In the spring of 1991, Erik Joal Meek was the most dominant high school basketball player in the San Diego Section. He was 6'10", 220 pounds, a left-handed center with soft hands and a 21-foot face-up jumper, and over 27 games for the San Pasqual Golden Eagles he had averaged 30.18 points a game — 815 total points, second only to Tony Clark's 30.3 in 1987-88 in San Diego prep history. He was a Parade All-American. He had committed to Duke the previous fall over a long list of national programs. He was going to walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium the next October and try to find a way onto a Krzyzewski roster that already had Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, Antonio Lang, and Cherokee Parks.
The Escondido kid had come up through the San Pasqual feeder system under head coach Tom Buck. By his senior year he was the section's most-watched big man. In the CIF San Diego Section D-II first round against University City, Meek dropped 41 points and 23 rebounds, shooting 15-for-22 from the field and 11-for-13 from the line. In the quarterfinals against Torrey Pines he had 26 and 14, his coach telling reporters afterward that "Meek will dominate anyone inside." In the D-II championship game against top-seeded El Camino, Meek scored 33 points and grabbed 17 rebounds — fourteen of those points and seven of those rebounds in the fourth quarter alone, as San Pasqual closed out a 73-70 win. Asked about the fourth-quarter takeover after the buzzer, Meek's answer was brief: he'd told himself it was time to do something. El Camino coach Ray Johnson, whose defense had spent the night forcing Meek away from the basket and into off-balance jump shots, was philosophical in defeat. He'd made the big-time shots, the coach said. A week later in the regional quarterfinals against Irvine Woodbridge, Meek scored 39 points, pulled nine rebounds, and blocked six shots. San Pasqual fell in the Southern California regional semifinal to a Tustin team that ended its season 28-4. But by then, Erik Meek was on every recruiting board in the country, and Mike Krzyzewski had his big man.
And then sometime in the weeks around graduation, Erik Meek nearly died on a California highway.
The details have been kept private over the decades, but the basic outline has surfaced in pieces. The Washington Post, writing in February 1994 about Duke's frontcourt for a Duke-UNC preview, mentioned almost in passing: "It's been enough to make Duke fans almost forget about 6-10 junior Erik Meek, who had 38 points and 21 rebounds in a playoff game as a high school senior, then had his career endangered just before graduation." A more detailed piece in the Greensboro News & Record, written for the 1994 Final Four, opened with: "Almost three years after a brush with death on the highway, Duke's Erik Meek plays basketball with abandon." A car crash. Career-endangering injuries. A delayed arrival at Duke that summer would have been a reasonable expectation. Instead, he showed up in Durham that fall — bruised, recovering, but ready to be a freshman center on the team that was about to win its second consecutive national championship.
He never talked about it much in interviews. He didn't have to. His teammates and his coaches saw the way he played. Antonio Lang, his Duke roommate in the 1993-94 season, told a reporter for the Greensboro News & Record that nobody got as fired-up as Erik — that a couple of days before a game his eyes would glaze over and he'd start saying he was so ready to play that he wanted to be on the floor right then. Lang's image for it, in the piece: "He's like a volcano that's about to erupt." Pete Gaudet, the assistant coach in charge of Duke's big men, framed it more practically in the same piece — nobody outworked Erik, Gaudet said, and the kid played without fear. Almost three years after a California paramedic had been working on him beside a wrecked car, Erik Meek was still playing basketball like a man who had been told, once, that he might never play it again.