Peter Jurkin sits in the middle of the East Tennessee State basketball locker room, surrounded by smiling teammates on either side. Having just beaten rival Chattanooga by 20 points to extend their winning streak to 15 games, the Buccaneers are understandably excited.
Coach Steve Forbes enters. “That’s a great win,” he says. “Peter, 16 points and 13 rebounds. I told you at halftime to go grab six more [rebounds], you got seven. Heck of a game.”
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The team erupts in cheers and applause. Jurkin looks at the floor.
Considering everything that he’s seen, nothing surprises the 25-year-old grad student these days. His 13 rebounds probably weren’t even a surprise to many who watch him play, considering he’s the only 7-footer in a Southern Conference full of 6-foot-7 wings posing as big men. He’s a starter on the league’s best team and will be a big factor in determining whether the Buccaneers can secure their second straight NCAA Tournament appearance. But to know how much that locker-room moment and this season mean to him, you first have to understand how much he’s been through.
Jurkin’s story begins nearly 7,500 miles away from Johnson City, Tenn., in Juba, the capital city of war-torn South Sudan. The son of a tribal chief and a sibling to 16 brothers and eight sisters, he spent his summers working on the family dairy farm. His chores included letting the goats out to graze and removing horse manure, but Jurkin had bigger plans — earning an engineering degree, building a home for his mother and playing soccer in the Olympics.
Five-inch growth spurts when he was 12 and 13 changed everything. Jurkin started experimenting with basketball at a nearby court, and one day he came across a newspaper article about Luol Deng, a countryman and now a 13-year NBA veteran. The story mentioned Deng’s signing a multi-million dollar rookie contract with the Chicago Bulls. “I was like, Wow, that’s a lot of money,” Jurkin says, bulging his eyes for effect.
Jurkin couldn’t imagine anything beyond life a life in South Sudan, but then everything changed. His mother died in late 2005 when he was 13. “I felt lost, and I feel like there’s no use for me there,” he says, “so I want to go somewhere and start new.” Despite his father’s protests that he was too young, Jurkin left for the United States. With the help of the A-HOPE Foundation (African Hoop Opportunities Providing an Education) in acquiring a student visa and arranging travel, he was put on a plane alongside three other tall South Sudanese boys. The culture shock set in immediately.
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“We watched action movies, all like New York high buildings and stuff,” he says. “That was my idea of what America was.” He stepped off the plane in Detroit wearing a white T-shirt and khaki pants, only to be greeted by freezing temperatures and knee-high snow. “We don’t have winter,” he says, “so I never had a coat.”
Mark Adams, the foundation’s president and coach of the Indiana Elite AAU program, made arrangements for Jurkin and the others, including a prospect from Colombia named Hanner Mosquera-Parea, to take English-language classes and begin basketball workouts. “I didn’t speak any English, I didn’t know what to say. They’d take us to McDonald’s and we’d just point at the pictures,” Jurkin says. “A lot of times I don’t sleep, because I miss my family.”
Basketball, he knew, would be his ticket to a college education, but even there he struggled. He’d had little training and could hardly run up and down the floor without gasping for air, and at well under 200 pounds he was easily pushed around. Nonetheless, the group was invited to attend elite camps that summer at Indiana and Tennessee. A then Volunteers assistant coach remembers the day well.
“They were eighth-graders, which was crazy because they were all 6-10,” Forbes says. “[Jurkin] was all arms and legs.”
At the end of the summer of 2006, Jurkin was sent to United Faith Christian Academy, a school in Charlotte that had been selected for him by A-HOPE. That’s where he caught the attention of an assistant coach at the school who just so happened to be a local legend: Muggsy Bogues. It was an odd pairing — Bogues, the shortest player in NBA history at 5-foot-3 and the 7-foot Jurkin. They began with individual workouts every morning at 6. It wasn’t long before the two built a special bond.
