Pain and Basketball

His adrenaline pumping, Brian Elbogen hustles down the court at Dillon Gym, shouting instructions to teammates. The other players brick shots and throw away passes, but the six-foot, seven-inch sophomore drains jumpers and soars for rebounds. He's fundamentally sound, relentlessly aggressive. Two opponents swarm him, then three, hacking at his body. It doesn't matter — they can't stop him.

When Elbogen arrived at Princeton, he expected to have games like this, but not at Dillon Gym, home of the casual afternoon pickup player. During his standout high school career, he dreamt of playing in front of Orange and Black faithful at Jadwin Gym — and the Tigers' coaches wooed him right back.

Instead, it was in that building, early in his freshman year, that Elbogen was forced to find the words to tell his coach he had to leave the varsity basketball team.

One of the top three recruits in the Class of 2007, Elbogen was expected to make an immediate impact off the bench as a freshman. But before he could don a jersey, a two-yearlong battle with a severe back injury derailed those plans. In the year-and-a-half since, like other varsity athletes who quit because of injuries, he had to find a life outside of the basketball team that he came to Princeton to play on.

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Elbogen grew up in San Ramon, a primarily white suburb of 40,000 in Northern California where bleached hair and a laid-back attitude rule. Life didn't revolve around high school sports, not like it revolves around football in Texas or basketball in Indiana. But the town supported its teams, and when Elbogen started leading his Calfornia High team to victories, fans packed the school gym.

Thanks to his height, he'd been one of the best players on the court since he began playing youth basketball as a 10-year-old. While he enjoyed the game because he excelled, the sense of belonging to a team was even more important.

He eventually grew into his long, skinny body, and the summer after his sophomore year of high school, he played for the Oakland Soldiers, a talented club team that LeBron James once played for. By his junior season at California High, his size and strength made him a dominant force, and he led his team to a league championship.

He was an "aggressive player" who was "strong as all hell," recalled Princeton sophomore forward Patrick Ekeruo, who played against Elbogen in high school.

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He first felt the pain in his back during the preseason his junior year. Convinced it was only a tweaked muscle, he tried to ice the pain away.

Instead, as the year went on, the pain got worse. He took anti-inflammatories and got massages from a chiropractor to loosen the muscles, but the pain remained.

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He kept playing. The pain seemed to subside on the court, though it returned a few hours after a practice or game when his muscles started to tighten. At a team holiday party after a game in January of his junior year, he sat down to rest. He couldn't get up. His parents had to come to bring him home, carrying him into the car and then into their house, where he lay on his back for a day, icing and trying to loosen his back muscles.

Out of nowhere, a physical therapist who had read newspaper articles about Elbogen's condition called to offer help. He referred Elbogen to an orthopedist who examined his test results — MRIs and CAT and bone scans — and discovered what previous doctors had missed: Elbogen had a broken back.

He was diagnosed with two conditions. The first was spondylolysis, in which the tiny bones holding vertebrae together are broken and cause painful inflammation. The other was Grade 1 spondylolisthesis, which can cause unstable back joints to slip out of place and risk permanent nerve damage. One false slip could lead to numbness down the legs and extreme pain, even an inability to walk.

The diagnoses allowed Elbogen to take measures that kept him on the court without risking significant physical damage. He wore a back brace while playing and skipped practice drills that caused unnecessary strain. After his junior season, he worked with a physical therapist to prepare for his senior year, focusing on his core and abdominal muscles to increase back stability.

Able to handle the pain, he could think seriously about his college hoops career. Recruiting services compared him to Mark Madsen, the gritty former Stanford star who was backing up Shaquille O'Neal for the L.A. Lakers at the time.

Elbogen took recruiting trips to Princeton, Penn, the University of New Mexico, St. Mary's and Portland. At each college, he told the coaches he might never play.

In early November, he committed to Princeton, lured by its academic quality. Before his early decision acceptance was even mailed, alumni discussed his skills on Internet message boards.

Meanwhile, Elbogen continued to thrive on the court. His senior year, he led California High to another league championship and was named the league's Most Valuable Player.

In April, he received a letter from a woman whose family had attended every one of his games. It had been a pleasure to watch him play, she wrote. Her middle-school-age son, she said, had cut out every article about Elbogen and posted them on his wall, hoping to someday "be like Brian."

Those senior year experiences pushed him toward continuing to play in college. He vowed he would give it a shot, deciding to introduce himself to his new Princeton friends as "Brian the basketball player."

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The summer before his freshman year, Elbogen prepared to play varsity ball. He continued rehabbing, waking up for 6 a.m. training sessions and lifting weights to increase strength.

In August, full of optimism, he met with his parents and men's basketball head coach John Thompson '88, who suggested he ease into Princeton's workouts. But Elbogen's plans were different.

"If I'm going to play, I'm going to be like any other player in this program," he told Thompson. "I'm going to do all the lifts, all the workouts and all the pickup games. I don't want to play if I can't go at it 100 percent like everyone else on the team."

At Princeton, basketball dominated Elbogen's life. It wasn't just the five hours of daily practice. There were the team bonding experiences — eating with teammates in the dining hall, relaxing with them at the 'Street.' For incoming freshmen, the social benefits of athletic teams are alluring, and the close atmosphere felt like a brotherhood to Elbogen.

