Wake Forest Basketball Coach Steve Forbes: ‘Resilience, Toughness. Nobody Exemplifies That More Than My Wife’

He was half a world away when Forbes got shocking news from his daughter: "Mom's had a stroke." Now he is coaching her through the fight of their lives.

HE THOUGHT IT was a butt dial.

On the night of August 8, Steve Forbes was riding a minibus at Camp Arifjan, the U.S. Army installation in Kuwait, when he felt his cellphone vibrate. Forbes, the men’s basketball coach at Wake Forest, was there for Operation Hardwood, a program that sends a group of former and current college coaches to military bases so they can coach servicemen and women through a tournament and give them a little taste of home. Forbes and his fellow coaches were on their way to a late dinner. When he pulled his phone from his pocket, he saw that it was his daughter, Liz, calling from home. Forbes figured it was a mistake and let it go to voicemail.

A few minutes later, Liz sent a text message saying they needed to speak. Steve stepped off the bus and called her back. Liz was more than 7,000 miles and nine time zones away, but the message came through all too clear.

“I think Mom had a stroke.”

Forbes was shocked. A stroke? How?

Johnetta, his wife of 36 years, was 58 and totally healthy. She ate right, exercised frequently, never had problems with blood pressure or cholesterol or anything that could have triggered something like this. How in the world could she have had a stroke? 

Liz filled her dad in on what little she knew. Johnetta was staying at the family’s condominium in Destin, Florida, along with their three adult children. Johnetta woke up saying she didn’t feel well, and that the left side of her body felt heavy. The hospital in Destin was unable to make a diagnosis, so Johnetta was being transported an hour away to another hospital in Pensacola.

Steve returned to his room on the base and stayed on the phone until about 4 a.m. local time. He went to sleep not knowing what had happened. While he was eating breakfast later that morning, Liz called with the update he’d been dreading; the doctors in Pensacola confirmed that Johnetta had indeed had a stroke. Steve wasn’t sure how bad the damage was or what would happen next. He just knew he had to get home.

It took the entire day for military officials to arrange the logistics of his departure. Finally, around 10 p.m., Forbes was escorted to the airport in Kuwait City, where he boarded a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. After a four-hour layover, he connected to Washington, D.C., made his way through the interminable customs line at Dulles Airport, and then took a car to a nearby airport where a private plane was waiting. By the time Forbes arrived in his wife’s hospital room in Pensacola, it was late Thursday night, nearly 70 hours after she first fell ill.

The kids had spared their dad the worst details, so Steve was unprepared for the sight that awaited him. Johnetta lay in her bed, unconscious, connected to a bevy of beeping machines. The left side of her face was drooping so badly that Steve could not see her teeth on that side of her mouth. He kissed her and spoke to her, but still she slept. Fifteen minutes later, she opened her eyes and tried to communicate. He had a hard time understanding, but at least she knew he was there.

The doctors were reluctant to proffer false hope. There was simply no way to know in this early stage the extent of the damage. The ensuing hours offered small but promising signs. A twitching thumb. Wiggled toes. Johnetta slept a lot, which is common in stroke victims, but as the hours passed she grew increasingly alert. On Friday, she woke up from a dream and said to Steve, “Tell me the truth. Am I paralyzed?” He told her she wasn’t. She went back to sleep.

Steve did his best to maintain his composure, but on Saturday, as he started to apologize to Johnetta for not being there when the stroke hit, he fell to pieces. “I cried and cried and cried,” Forbes, 58, says. “Just a few days earlier, I gave her a kiss and walked down the driveway. My kids had to make all these life-changing decisions without me. As a husband and a father, it broke my heart.”

In the days that followed, a parade of nurses and doctors came into Johnetta’s room and asked her to perform various functions. They usually walked away encouraged. The staff had to tape her left eyelid shut so the eye wouldn’t get irritated. Johnetta passed a barium swallowing test, which was important because it meant she didn’t have to start using a feeding tube. The kids brought her a small chocolate Frosty from Wendy’s. It hit the spot.

