Inside three-time NBA dunk champion Nate Robinson's silent battle — and the fight for his life

ON THURSDAY, APRIL 11, a man by the name of Reginald Ballard was sitting at his home in Pasadena, California, when his phone buzzed. The actor, known for his roles on the sitcoms “Martin” and “The Bernie Mac Show,” opened a text message from his wife.

She had sent a story about ex-NBA guard Nate Robinson.

Two days prior, Robinson had publicly shared deeply personal and devastating news — he was years into kidney failure, and he didn’t know how long he’d have left to live if he didn’t receive a transplant.

“Both of my kidneys are shot,” Robinson later told ESPN.

Ballard was confused. This seemed like old news, he thought. Hadn’t he read a story about Robinson facing this same issue two years ago?

Ballard, an avid sports fan, had faced kidney failure himself in December 2020. On the day of his diagnosis, his doctor explained the Paired Kidney Exchange program through the National Kidney Registry.

In one scenario, his doctor told him, someone close to Ballard could donate a kidney into the program on his behalf, and he could receive one in return from a living donor elsewhere. The whole process could take less than a year, he was told, a much faster option than waiting to receive a matching kidney from someone who had passed away, which could take several years. Ballard signed up. After extensive tests and screenings over the next few months, Ballard’s wife donated a kidney, which went to a man in California, and Ballard, in return, received one from a woman in North Carolina.

His transplant surgery took place in December 2021, one year after his initial diagnosis — and he would have received that kidney even faster, Ballard told ESPN, were it not for heart surgery required during that span to clear a blockage in one of his arteries.

A few months after receiving his new kidney, Ballard received a call from the Texas Kidney Foundation, which asked him, a Texas native — he was born in Galveston — to join as an ambassador. They wanted him to help to spread the word about the kidney exchange program and the process to educate others. He couldn’t say yes fast enough. While working with the foundation, Ballard came to know its president and CEO, Tiffany Jones-Smith, who had joined in 2017 after losing 16 members of her immediate and extended family due to kidney disease.

Hours later, at 1:37 p.m. a voicemail landed on Jones-Smith’s phone. It was from Ballard. She didn’t know who Nate Robinson was, but she quickly knew she needed to reach him.

That night, after leaving a health care event, Jones-Smith sat in her car and called him. It was 8:53 p.m.

She began by asking Robinson if he was on a waiting list of any kind — either to receive a kidney from someone who had passed or someone who was alive. He said he was.

What could he remember about his orientation process? The conversations with specialists who had walked him through the myriad steps toward receiving a new kidney — the diagnostic tests, the mental health examination, the options, the risks?

Robinson paused. He didn’t remember anything about that process. She asked him again. Again, nothing.

Jones-Smith immediately knew something was wrong. Robinson, she quickly realized, wasn’t on a waiting list at all.

Robinson continued, telling her that he had been receiving kidney dialysis treatments multiple times a week — a process of removing excess waste and fluids from the blood — for three years. His father had recently ended a 10-year stretch on dialysis, but Robinson was still going.

Hearing the timeline, Jones-Smith shuddered.

Jones-Smith knew that while some could survive dialysis for decades, the average life expectancy is five to 10 years.

As she listened to Robinson tell his story, Jones-Smith knew that facing a life-threatening situation could be terrifying, paralyzing and isolating.

“He seemed like every other young man who had been at this for years that I’ve talked to,” she told ESPN. “It beats you down.”

She told Robinson that she would help connect him with experts and specialists. She assured him everything would be OK. She told Robinson to be honest with her, to be transparent. He said he would. She told him about the National Kidney Registry.

The call lasted 19 minutes.

After she hung up, she couldn’t believe how this man, famous and wealthy, with access to some of the best health care in the world, could get so lost amid a life-threatening struggle.

Her mind swirled. If this man couldn’t find a new kidney after three years, then what about the nearly 100,000 Americans who were on the kidney transplant waiting list? And what about the millions of other Americans who, like Robinson, were suffering from kidney failure? What about their fate?

