-and-gold of the Tiger Tikes, a skills exhibition team that performed at the halftime of LSU and prep games in Baton Rouge that Luke joined when he was 4. The colors of his Biddy basketball team. The navy blue and gold of St. Thomas More School. The black and orange of Catholic High School. The maroon and gold of Loyola University New Orleans, where Luke made history before he ever played an official minute for them.

They swirled before him in a palette of hardships and painted a canvas of frustrated ambitions.

“I was thinking about all he’s put into this game of basketball,” Peter Zumo said.

He had been through three losing seasons and just one winning one. The most infamous hurricane in American history had shortened his sophomore season by more than half, seriously stacking the deck against the odds of his becoming the career all-time scoring leader. He had never made it past the conference quarterfinals. He never made it to a national tournament. Yet, Luke still shot 500 jump shots during summer workouts, when many college students were hitting up happy hour on the way to catching the newest blockbuster at the theater. He still played in every game, despite a blood condition that hurt his stamina, the occasional rolled ankle and the occasional sickness.

And here was his son’s chance at a Senior Night for the ages, if he could just show the Loyola home crowd his privileged shooting form one last time.

“He’s a good kid,” Peter Zumo thought to himself. “He deserves good fortune.”

A grim-faced Luke Zumo bounced the basketball several times before pausing, breathing deeply, then squaring up for the first free throw. He was poised, he was collected, he was cool.

On the next two attempts rested the men’s basketball program’s first 16-win season since the reinstatement of athletics; the team’s first non-losing season in the GCAC since Dr. Michael Giorlando took over as head coach and athletic director in 2004; a first-round bye for the upcoming post-season conference tournament; proof to critics that athletic scholarships brought not only top-tier athletes to Loyola, but top-tier scholars as well.

With 0.00 seconds left on the game clock, and the scoreboard knotted up at 66, this trip to the line maybe his last shots ever in a home uniform, on the floor he had called home since the Fall 2004 semester.

People using the workout equipment in the second-floor gym area turned off their treadmills, dismounted their ellipticals and crowded the jogging track.

For even these casual observers, Zumo brandished his privileged form as he jutted his elbow out, bent slightly at the knees, deliberately rose up, catapulted the ball with the flick of his wrist and put it all in the balance.

It was silent enough in The Den to hear the light fixtures buzzing and the bookkeeper tapping his pencil against the scorer’s table.

The ball’s flight peaked then dipped toward the void in between the front rim and back iron.

As Luke Zumo had done so many times before that home crowd, he nailed it.

Peter Zumo nodded his head hard and decompressed, sniffling in and drying his welled eyes. The Den howled and celebrated, sure it had never witnessed a finish like that since it was built. It may never again.

A heroic Luke Zumo thrust his index finger triumphantly skyward and turned immediately to his teammates. He started walking toward them, and for the first time that night, for the first time ever on a basketball court, he smiled.

*Four days later, despite a team-high 19 points from Luke Zumo, Xavier University eliminated Loyola from the GCAC quarterfinals at The Barn.

The final tallies of Luke’s legacy, therefore, were in.

Eighteen points per game; 247 three-pointers, second all-time at Loyola; 1,573 career points, third all-time; first-team all-conference honors as a senior; two preseason all-conference selections; a spot on the second-team of the Louisiana Sports Writers Association’s All-Louisiana basketball team.

And one hell of a Senior Night. One hell of a payday.

One more season, and Luke Zumo would have been the career leader in three-pointers and career scoring. As it was, he outgunned every member of the 1945 national championship team, and outgunned Charley Powell, who made history himself by becoming the university’s first black athlete in the 1960s.

The only basketball player in the new era of athletics Zumo didn’t outscore was career scoring leader Brian Lumar (1,832), who didn’t have his four seasons of basketball interrupted by a hurricane.

Because of the hurricane, Zumo had an extra season of eligibility granted to him by the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Had he taken it, he would’ve been the best 3-point shooter and best career scorer ever. At his 18 point per game average, he would’ve needed just 14 games out of a 26-game season to do so.

But physical therapy school called, and so did married life with Katie Henry, a 2007 Loyola graduate he got to know while he was her vice president in COMPASS, a girl he got to know one night when he was shooting a game of H-O-R-S-E at his buddy’s house.

While on Easter vacation at her family’s home in Columbus, Miss. Zumo figured he’d ask Katie Henry to marry him.

One evening, after taking a jog together, the two settled in after their showers. She desperately wanted to finish doing her taxes, and he was desperately trying to get her to come out to her mother’s porch so he could ask him to marry her.

“Bring your taxes out here,” he said.

“It’s all kinds of paperwork, it’s going to blow away out there,” she said, resisting.

“Well, then put it away, come relax out here. There’s still a few minutes of daylight,” Luke said.

She finally relented and sat on the porch next to him.

He wanted to ask her to marry him after slow-dancing to the couple’s song – Des’Re’s “Kissing You,” the love theme from Baz Luhrman’s “Romeo + Juliet.” He asked her to bring her laptop out, since bringing a radio or CD player out to the porch might’ve tipped her off that something was up.

“Hey, bring your computer out here,” he asked her, still playing it cool. Only Katie’s mother’s laptop was closer, so she brought that one instead.

It didn’t have the song on it.

Luke suppressed a grumble, then said, “Hey, let me run and get mine, I have to check my e-mail anyway.” On top of that, he definitely knew he had the song file.

After retrieving his laptop, he sat down next to her and acted like he was going to check his e-mail.

At that point, Katie’s cell phone went off. She answered, and it was a friend calling to check in and see what was up.

“They talked for, like, 5 minutes, but it felt like 20,” he said.

She eventually got off the phone, and without letting anything else take her attention, Zumo fired up “Kissing You” on his iTunes and asked her to slow dance.

Once the song ended, he dropped to his knee and asked her for her hand in marriage.

After her eyes began to tear, Henry accepted and immediately began to spread the news to her friends from school. When excitedly re-counting the sequence of events, she pondered a friend’s question concerning whether or not she knew something was up.

Honestly, she said, she didn’t. She only knew something was up when Luke’s body started to shake and tremble during the last 10 seconds of the song.

Having to shoot the biggest free throw ever for the men’s basketball program since the re-instatement of athletics didn’t unsettle his poise, it turned out. Neither did the torturous symptoms of his blood condition, nor the expectations everyone placed upon him as the school’s first scholarship athlete.

No pursuits in the game of basketball truly threw his poise off.

But when it came time to ask his girlfriend to join him in life after the game?

It turns out he trembled, just like the majority of us would.

. . . . .

Ramon Antonio Vargas can be reached at [email protected].