Where to begin with the story of Iowa senior guard Luke Recker?
To say his story is compelling is to say the Beatles sold a couple of albums.
He was Mr. Basketball in Indiana, for starters, which of course meant he would go to Indiana to play for Bobby Knight. And though he averaged 16.1 points per game as a sophomore, Recker would transfer. He said, simply, that he wanted to find a program better suited to his basketball skills, refusing to pin any blame on Knight.
And so he transferred to Arizona, and this is where the story goes horribly wrong.
One summer night in 1999, while on vacation in Colorado, the Ford Taurus transporting Recker and his then-girlfriend, Kelly Craig, was hit head-on by a driver later charged with vehicular homicide and vehicular assault.
Recker's temporal artery was slashed, his left wrist crushed, bones at the base of his thumb displaced. Craig's neck was broken, arms and legs paralyzed. Her brother had massive head injuries and was in a coma.
In all, 15 people were injured in the wreck. Though he would go through with the transfer to Arizona, Recker's life would become much more complicated than just hoops and school.
In a story in The Sporting News, Recker's mother, Marti Pepple, remembered her son saying this: "They say there is supposed to be a silver lining. But there is no silver lining. There is nothing good in this at all."
Recker would spend his time at Arizona healing, teaching his body to play the game again. But his mind was back home in Indiana. He wanted to be closer to home, and he eventually decided to transfer to Iowa, where he could play for one of his boyhood role models, Steve Alford, live in the same town as his father, and be closer to Craig.
The NCAA would eventually grant Recker an exemption allowing him to play immediately.
Last season, after 15 months away from basketball, he averaged 18.1 points and led Iowa to the top of the Big 10. An already injured knee became worse when he cracked his kneecap late in the season.
After seven months of rehabilitation, Recker returned to Iowa for this season playing "the best basketball of my life." Going into Tuesday's game with the University of Memphis, Recker is averaging 18 points.
"That tells you what kind of incredible talent he is," says Alford.
Funny thing is, Recker is still a guy who will cut out articles he feels underestimate him and put them in his locker. He still talks about the way Indiana fans derided him when he decided to transfer and admits it drives him to this day.
But Recker also knows, more than most college students, how precious it is to be young, healthy and doing what he loves every day.
"I know adversity can strike in a heartbeat," Recker says. "I know how quickly things can change."