She also knew it was often even worse for Black Americans, who are more than three times as likely to develop kidney failure than white adults.

She called Robinson eight times the next day. She would call him almost every day in the weeks ahead.

She wondered about the health care professionals around him. Were they providing answers and guidance? Was he asking the right questions?

She couldn’t shake the lingering question of how he arrived at this point in the first place. How, exactly, did this happen?

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IN THE FALL of 2005, Robinson stood in a doctor’s office at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Midtown Manhattan. He was 21, a rookie for the New York Knicks, recently drafted 21st overall out of the University of Washington.

He was there for a routine physical. The Knicks’ team doctor was a woman named Lisa Callahan. Standing 5-foot-2, most players she evaluated needed to sit down to look her in the eye, but Robinson, 5-foot-9, barely had to sit at all. She quickly took a liking to the Seattle native, known as a jokester.

During the initial physical, Callahan noticed Robinson’s blood pressure was higher than normal — nothing too troubling, she told him, but something they should keep an eye on. High blood pressure, she knew, was common among the Black population. Robinson otherwise passed and proceeded to begin his NBA career.

Later that season, in the spring of 2006, Robinson woke one morning feeling as nauseated as he’d ever been. He had no idea why. Throughout his life, he’d been healthy. He’d never missed a day of school. He’d never missed a practice. But, on that day, he felt sicker than at any point in his life. He worried he wouldn’t make it to Knicks practice.

“Stop playing, bro,” a teammate told him. “You’re a rookie. You can’t be late.”

“I’m sick,” Robinson said. “I’m not lying.”

He knew his teammates didn’t believe him. So he hopped in his car, drove to practice and couldn’t make it to the garbage can at the practice facility. He vomited across the training room. His legs began to cramp, then his hands, up and down his body.

Callahan gathered Robinson and had him admitted at a nearby hospital.

After blood work, Robinson sat there as doctors explained that his kidneys didn’t seem to be functioning properly, which is what had been leading to his high blood pressure.

Robinson wasn’t sure what that meant.

Callahan told him she wanted to start monitoring his blood pressure more actively, because engaging in an intense, cardiovascular activity — like playing in an NBA game — could lead to a spike in blood pressure and, perhaps, a cardiac event.

“‘We don’t want you having a heart attack on the court,'” Robinson recalled Callahan telling him.

Robinson was taken aback. His NBA career had just started — and now it was in jeopardy?

“I’m playing basketball,” he told Callahan. “If it happens, it happens. If I die doing what I love, then so be it.”

Soon after, Callahan traveled with Robinson to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where kidney specialists confirmed her fears: Robinson’s kidneys were not functioning properly, but, more than that, the doctors told him he would eventually need a kidney transplant. Robinson nodded, believing that “eventually” could be years away. For now, he just wanted to play.

He began taking blood pressure medication and agreed to getting checked often.

Over the years, this became his routine. On rare occasions, he’d become violently ill and need to visit the hospital, but he said he only ever missed two games — total.

Callahan kept a close eye on him, even after Robinson left the Knicks, later joining Boston, then Oklahoma City, then Golden State, then Chicago, then Denver, then the Clippers, then New Orleans. The experience was new for her, too. She had never cared for any young professional athlete who had kidney disease. The only one she knew of was Hall of Fame center Alonzo Mourning, who played in the 1990s and early 2000s.

By 2016, Robinson was out of the NBA. He had played 11 seasons and averaged 11 points per game, including 17.2 in 2008-09, his final season with the Knicks. He’d won the slam dunk contest in 2006, 2009 and 2010. He played two more seasons overseas, until 2018. He said his kidney issue never stopped teams from signing him, nor did it end his career early. Throughout, he was happy, and he became a father of four. He had fulfilled his dream. He was at peace.

Robinson knew all along that his kidneys might one day fail him. He just didn’t know when.

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IT WAS THE summer of 2021 and Robinson had traveled to Philadelphia with his son for a basketball camp. Suddenly, Robinson started feeling ill. He had foggy headaches. He was fatigued. He had no appetite. He spent most of the time in his car while his son played in the gym.