"Brian loved the team," recalled his father, David Elbogen. "He really liked the coaching staff and his teammates."

But before the team even had its first official practice, Elbogen's back pain became much worse. He was unaccustomed to the hard practice regimen of a college team, and the pain grew nearly unendurable. After every hard workout, his back tightened like a fist. Slowly, the optimism of summer gave way to doubt.

"Should I play through the pain?" he wondered. "Should I give it up?"

There were many long cell phone calls home that freshman fall. Leaning against a big tree in Holder courtyard to block the wind, Elbogen asked his parents what they would think if he quit.

"Weigh out the pros and cons," his father told him. "But pick what's best for you, Brian. You're so much more than a basketball player."

The son wasn't as confident. He didn't feel ready for life-altering decisions. His reputation at Princeton was made as a basketball player. He was ashamed and felt like he would be letting the team down.

"Brian's played through many injuries in the past because the game means so much to him," said his brother Mike, a UCLA sophomore. "He isn't the kind of guy who gives up at something easily — to have to finally admit to himself that he wasn't able to keep going in basketball at that level must have been really difficult."

In the end, Elbogen concluded that he wanted to be able to play basketball with his children. As much as he adored he game now, his future health and happiness were more important. So he decided to quit. All that was left was telling his coach.

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Elbogen's pace quickened as he walked across campus from his room in Holder Hall to Jadwin Gymnasium one afternoon in late October 2003.

The walk took 10 minutes. On any other afternoon, that would have been 10 minutes of chatting with teammates. Ten minutes of thinking about the latest finance lecture. Ten minutes of thinking about the plans for the upcoming weekend. On this day, though, his mind raced on a different thread.

"What is Coach Thompson going to think of me? He's going to think I'm some rookie freshman that couldn't handle it," Elbogen worried. "How the hell am I going to tell him?"

Elbogen arrived at Jadwin and climbed the two flights of stairs to Thompson's office. It seemed like their August meeting had been just yesterday. As he knocked on Thompson's door, he couldn't forget his words. He had promised to do his best, and he had done just that. But it wasn't enough.

"Coach Thompson, do you have a minute?" Elbogen asked. "I need to talk to you about something."

The coach and his player walked toward the empty bleachers high above the silent, glimmering court.

"Coach, my back is hurting worse than it did before, and I just don't think I can play through the pain anymore," Elbogen told Thompson. "I just think I have to think about my health and my future, and I don't think I can make it through the season, and — "

"Brian, it's okay," Thompson interrupted.

Thompson continued, assuring Elbogen that he sympathized with what he was going through. He recognized Elbogen's desire to keep playing, the intense effort he gave every day. Thompson is a college coach; he wants to win and believes basketball should be on par with academics for his athletes. But he understood that Elbogen had tried his best.

After the meeting with Thompson, Elbogen sent an email to the team explaining his decision to quit. Ekeruo, his fellow freshman forward, kept that email for many months.

It was "painful to read," Ekeruo says, because "you could see how much he wanted to play." The team had seen Elbogen as one of the hardest-working players on the floor and knew his decision was something "he had no choice about."

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Soon afterward, Elbogen sat down with a classmate in the dining hall and started a friendly conversation. They'd only met twice before, and the classmate knew only one thing about him: he played basketball.

And so, the question came for the ninth time in one day.

"Brian, hey," said the friend. "How's basketball going?"

"I'm not playing anymore," Elbogen said, followed by awkward silence. The comment was "a little stab in the heart," he later recalled, "a constant reminder of failure."

In the months after leaving the team, Elbogan struggled to cope. He was ready to be done with basketball. But his experience with the team, once a source of pride, now haunted him.

Back home, the same people who had idolized Elbogen wondered what was going on. One afternoon at the supermarket, another parent from his high school asked his mom if he was leaving Princeton. She said the rumor was untrue, that her son loved Princeton. But the parent pressed on. "Why is he still going to school there if he can't play basketball?"

Meanwhile, at Princeton, Elbogen battled feelings of guilt and failure. He was angry at the people who asked his mother questions about his future, but he was also angry with himself. He'd set such high expectations when he came to Princeton. He had expected to improve his game, expected people to ask about Princeton's basketball program, expected friends to tell him they had seen him on ESPN. Instead, he wasn't even a member of the team anymore.

After he quit, Elbogen could only wait out the pain and try to fill the new void in his life. He joined several groups on campus, including Friends of Homeless Animals, Amnesty International, Big Sibs and the Princeton Volunteer Leadership Initiative. It took time, but he now realizes that quitting basketball has opened other meaningful activities.

"I had so many options — there were so many things I could do to fill the void," he said. "I just didn't see them at first."

Though he can no longer play basketball at the varsity level, the competitive fire is still there, waiting to be unleashed at Dillon Gym. A few weeks ago, he played in a three-on-three charity tournament — going so hard that he injured both his ankles. His father and brother laughed about it from afar, understanding it was a positive sign.

"I think it was the right decision," his brother said. "Brian seemed a lot happier — and he had the chance to expand and try a lot of new things, which is a huge part of what college is about."

Of course, there are still the little twinges of the heart.

"There are moments when I think he thinks about it — like last year when the team won the Ivy Championship and then went on to NCAAs," his father said. "But I think he's at peace with himself."