Josh Turek

Well, first, born with my disability, born with a condition called spina bifida due to my father's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

So I had my first surgery at one day old.

I had 21 surgeries before I was 12, almost all of which took place at Shriners Hospital in Minnesota, because it's the only way that my family could afford it.

Yeah, and wheelchair basketball is one of the things that honestly saved me.

As a kid, I was bullied really, really badly and actually ended up leaving public school briefly because of how badly I was bullied.

And wheelchair basketball really gave me something to fight for and fell in love with it.

Got a scholarship to play at Southwest Minnesota State University, scored over 4,000 career points there.

So just barely, barely beat out- Casual flex there with the 4,000 points.

Something I'm really proud of.

And then I had an amazing opportunity of something I didn't even know existed, which was to play professional wheelchair basketball.

It doesn't exist here in the States.

And I had the amazing opportunity to play and live in places like Spain and Italy and France and Australia.

By the time I was done between club and country, got to live in every continent on, or at least visit every continent, play basketball in every continent on earth besides Antarctica.

And then the highlight of my career without a doubt was four Paralympic games, two gold medals.

And you were right.

I made my very first Paralympic team

straight out of college.

And that was 2004.

And as you know, as a basketball nation, if you don't win, it's basically like gold or failure.

And we got knocked out in the quarterfinals.