When he returned home to Seattle, he was admitted to a local hospital, where he tested positive for COVID-19. While admitted, he began throwing up. He couldn’t control his bowels, and severe pain radiated throughout his body.

The doctors began running a series of tests. The prognosis was dire. What had for nearly 15 years been an eventuality was now a reality: Robinson’s kidneys were failing — and if he didn’t begin dialysis immediately, they told him, he could die.

He began dialysis within a week, the start of a yearslong routine that is ongoing. His alarm sounds at 4:20 a.m. He leaves the house by 4:45, then makes a 20-minute drive to a Seattle clinic, where, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he sits in a chair from 5:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. while a tube pumps fluids in and out of his arm.

It is exhausting, the process literally and figuratively draining him. Over the first year, depression set in. Robinson began spending long hours alone in a man cave on the second floor of his Seattle home. The room housed his three dunk contest trophies. The walls were lined with the jerseys from NBA teams he played for, and with jerseys gifted by people he played against: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Tracy McGrady. There was a foosball table, a projector and a screen. It was a place where he played video games, where he and friends would watch movies. It was a room that gave him joy and sparked the fondest of memories.

But now, it was shrouded in darkness — and he sat in the dark, day after day, for nearly a year.

“I feel like I’m dying from the inside out,” he told Sylvester Dennis, a friend since childhood.

Friends, including Dennis, pleaded with Robinson, telling him, “You can’t let this drain you. It’s going to kill you by being sad.” He would counter by telling them they didn’t know what he was going through. “Those were some dark times,” Robinson told ESPN.

Robinson was paralyzed, both by the prognosis and an uncertain future. He was facing his own mortality for the first time, feeling weak after long feeling invincible. His kids called him Superman.

“When your kids call you that, you feel that way, too,” Robinson said.

He began quietly asking friends and family if they could donate a kidney, but the guilt was overwhelming. The embarrassment was too. He was ashamed.

“It’s a lot to ask somebody for something like that,” Robinson said. “It’s not like asking somebody, ‘Bro, can I borrow some sugar?'”

Robinson had assumed, initially, that he would automatically be placed on a waiting list for a new kidney, and said he was surprised to learn the process was far more complicated.

“They said that I had to go through all these tests,” he said. “Then there’s a committee to make sure that I’m healthy and deserving of a kidney.”

He thought to himself, What? Deserving of a new kidney?

“It wasn’t just something like going to get a new ACL,” he said. “That’s what I thought it was. I didn’t know you have to know somebody or somebody has to die or somebody has to give.”

All at once, he felt caught up in a storm, trying at once to navigate the byzantine maze of the American health care system — and survive a body in failure. There was so much information to process. There were so many questions, so many he didn’t even know to ask.

His anger grew. “Our system is broken,” he said.

Week after week, month after month, Robinson continued dialysis. Sometimes, the patients he’d long sat beside were no longer there. “Some, they either got a kidney,” he said, trailing off, “or they didn’t.”

Word of Robinson’s situation eventually reached Tank Johnson, who played on the University of Washington football team for one season alongside Robinson, and the two had kept in touch over the years. Johnson had heard through the UW community that Robinson was sick — sicker than people knew.

He started reaching out to Robinson, sending him nearly a dozen messages. He never heard back.

So many around Robinson wanted him to go public, believing there was someone out there who could donate a kidney. More than that, they believed he could be a voice, especially among Black Americans. Former NBA guard Jamal Crawford, a Seattle basketball legend and close friend, wanted him to go public. So did Dennis. So did Johnson, who finally got in touch with Robinson nearly two years later, midway through 2022.

But Robinson stayed silent. More and more, to those around him, it seemed like he was resigned to stay on dialysis indefinitely.

“You can’t just sit around and wait,” Dennis told Robinson. “You have to be proactive. It’s life or death.”

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IN THE FALL of 2022, Dennis attended a football game at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle. He was there to watch Robinson’s sons, whom he calls and considers his nephews. As Dennis sat in the stands, Robinson was again in the hospital, as sick and frail as he’d ever been.

