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WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- When Tony Woods came off the court at the AAU tournament in Florida, the five-star recruit had an unsettling voicemail waiting for him.
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The voice -- future Wake Forest teammate Ty Walker -- was familiar. The tone was not.
Skip Prosser, the beloved coach who had convinced Woods to commit to play for the Demon Deacons, was dead of an apparent heart attack. For Woods, the news simply couldn't be true. Just one day earlier Prosser was right there, in Orlando to scout him and AAU teammate and fellow blue chip big man Al-Farouq Aminu.
"Coach Prosser's last night alive, he was at my and Farouq's basketball game in Orlando," Woods said Thursday. "Seeing his last night on earth, and then the next day he died that morning. ... He was just at my game."
Indeed, Prosser's name will forever be linked to those three high-profile players he spent the final days of his life recruiting, the future stars that Wake Forest counted on to return the program to the lofty status it enjoyed with Chris Paul. And as the anniversary of Prosser's untimely death approaches Saturday, the three members of his final recruiting class have arrived on campus with a determination to honor the coach they never got to play for.
"I still feel as though I'm still playing for him," Walker said. "He's in my heart always."
Walker has a tattoo on his left arm that says, "R.I.P. Coach Prosser." That way, he always remembers the man whose death has been impossible to forget in this basketball-crazed state, where big-name coaches like Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams are larger-than-life deities.
The subtle reminders of Prosser are everywhere for Dino Gaudio, the longtime right-hand man and eventual successor.
He is uneasy about this year's trip to the Florida AAU tournament. He knows he'll become flooded by the memories of his final moments with his best friend.
"I don't want to stay in the same hotel that Skip and I stayed in when we were down there," Gaudio said. "... Two days after Skip passed, (Florida coach Billy Donovan) called me (and said), 'I can't believe it, we were just standing there talking recruiting, basketball and that was the last time I saw him."'
Prosser spent his last days at two tournaments, watching Walker play in Las Vegas and Aminu and Woods in Orlando before heading back to Winston-Salem last July 26. He went for a noon jog on the campus track and returned to his office, where was found collapsed and unresponsive on his couch and was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The campus took his death hard, and so did the three young players who had given Prosser their word that they would play for him the following season.
Walker collapsed in tears upon hearing the news, then lost his appetite and barely slept while being "kind of depressed, in a slump" for a few days. Woods kept playing in his tournament, but had trouble keeping his mind on basketball, and Aminu found himself dealing with death for the first time.