Turner Knows Family Matters

Whenever Kevin Turner lifts his sweet-eyed gaze toward the rim, the aunts and cousins high in the stands almost swear they can see his long lashes from way up there.

Three-pointer, they think. Three-pointer.

“He has his mother’s eyes,” said Carolyn Edwards, one of the four protective aunts of the skinny, sharp-shooting Illinois guard who scored 32 points against UCLA this season and will take No. 22 Illinois into the NCAA tournament Thursday against South Alabama in Sacramento. “I look at him shooting three-pointers, and I can’t see nothing but his mother. I always say he’s going to make them.”

Turner’s mother has been gone three years now, and he lost her too early, to cancer at only 38. That is sad, but it is part of life, and college athletes are at an age when a parent can be gone, just like that. Cincinnati’s Ruben Patterson buried his mother this season. Kentucky’s Allen Edwards buried his too.

What Turner has lost is difficult to imagine.

He never knew his father, stabbed to death in a robbery when Kevin was a baby. His mother didn’t raise him so much as his grandmother, Pinkie, the matriarch of a large, embracing family. When she died, Kevin and his brother, Ken, went to live with one of those lively, generous aunts, Gertrude Garrett.

Then two years ago today, Jermon Little, the cousin closest to Kevin, was sent from Chicago to Champaign, Ill., in the middle of the night to break one more piece of bad news.

Ken was gone too, shot and killed in the cross-fire of a gang battle on his way to the store four days after his birthday.

“I knew March was coming, and this is the month of his birthday and the day he died,” Kevin said Saturday in Chicago, after the Illini’s loss to Purdue in the Big Ten tournament.

“It’s been on my mind. I was thinking about it before the game. This day was his birthday. Maybe if we would have won, I would have dedicated it to my brother. Unfortunately, it didn’t go our way.”

Once, Kevin played to forget.

He has come a long way.

Now, he can play to remember.

When Illinois plays Thursday, two years and one day after Ken’s death, Ken will be on Kevin’s mind again.

“He was devoted to his brother. He’ll always miss him,” said Garrett, the rail-thin backbone of her family who prefers to call herself its “skinny spine.”

“We have a very close-knit family,” she said. ‘When tragedy struck, he knew he had us. We are there all the way.”

“My aunts--I love ‘em dearly,” Kevin said. “They’ve been with me since I was a little kid.”

One aunt wears an Illini baseball cap at games. Carolyn Edwards goes her one further, wearing an Illinois jersey as well.

And everywhere, there are cousins. Too many to count.

“We say we’ve got angels in the outfield, watching out for him,” one said.

“He’s just really started talking about the tragedies,” Edwards said. “That’s what’s helped him get through it, basketball. He’s never talked about things much, but he has basketball to help get him through.”

Turner averaged only three points a game as a freshman, and only six as a sophomore. A starter as a junior, he averaged 10 points, then suddenly, stunningly, blossomed in his senior year.

In a December game against UCLA at Pauley Pavilion, a 74-69 Illini loss, Turner scored a career-high 32 points, making 12 of 25 shots, and eight of 13 from three-point range.

The next game, a 74-72 victory over Indiana, he topped that effort, scoring 35 points, with seven three-point baskets in that one.

Those were the first consecutive 30-point games by an Illinois player since Kiwane Garris in 1994.

“Heading into this season, without Kiwane Garris and Chris Gandy, I knew some games I’d need to step up,” said Turner, who averages 18 points for Illinois, who are 22-9 and were the regular-season co-champions of the Big Ten, with Michigan State.

This season, his aunts and cousins can see a new spirit in Turner on the court. Even when his shot is off, they see a young man who plays with more joy than before.

“I could say his senior year he’s showing more emotion on the court,” said Little, his cousin. “He’s bringing it out instead of holding it in. I feel maybe that helps him perform better. Kevin, he’s a real quiet person. A sweet person. He doesn’t say much. He’s been through a lot.”

Little carried that awful message to Turner two years ago.

“It was hard,” Little said, remembering how he broke the news of Ken’s death after driving to the Illinois campus from Chicago. “I saw the look on his face. The hurt was eating him up. He’s one that doesn’t show too much emotion, but that time he had to.

“That close a person to you. Your mother’s gone. Your father. Your grandmother’s gone. Why? I try my best to do as much as I can for him.”

Turner’s immediate family is gone, but his extended family--all those aunts and cousins--have an embrace as long and wide as the three-point arc.

“This year, I’ve been able to show more emotion than my first two years,” Turner said. “I’m a quiet person. But I use my family as inspiration to help me believe we can win in the tournament.

“We’ve come too far for it to end too soon.”