But when the baby arrived, the doctor handed her a 10-pound boy.
“What happened?” she asked. “This is devastating!”
Over the next 24 hours, a nurse repeatedly asked her to name her son, but she refused to respond. On the third visit, the nurse would not leave without an answer.
“That’s how Evan Turner came to be my baby,” Iris Turner said of Ohio State’s junior point guard. “It’s been a struggle, in and out of the hospital, ever since.”
Over his first four years, Turner was sickly. He had measles, chickenpox, pinkeye, enlarged tonsils and swollen adenoids. He also had a severe overbite and could not speak clearly until he was 3. He communicated through his older brother Darius until his speech was corrected through therapy. Other children would tease him, saying he was a mama’s boy.
He would say, “So?”
Turner, now a favorite to be named national player of the year, leads the second-seeded Buckeyes, who are on an eight-game winning streak and who play Georgia Tech on Sunday in the N.C.A.A. tournament’s second round. He has returned from another hospital stay to play the best basketball of his career.
When Turner landed on his back after a dunk attempt against Eastern Michigan on Dec. 5, his mother’s initial instinct was to jump from her seat in the parents’ section. But she walked to the elevator instead. Once inside the training room, she overheard her son asking if she was hysterical.
“Why would I be hysterical?” she asked. “I’ve taken care of him forever.”
At the hospital, they learned that he had fractured the transverse processes of two vertebrae, affecting his rotational movement. When he returned to his apartment with his mother, his teammate Jon Diebler and his youth coach Yancy Colquitt, he lay gingerly and picked up the book “Lone Survivor,” about rescuing Navy Seals.
“Life is survival of the fittest,” said Turner, who is averaging 19.9 points, 9.2 rebounds and 5.9 assists.
He was expected to miss eight weeks but was back in four. On the day he was cleared to play, his mother drove 356 miles from Chicago to see for herself.
“You could see the nervousness that a mother would have,” Ohio State Coach Thad Matta said. “It was their decision, them sitting in a room without me around.”
Turner was a wiry 6-foot-7 freshman. The first time he and Diebler went to the weight room, they watched their teammate David Lighty lifting a barbell with several weights. When it was their turn, Diebler and Turner started to take off plates, but the strength and conditioning coach Dave Richardson told them the bar had been set for everyone. Neither could lift it.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect much from Evan,” Richardson said.
Matta had been attracted to Turner while watching Diebler, one of the nation’s best sharpshooters, in the King James Classic in Akron. Turner did not allow Diebler to get a shot off in the second half.
“I had to offer him a scholarship,” Matta said.
A perfectionist who played piano as a youth, Turner passed up shots at Ohio State and tried to make sure conditions were perfect before he let the ball loose. That perturbed Matta. By the end of Turner’s first season, Matta took him into an otherwise empty practice gym. He made Turner throw a rack of balls across the floor. He started with one short, then threw deep. Turner had no idea what Matta wanted.
“Do I look mad?” Matta asked.
Turner said no.
“You’re going to make a lot more plays than you are errors,” Matta said.
Turner’s game and his relationship with Matta have improved since. After playing small forward and power forward, Turner moved to point guard this season. His ball-handling skills have tightened, and his ease with his left hand allows him to dribble with his eyes closed.
Colquitt, his youth coach, said, “Whoever drafts him eventually is going to get three players.”
The skills have attracted interest from outsiders, but his mother has been the protector. The woman who never let her sons leave home without knowing the destination, and had them phone whenever they reached it, has been accepting business cards from agents and financial advisers who approach after games. By last season’s final game, she had a stack and kept them. Some thought he would follow the former Buckeyes Greg Oden, Mike Conley Jr., Daequan Cook and Kosta Koufos to the N.B.A.
“I thought Evan was going after last season,” Iris Turner said. “He didn’t tell me until after the final game.”
A random fan caught her attention during the Big Ten tournament title game last Sunday. A Minnesota enthusiast sitting in the Ohio State parents’ section was talking about Turner, referring to him as No. 21. Feeling she should inform him of the Buckeyes star’s identity because he had stolen the show that weekend with a buzzer-beater against Michigan, Iris Turner volunteered, “That’s my baby.”