“He told me he played in the NBA for 14 years, and I was like, No, I don’t believe it; he’s too short,” Jurkin says. “They showed me video of him, and I was like, No way. Everything changed because I was like, Wow, he was a really, really good player.”
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“I took him under my wing and taught him the game of basketball,” Bogues says. He trained Jurkin using techniques he had picked up from NBA big men such as Alonzo Mourning and Tim Duncan, as well as guard skills from his own arsenal. Off the court Bogues became a father figure, and Jurkin soon moved in with him. “My wife and I gave him a sense of stability in terms of knowing someone was always going to be here for him,” Bogues says.
As a sophomore at United Faith, Jurkin flourished. He was joined that season by a familiar face, Mosquera-Parea, and the pair played together as United Faith went 23-5 and won a state championship. Both became highly touted recruits, and after the season Jurkin committed to play for Tom Crean at Indiana. Parea followed suit in the fall, and the Hoosiers’ 2012 recruiting class was widely considered to be among the best in the country.
Heading into his freshman season at Indiana, Jurkin was playing the best basketball of his life. He was invited to the 2012 Jordan Brand Classic as one of the top high school players in the country. He was on top of the world. That’s when he came tumbling down.
The NCAA launched an investigation into Adams, the A-Hope founder, and the relationship between his AAU program and Indiana basketball; it alleged that Adams had provided $9,000 worth of impermissible benefits to Parea and another $6,000 to Jurkin. “We didn’t get paid to go there, nobody told us like, Hey, if you do this, no,” Jurkin says. “The reason I committed is I was very familiar with Indiana. In the summer we played with Indiana guys, and it felt like I could really play there.”
Still, the freshmen were asked to repay a portion of the money to charity, and they were suspended for the first nine games of the 2012-13 season. During their suspensions, Jurkin and Parea were asked to step up their workout regimen, often staying for an hour after practice to go through high-intensity drills. Tasked with adding weight, Jurkin ballooned to 250 pounds, but the extra heft put pressure on his legs and he began experiencing pain in his right knee. To compensate, he began shifting more weight to his left leg, until one day in practice he suffered a hairline fracture in his left tibia after an awkward fall.
Jurkin wasn’t concerned about the injury. During high school he had suffered one just like it to his right tibia, and it had healed after a few months of rest. After four weeks, he began easing back into basketball activity. It was too soon. Within a month, he refractured his shin more severely.
Then the bottom fell out. In 2013, Jurkin’s father called to tell his son he was gravely ill. “I told my coach that,” Jurkin says, “and the next day he got me a ticket to visit my dad, so that’s the thing I won’t forget about Coach [Crean] because he did that for me.”
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Jurkin returned to South Sudan in time to see his father before he died. He was just 20 and now parentless.
Jurkin rushed home to see his father before he died in 2013. (photo courtesy of Peter Jurkin)Back in Bloomington, he never regained full strength in his legs, and in his first two seasons a frustrated Jurkin appeared in just 11 games for a total of 18 minutes. Crean approached Jurkin after his sophomore season to ask if he would consider transitioning to a manager’s role for the following year.
“That really made me upset,” he says. “You recruited me here to play, not to be a manager. That pushed me more that I need to leave and go somewhere that somebody can help me get better so I can play.”
Getting better meant having surgery, a development that drove away many potential suitors for the newly available 7-footer. Power conference schools wouldn’t guarantee playing time, and Division II programs couldn’t offer competition against the nation’s top teams. Jurkin decided to attend East Tennessee State, and soon after he had a rod inserted to reinforce his tibia. The year off required by the transfer also allowed the leg to heal, and by the time he was eligible for his junior season in 2015-16, he was pain-free.
Except nothing for Jurkin is ever that simple. ETSU fired coach Murry Bartow in the spring of 2015. The good news for Jurkin was that the school hired a familiar face in Forbes, the man who had seen him play all those years earlier. Forbes set about retooling the roster. It included the addition of another high-major transfer: Hanner Mosquera-Parea.