“He was on death’s doorstep,” Dennis told ESPN.

Dennis had reiterated to Robinson that he needed to continue to fight, if not for himself then for his kids. Robinson countered: If he died, he said, at least Dennis could take care of them.

Suddenly, news started spreading through the crowd. Someone turned to Dennis, “Did you hear?”

He looked at his phone and finally saw something he’d been pleading with Robinson to do for the better part of two years — issue a statement finally announcing he was undergoing treatment for kidney failure. It said he wanted to be a voice for others. He thanked people for supporting him.

Dennis angrily set his phone down. The statement was fine, he thought, but it was missing the most important element, the thing that would save his friend: The fact that Robinson needed a kidney.

“When I put that out, that was my way of saying it,” Robinson told Dennis.

“Nate, you still didn’t say you need a donor!” Dennis fired back. “You need a donor! Say it!”

Dennis and Robinson had grown up together, first meeting when Dennis was 10 and Robinson was 8. They were practically family. But Dennis had grown frustrated with Robinson, first for staying silent, then for not advocating more for himself.

“I just want this all to be over,” Dennis said Robinson told him.

Dennis had watched as Robinson made more and more trips to the hospital because he was so ill, going from annual visits to, after he started dialysis, every few months, then, on occasion, multiple times a month.

Robinson always knew when he’d need to be hospitalized. He’d suffer a migraine, then his vision would blur. Then he’d start to cough. Then, he’d throw up what looked like, to Dennis, green bile.

At the hospital, doctors would check Robinson’s blood pressure and it was so high, he said, they worried he’d have a heart attack.

In January 2023, soon after Robinson issued his statement, Dennis connected with the National Basketball Players Association, which put Robinson in touch with Mourning, who had received a kidney transplant from his cousin in 2003 and had been a voice for the issue ever since. Mourning encouraged Robinson that he could beat this and go on to live a long life, just as Mourning — now 54 — had done. More time passed, with more people trying to nudge Robinson forward. Then, this spring, a flurry of activity unfolded.

On April 9, Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller posted an interview with Robinson on their podcast, during which he described the depths of his depression during those first two years on dialysis, saying he had never felt so low.

On April 10, the Daily Mail published an interview describing the severity of his situation, in which Robinson said he didn’t know how long he’d ultimately live if he didn’t receive a new kidney.

Tank Johnson again reached out, and this time Robinson gave his blessing. So Johnson helped narrate a video that aired on the jumbotron during the University of Washington’s spring football game in Seattle on May 3. In that video, viewers were directed to a university site where they could fill out a form to see if they were the right match for a kidney donation. A few days later, on May 6, the school tweeted out the same information. Soon after, on May 18, Crawford tweeted Johnson’s video call to action, saying, “We need everyone with this one.” On the same day, Robinson shared the video to his Instagram.

Then, as hundreds of thousands of people wanting transplants do, he waited for a response.

About a week later, it arrived. Robinson was driving through Seattle when he received word from a friend who had been in touch with UW. The school had been inundated with offers from people willing to donate their kidneys.

“Thousands,” Robinson said.

Staring through the windshield, tears began to fall down his cheeks.

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ROBINSON WAS SURROUNDED by friends and family during a birthday party held at a downtown hotel in Seattle just a few weeks ago. He had just turned 40 years old, and as he reflected on the milestone, he also considered his recent good fortune. He believes that there is a potential donor in the group that offered — “that one perfect kidney,” he said.

For now, though, he said he’s focused on staying healthy so his body will accept the transplant. He works out, takes long walks and eats well — no processed foods, no fast food, more vegetables and fruit. When asked how he’s doing recently, he said, “I’m cool — for now.”

He isn’t on a donor waiting list. He said he’s had trouble getting on one because his blood pressure has remained too high and because he kept getting too ill too often. He’s said there are so many people who are more deserving, including others who have been on dialysis for much longer. He has also expressed confusion about the whole process, repeatedly saying, “I don’t know, man. I’m not a doctor. Don’t ask me.”