As the family pivoted to game planning for the future, the doctors warned that it could take three years for Johnetta to recover fully. Steve about fell out of his chair. “I was like, what? Three years? That blew me away,” he says. He felt an acute urgency to get started. “The coach kicked in at that point,” he says. “We’re going into attack mode now.”

After much research and discussion, Steve was able to arrange for Johnetta to be admitted to the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, one of the nation’s foremost hospitals for neurological rehabilitation. The road ahead was long and uncertain, but she wouldn’t be traveling alone. “I’m built for this,” Steve told her. “You’ve been taking care of me for over 30 years. Now it’s my turn.”

On Aug. 24, two weeks and two days after her ordeal began, Johnetta and Steve arrived at the Shepherd Center. When the ambulance pulled up, Johnetta’s gurney was rolled out of the vehicle, through the front doors, and into her new room. There was no way to predict how long she’d be staying, but she made a promise to everyone, herself most of all: She may have entered that place lying down, but she was going to leave standing up.

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MOST OF THE TIME when Johnetta visited the condo in Destin, she went alone. Over the summer, however, her kids had said they wanted to get together one more time before Johnathan, the youngest of the three, went back to the University of Tennessee to begin his sophomore year.

That decision saved her life.

It started in the middle of the night. Johnetta was awakened by what she thought were noises and lights. She wasn’t sure where they were coming from, but they seemed awfully loud and bright. It also occurred to her that the left side of her body felt heavy. That was odd, but she wasn’t too alarmed. She went back to sleep.

When she awoke the next morning, she felt nauseous. The heaviness persisted. Her kids got suspicious when she turned down breakfast and coffee. When Liz, 34, and Chris, 28, headed for the gym, Johnetta said she was going back to bed. Johnathan, stubborn like his mom, wasn’t having it. He got in touch with a friend’s father who is an orthopedic surgeon and put his mother on the phone. The doctor didn’t quite know what to make of her symptoms, but he suggested she go to a local hospital to get checked out.

Chris and Liz returned immediately, and the four of them drove to the emergency room. Johnetta walked in under her own power, but soon afterward she started feeling violently sick. The last thing she remembers is vomiting in the bathroom.

She retched for hours. The ER doctors suspected a stroke, but they didn’t have the resources to diagnose her. They arranged for an ambulance to take her to Pensacola as Liz reached her dad in Kuwait. The three kids went back to the condo to grab some clothes and then drove to Pensacola.

“That car ride was just hell,” Chris says.

The technicians in Pensacola performed CT scans, which revealed multiple strokes. They were caused by fibromuscular dysplasia in one of the major arteries in her neck. This condition, which she probably had since childhood, narrows the artery, which can lead to a buildup of plaque. As sometimes happens with dysplasia, Johnetta’s artery tore, allowing the plaque to get loose and cut off blood supply to part of her brain. Johnetta’s neurologist suspected that she had unwittingly suffered multiple small strokes, or TIA’s, following a vertigo episode in March. She suffered a far more significant stroke in her Destin condo, and then two more shortly after arriving in Pensacola.

The kids were in a state of shock as they kept vigil by Johnetta’s bedside and waited for their father to arrive. “She’s the backbone of the entire Forbes family,” Chris says. “Seeing her in that kind of state was just mind-blowing.”

On Wednesday night, Johnetta opened her eyes and saw Chris sitting across from her. “Did you take care of the mail?” she asked.

“The what?” he replied.

“The mail. Did you make sure it’s not being delivered?”

For the first time since everything started, Chris smiled. “That’s the first thing she was worried about — the freaking mail,” he says. “It helped clear the room a little bit. It kind of showed, OK, Mom’s still in there.”

