March 22--Minutes after giving his dying friend a nationally televised shoutout Saturday following Indiana's NCAA tournament victory over Kentucky, winning coach Tom Crean retreated to the locker room to make good on his word.
Crean called buddy Trey Schwab, just as he promised.
Schwab lay in a bed at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, nearly 300 miles away from Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa, his carbon-dioxide levels rising and his sick body failing. The recipient of a double lung transplant 12 years ago as Crean's assistant at Marquette, Schwab knew the end was near. An infection last fall started his downward health spiral. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the lung disease he was diagnosed with after a bout with pneumonia in 2001, has no cure. What kept Schwab going in his final days was seeing Crean lead Indiana back into the Sweet 16.
Before the Hoosiers eliminated Chattanooga in Thursday's first round, Crean texted Schwab minutes before tipoff and talked to him immediately afterward. And as Crean's players celebrated beating rival Kentucky after his biggest win at Indiana, their coach balanced his joy with pain in a phone call he will remember longer than the 73-67 score.
"They put the phone up to his ear so I could tell him I loved him one more time," Crean told the Tribune on Monday.
The coach's voice cracked.
"Nobody wanted to see him leave," Crean said. "But I knew he was ready to go."
Robert Love, the doctor from Northwestern Medicine who performed Schwab's transplant, spent last weekend at his patient's side. Love was there when Schwab struggled to respond to Crean because he was wearing a mask to help him breathe and when the former assistant coach smiled seeing Indiana beat a Kentucky team he helped scout.
"Trey had trouble talking but could hear Tom," Love said in a phone interview. "He understood what had happened."
Just before noon Sunday, Schwab passed away peacefully surrounded by a small circle of loved ones. He was 50, yet Love believes Schwab felt grateful to live as long as he did after the double transplant. Yet Crean always considered himself the lucky one for developing a relationship with someone he loved like a brother.
"Everybody there thought he had a couple hours to live on Thursday and he made it three days longer than expected -- that summed up the guy I knew," Crean said. "He defied odds and got the most out of it. He wanted to see our game."
Now Crean carries Schwab's memory and a heavy heart into Indiana's next game Friday in Philadelphia. The Hoosiers stand two victories away from the Final Four, the college basketball mountaintop Crean reached with Schwab at Marquette in 2003. It was on the weekend before Marquette's appearance in New Orleans 13 years ago that Schwab first received word of a potential donor.
"But the lungs weren't a great size match," Love recalled. "It was a tough decision because we probably could've made it work. He had to wait another whole year."
Finally, on Feb.17, 2004, Schwab's wait ended. Love successfully completed the double lung transplant before the real drama began. Eleven days after the operation, Schwab experienced an allergic reaction to medication, resulting in a blood clot that nearly killed him.
"He was in full cardiac arrest," Love said.
For 40 minutes, doctors performed CPR. As they revived Schwab, Crean followed a police escort from Milwaukee. When Schwab finally emerged from surgery, the Marquette family sighed and doctors worried about damage to his brain or kidneys.
"Amazingly, he woke up that night fully intact," Love said.
Before long, Schwab was back at the Bradley Center in a reduced role but still with a large presence because of his personality. Health dictated that Schwab change careers from coaching to advocating for the transplant program at UW Hospital, but he never stopped making an impact on young lives.
"He gave his life to other people getting saved like he was," Crean said.
From Dwyane Wade to the 12th man on any given team, Marquette players always respected Schwab for his guts as much as his basketball mind.
"When I first got here, Coach said you have to lay it on the line every day and I said, 'How can you do that every day?' " Wade was quoted as saying in a 2003 Associated Press story. "Well, I see how you can do that every day because what (Schwab) is going through."
Every day, Schwab endured with an upbeat attitude, which Travis Diener admired.
"When you're 19 years old, you take certain things for granted," said Diener, a Marquette guard from 2001-05 who is now an MU assistant. "We often just overlooked the things he had to overcome just to stay alive and how much he had to fight. His courage was an inspiration. Everyone he touched realized that."
Nobody more than Crean, the embattled Indiana coach whose friendship with Schwab helped him find perspective during the most trying of times in Bloomington, Ind.
"I can't help but think of him now," Crean said. "He was an incredible man. I'm so thankful he hung on long enough to hear from everyone he loved. A lot of people got to say their final goodbye."
Crean always will cherish being one of them.
dhaugh@tribpub.com
