Ask Jrue Holiday about his favorite highlight of this breakout season, and the New Orleans guard won’t even mention a bouncing ball.
He’s too busy remembering all those shared glances with his bouncing baby girl, Jrue Taylor, the 19-month-old he once feared he might never meet.
“She loves seeing me at certain instances in the game – if there’s a timeout, or there’s a break – and I can look up to her and wave at her and blow a kiss,” Holiday, whose Pelicans tip off against the defending champion Golden State Warriors in a second-round series starting Saturday at Oracle Arena, told USA TODAY Sports this week. “I think there’s joy in just knowing that my family’s OK. Being able to know that my home life is fine, I feel like it reflects the way that I play. (It’s) just knowing that my daughter gets to watch me play and she gets to come to the games. I can’t even describe how much joy that brings me.”
To understand why the 27-year-old Holiday’s soul is good again, you have to know the fear that he faced with his wife, Lauren, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and FIFA World Cup champion soccer player who retired from the U.S. women’s national team in July 2015 with dreams of raising their family.
In the summer of 2016, Holiday was preparing for his return to Pelicans training camp. He had come in hobbling in 2014, when a right tibia surgery required a six-month rehabilitation leading into camp and his start was slow as a result. He entered the 2015 camp in similar fashion; complications from the surgery had required a second procedure in which a screw was removed from his leg.
But this time, he never made it to camp, and his reasons for being away from the team were much more serious.
Not long after Lauren decided to retire from the U.S. women’s national soccer team in order to raise their family, doctors discovered the source of head pain she’d been feeling during pregnancy: There was a benign brain tumor behind her right eye. Mother and child were at risk, and Jrue – who met Lauren during his freshman year at UCLA when she was a junior – wasn’t about to head back to work.
Surgery would be required at Duke University, and the urgency meant they couldn’t wait for Jrue Taylor to come out on her own time. Labor would be induced early, and the plan called for Jrue, Lauren and their new daughter to recover in North Carolina while the Pelicans played on.
“He came to us and said, ‘You know, with Lauren being ill, I have to talk to the Pelicans and tell them that I’m going to be with my wife,” Jrue’s mother, Toya, told Pelicans.com last year. “And if they don’t want me to do that, I probably won’t play basketball again. …We (Toya and Jrue’s father, Shawn) were both proud of him, (and said), ‘Hey, we’re standing behind you. It’s not a big deal. You can go back to school. We’re good with that.’ I was really proud of him, because he could have ran away from that.”
Added Holiday in that same video, “As much as I love basketball, I love my family a hundred times more.”
The Pelicans not only supported the Holidays but also gave him their blessing to miss all of camp, preseason and the first 12 regular-season games. They stopped by to check on the family, too, with general manager Dell Demps and coach Alvin Gentry visiting in North Carolina during the recovery. The owners of the team – the late Tom Benson and his wife, Gayle – agreed to give Jrue all the time he needed.
“I have never quite known suffering like I experienced the last 6 months,” Lauren, now fully recovered, wrote on a social media photo of Jrue and Jrue Taylor after she was born. “I can remember countless nights repeating ‘there may be pain in the night but joy comes in the morning.’ I remember half believing it and half still in disbelief that this was my life. I memorized scripture and some days my faith felt unshakable and others I was scared to death.”
Before long, basketball began to matter to Jrue again because, well, his family was safe. This season resulted in career highs in scoring (19.0 points), shooting (49% from the field) and rebounding (4.5).
Still, the humble Holiday hasn’t lost any of the big-picture perspective he gleaned from that terrifying time. Ask him about his tremendous play in the first-round sweep against Portland when he averaged 27.8 points and 6.5 assists per game, and he makes a self-effacing joke.
“I have people in my circle who tell me all the time how good they think I am, which I’m just going to say is my wife,” Holiday, who signed a five-year, $125 million deal last summer, said with a laugh. “She tells me all the time, ‘Good game, bad game,’ or how good she thinks I am. Obviously I value her opinion, because she’s probably the most successful athlete in my family.