“They can say they recruited him, but they didn’t,” Jurkin says. “I called [Mosquera-Parea] and said, ‘Hey, come here and we can do the same thing we did in high school.’”
Though they were on the same campus, they never got the chance. While Parea sat out his transfer season, Jurkin readjusted to college basketball after three years away by coming off the bench to lead the team in blocked shots and pitch in 5.3 points and 3.1 rebounds. The following year, in what Jurkin assumed would be his final season, he sat while Parea played.
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“The first game passed by, I didn’t play. Second passed by, didn’t play. Third went by, didn’t play,” Jurkin says. “I just started thinking like they really don’t need me.” The coaching staff had elected to start Parea next to senior Tevin Glass, and the pair’s versatility and athleticism allowed ETSU to thrive defensively. As the Buccaneers kept winning, Jurkin was relegated to the familiar role of spectator. “I did feel like the coaches don’t see,” he says. “They don’t see what they have, even though you try hard in practice.”
Forbes insists he didn’t doubt Jurkin’s ability but simply was satisfied with the successful pairing of Parea and Glass. “I felt terrible about it,” Forbes says, “but at the end of the day I felt like I had to do what was best for our team. I could see the pain of not playing and not being a part of something that was special.”
Indeed, Jurkin managed just 6.5 minutes per game, but the Buccaneers posted a 27-8 record, won the Southern Conference and made their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2010. He was honored at senior night but never got on the court. With ETSU leading comfortably during a conference tournament semifinal win over Samford, a chant of “We Want Pe-ter!” broke out among the always pro-Jurkin crowd. He never left the bench.
“They think it was a joke, but for me it was serious,” says Jurkin. “I want to be a part of it. I didn’t feel like I was a part of anything. The same thing in Indiana; they won a Big Ten championship. Exactly the same. I’m not part of it.”
After the season, Forbes and the athletic department petitioned the NCAA for a sixth year of eligibility for Jurkin. It was a months-long process with no promise for a happy ending. But with all that he has endured, Jurkin has long since learned there is more to life than basketball. He graduated with a degree in sports management — he dreams of helping youngsters from South Sudan navigate their way to the United States for the chance of a better life — and he got married, allowing him to apply for a green card to remain in the United States when his student visa expired.
Jurkin was back in Charlotte last summer, working out with Bogues and other trainers to strengthen his legs and improve his mobility, when Forbes called. He had been granted the sixth year.
“I called him, and I said, ‘Listen, let’s let bygones be bygones. Let’s put the past in the rearview mirror and move forward and have a great senior year,'” Forbes recalls. “What I did tell him was, you’re going to play. He’s earned it, but he’s playing and I see a smile on his face now that wasn’t on his face last year.”
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Jurkin has started 28 of 29 games, and his improvement in moving his feet and defending ball screens are big reasons why the Buccaneers are ranked in the top 40 in the country in Ken Pomeroy’s defensive efficiency.
Jurkin has proven himself against top competition. When the team traveled to Rupp Arena in November to take on Kentucky, he posted 17 points and seven rebounds. At the Cintas Center against Xavier in December, it was 11 and eight with five blocked shots. “I tell him all the time, nobody can guard him,” says Desonta Bradford, the Bucs’ leading scorer.
That includes Chattanooga. In 33 minutes against the Mocs, Jurkin swished a 3-pointer on ETSU’s first possession, ignited the crowd with a second-half dunk and a raise-the-roof hands gesture and finished with a career-high 13 rebounds. At 23-6 and 14-2 in league play, the Buccaneers are a heavy favorite to win the SoCon and return to the NCAA Tournament. Jurkin is contributing 7.8 points and 4.9 rebounds per game and shooting 57 percent from the field and 82 percent from the line.
“This is the time right here, and all my focus is I’m not trying to waste this time,” Jurkin says. “I’m trying to enjoy every moment of it.”
This is the moment, after all, he’s been waited a lifetime for — not just to be on a winning team, but to be a part of it.
(Top photo courtesy of East Tennessee State University)
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