He recently spent 10 days in the hospital because of a blood clot in his arm while Fourth of July fireworks lit up the Seattle sky outside. There were complications, and he needed an emergency procedure. He was placed under anesthesia multiple times and didn’t know if he’d wake up.

He takes eight medications a day and said he’s trying to keep his blood pressure down. He said he hopes to have a new kidney within the next 6-12 months.

He said he has a colonoscopy scheduled for November, and, after that, he’ll meet with a team of specialists at UW to evaluate his health — and determine if his body can accept a new kidney. Then, they have to identify a potential candidate from the pool that offered.

“It’s not easy at all,” Robinson said of the process. “People think it is. People think, ‘Oh, you should be able to get a kidney with a snap of your fingers.’ I wish! It doesn’t work like that.

“There’s so many steps and levels to it that I don’t know.”

On good days, he’s happy he can watch his young daughter practice basketball and play at the park with his kids in the sun. He walks the dog. On bad ones, he tries to appreciate those too, because at least he’s still here.

“We’re human,” Robinson said. “People look at me like I’m some superhero or something, which is cool, but we’re human.”

He thinks of the people who pushed him along the way — people like Dennis and Johnson and Crawford. He thinks of his father, who received a kidney transplant last year and kept encouraging Robinson: “You’re up next.”

Robinson thinks of Callahan, whom he has saved as “Mother” on the contact list on his phone. She was with him on some of his sickest days. She watched over him throughout his NBA career.

And he also thinks of Jones-Smith, whom he calls “an angel sent from God.” She never blamed him for being ignorant of the process, for thinking that he was on a transplant waiting list when he wasn’t, for not knowing what to do.

“A lot of times, people don’t know because they don’t know, and Nate didn’t know,” she said. “If he would’ve known all these things at the beginning, he would’ve done them.”

She told him about the National Kidney Registry the first time they spoke. She eventually got him on the phone with executives there, hoping to help. Recently, she again explained the paired kidney exchange program — and how it could be a faster route — but he said he was happy with the one he was now on. She supports him and remains hopeful that he can raise awareness for others, the far less famous and fortunate who struggle to find the care they need.

“I think that the greatest work of Nate’s life,” Jones-Smith said, “lies ahead of him.”

On Saturday morning, Robinson was in his Seattle home, folding clothes, and it was a good day. He’d had a bad one Friday, throwing up constantly. He had tried to be stubborn and just take his nausea medicine, but he threw that up, too. So, at 5 a.m. on Saturday, Robinson went to the hospital, was seen at 7 a.m., received an IV and was discharged at 9 a.m.

When he goes out in public now, people tell him they’re praying for him, that they hope he finds a new kidney soon. He took his daughter to a Seattle Storm game last week. They sat courtside. A woman approached. “I’m 89 years old,” she told him. “I loved basketball. I love what you did for the Huskies. If I was younger, I’d give you my kidney in a heartbeat.” Robinson thanked her, fighting back tears.

“When people come up to me like that, it gives me hope,” he said. “It gives me power to keep going.”

He imagines his future, beyond this current struggle.

“Later on in life, when I get a kidney, I’m going to be looking back, like, ‘Damn, I really went through all this,'” he said. “That kidney I get, I’m going to cherish it. I’m going to treat it like a baby. I’m going to do everything I’m supposed to do.”

Robinson also looks back at what he did — and didn’t do.

“If I could go back to the beginning,” he said, “I wish I would’ve just gotten a kidney my rookie year, and I would’ve just sat out for however long I needed to sit out to get healthy and have been done with it.”

If he could, he’d go back three years ago, when he first began dialysis, and try to mentally prepare for how hard this was going to be.

For now, he tries to be grateful for every day, every breath.

“Every time I wake up and open my eyes, I pray,” Robinson said. “I go to sleep, and I pray. I’m just thankful, man. Say I don’t wake up tomorrow. I had a good life. I worked hard at what I did to get to where I was — and for people to know who I am. I worked damn hard for that … I had to grind to get out of the mud.

“And,” he said, “I’m going to grind to get out of the mud of this, too.”