Butler’s Last Climb: UConn, Kemba Await

HOUSTON — “You are on the slopes of Mount Everest, very near the top now.“

The Butler Bulldogs ate their Friday dinner in a Maggiano’s restaurant near their hotel, and during the meal, coach Brad Stevens took time to share with them an email. It was from a 1989 Butler alumnus named Matt White, who had appeared before them in person on the same day last year, in a private practice at Indianapolis’ Conseco Fieldhouse. His wife had read his message that time, because he cannot speak or move his limbs. He has battled with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) for the past 11 years and is confined to a wheelchair. He breathes through a ventilator, and in order to write, he must signal out each letter to a computer using laser-guided headgear. Every sentence is a painstaking process. The email Stevens was holding from White contained 976 words; they speculated that he’d been writing it for days, ever since they clinched the trip to the Final Four.

Last season, White wrote them that he’d come from Cape Haze, Fla., where he lives, to see the Bulldogs win a national championship. He saw them come within one Gordon Hayward shot of doing just that. This year, he wrote about the process of climbing Mount Everest. It requires acclimatization, or “allowing the body to create and retain oxygen-carrying red blood cells as needed,” by adjusting to extreme altitude in stages, from lower base camp, to advance base camp, to the final climb. White said he climbs his personal Everest every day, by coping with a fatal disease for seven years longer than doctors expected. He told them that their climb had succeeded so far because they trusted in their teammates (“no one climbs alone”), had courage (“nothing rattles you”), and never quit on a single possession.