GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Gonzaga’s Przemek Karnowski is the predominant character, at least visually, of this Final Four. He’s a 7-foot-1 mastodon with deft touch, next-level passing instinct and a facial profile that borders legendary ZZ Top territory.
Big dude, big beard, big game. Easy to love.
Hard to envision the endearing giant holed up in a small house, staying in bed and needing persuasion to even step outside. But a little more than a year ago, that was Karnowski’s existence. He faced an ailment that threatened his career, if not his life. Karnowski’s back surgery midway through the 2015-16 season has been well-documented, but much more than that, a staph infection that spread from his back to his lower leg was particularly scary and could have terminated his future on the court.
“There was a very high probability that he was not probably going to play basketball again,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said.
Karnowski arrived at Gonzaga, via Poland, in 2012. He was seen as the potential piece to put Gonzaga into the Final Four. Now that it has finally happened, it’s difficult to see how Gonzaga would have been here otherwise. Nigel Williams-Goss is Gonzaga’s best player, but Karnowski is the centerpiece.
The first sign of trouble was a simple fall in a team shootaround on Dec. 1, 2015. Karnowski hit the deck in Gonzaga’s practice facility the day before the Zags were to play Washington State. The next day the back spasms showed up and Karnowski was incapacitated. The coaching staff was of course alarmed, but at the time they thought he would only miss a few weeks.
Within days, lovable “Shemmy” was bedridden. The pain of the bulging disk in his back was too severe to do anything, so he opted to do nothing. Gonzaga associate head coach Tommy Lloyd said Karnowski would not get out of bed. Karnowski’s parents coincidentally had made the trip from Poland at the time of the spasms, and so Lloyd, mom and dad went to Karnowski’s one-bedroom off-campus house to get him moving. Even if only to get the blood flowing.
It was a fight.
“I’m like, ‘Przemek, you’ve gotta get out of bed,’” Lloyd said. “‘You’ve gotta take a shower, you’ve gotta start feeling better.’ I’m having the hard talk with him and he’s like, almost tearing up. And then he tries and we get him out of bed and it literally takes 20 minutes to get him out of bed.”
Karnowski couldn’t do daily tasks, save brushing his teeth or urinating, and needed to be stiffened at an awkward angle in order to barely fit his sizable frame into Lloyd’s Toyota Sequoia. Unable to bend his back, Karnowski couldn’t shower at his house anymore and needed to be brought sporadically to Gonzaga’s facilities to shower. The crutches he was using weren’t helping, either.
“Loading him into a car was nearly impossible,” Lloyd said.
Within a few weeks, things got scary and serious.
“Next thing we know, it’s not getting better -- it’s getting worse,” Lloyd said. “He starts dropping weight and he’s profusely sweating in his bedroom. It gets a little bizarre.”
A follow-up, emergency MRI showed Karnowski’s lower back revealed what amounted to rot: The staph infection was ruining him.
“The doctor comes out and is like, ‘This can’t even be the same guy,’” Lloyd said. “‘From two weeks ago to now, how is this so different?’”
The bulged disk was being eaten away by a staph infection. He had two sources of massive discomfort and threats to his health. To this day, the source of the infection isn’t known. The infection spread to his leg. Karnowski developed a gross abscess on his left shin: 10 centimeters long by three centimes wide by three centimeters deep.
“It was hot to the touch,” Lloyd said. “It was a nasty puss pocket.”
And that’s when doctors knew immediate surgery was necessary. The infection had eaten through his disk, and in the moment any thoughts of playing basketball again were eliminated. It was about saving his leg and his life. Fortunately, there was a Spokane doctor who was qualified to perform the operation, because transporting Karnowski to Los Angeles, for example, would have been torturous and potentially dangerous.
“I don’t wish any of that to happen to my worst enemy,” said Karnowski, now the team’s captain. “I think that says a lot. It’s hard to for me to say because I was in so much pain. Just going to the practice facility every day was a big challenge for me.”
And by this point, Few and the coaches and Karnowski’s parents were prepared for the end of his career. Big man, bad back, unknown timetable for return. Who knew if he would be able to find proper repair and play again?
“I think all of us coaches, players, coaches’ wives, were huge in this process, going over and kind of giving him a little TLC with his parents not being around,” Few said. “And we were really truly hoping, probably, December, January, February, for just a normal active life. I mean, he couldn’t even get in or out of a car, or really walk, or even just kind of getting in and out of bed. And then I was really worried about depression and things like that. Emotionally he wasn’t in a great place. So the fact that from going from those dark days to like right now, it literally is miraculous, and I’m not using the term lightly.”
The surgery was done within two days after the infection was discovered. Karnowski had plummeted from 310 pounds at the start of November to 238 pounds within days after surgery, in early January. He rehabbed from January until September. He went without jumping for more than seven months.
Getting back into basketball shape was exacting. In the four months following surgery, he carried around an IV bag, requiring a travel nurse to come to his house to assist him. He wanted to go home to see his family in Poland but that was not an option. He fought like hell through strength and conditioning to be ready. By October he was fully cleared.
He plays with two titanium brackets fused into his back to keep him capable. The big man is thankful. He’s averaging 12.2 points and 5.8 rebounds this season. Without him, Gonzaga would look very different. Without him, Gonzaga is not in Arizona.
And now, the big man with the big beard is putting the finishing touches on college basketball’s biggest comeback this season.