“As coaches, we talk about resilience, toughness, attention to detail. Nobody exemplifies that more than my wife. Every day she’s trying to get a little bit better, moving her fingers and her arm, trying to get up and stand. That, to me, is toughness. It’s not guarding somebody for a possession and getting a rebound. That ain’t toughness. That’s just basketball.”

She was in much better shape two weeks later when she reached the Shepherd Center. The staff wasted no time getting started. On the morning after she was admitted, Johnetta was pulled out of bed, placed into a wheelchair, rolled into a hallway, and lifted onto her feet. A male staffer supported her from behind while a female therapist helped her move her legs. From that day forward, Johnetta awoke at 7:30 each morning and grinded until dinnertime, relearning basic motor skills such as eating, talking and walking. She did not experience much pain, but the efforts were exhausting.

When the kids visited that first weekend in Atlanta, they couldn’t believe how much progress she had already made. Johnetta’s extensive speech therapy had strengthened the muscles in her face, which allowed the droopiness on the left side to recede. She no longer needed her eyelid to be taped. When a nurse came in to ask how Johnetta was doing, she replied, “I’m fine now, because I know my kids aren’t worried about me anymore.” Then she wept.

Each time Johnettta took a small step, her therapists forced her to attempt a giant leap. “A physical therapist is like a coach,” she says. “They see things in their patients that they don’t see in themselves.” When she got discouraged, Steve and the kids would show her photos from weeks prior to illustrate how far she had come. Johnetta graduated from her wheelchair to a walker, and then to a cane. One day she was able to walk 80 feet by herself. “Great!” her therapist said. “Tomorrow we’ll do 100.”

Finally, on Sept. 22, the big day arrived. Johnetta hugged the staff, settled into her wheelchair, and was pushed through the front door. Then she stood up and took hold of her cane. She didn’t set any speed records that day, but she walked to the car, just like she’d promised. Steve guided her gently into the passenger seat, and they headed for home.

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IT WAS JARRING, to say the least, for Johnetta to go from being in a rehab center, where she was attended to around the clock by trained therapists and nurses, to being at home, where she was attended to by a college basketball coach. “It was like bringing home a newborn child,” Steve says.

At first, the wheelchair was Johnetta’s only way of moving around. If she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, Steve had to rise out of bed, lift her into the chair, wheel her into the bathroom, lift her out, help her relieve herself, put her back in the chair, wheel her to bed, lift her out, and then try to go back to sleep. Chris, who works on Steve’s coaching staff as video coordinator, moved into the house with his fiancée, Annie, and alternated night shifts with his dad. For Johnetta, who had built up her independence during three decades as a coach’s wife and full-time school teacher, it was one of the most dispiriting aspects of her new life. “No one wants to go to the bathroom with people in there,” she says. “That’s supposed to be a private room.”

She wore a brace during the day to prevent her left knee from hyperextending. She wore a boot at night to keep her left foot flexed. Steve had to help her in and out of her compression socks, which were extremely tight. “I’m going to have arthritis in my thumbs till I die,” he says.

With the season approaching, and Steve and Chris needing to spend more time at Wake Forest, nurses from a local health care facility provided in-home care several days per week. As a self-described “relationship guy,” Steve wanted to be with his players as much as possible. But everyone in the program knew and loved Johnetta — her chocolate chip cookies, which she baked by the hundreds, were always a big hit — so they understood why he wasn’t around as much.

“We knew we had to band together,” assistant coach BJ McKie says. “Coach has always operated on a next-man-up mentality. It was our job to keep the train moving so he could stay focused on what he needed to do.”

Most every day, Steve or Chris drove Johnetta to the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, where she went through some combination of physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. Her therapists gave her lots of homework, which she diligently completed. By mid-October, Johnetta was lifting herself in and out of her wheelchair and pushing herself around the house. That meant she could go to the bathroom by herself. She also gradually regained full motion in her left hand, which she demonstrated by flipping her husband the bird while wearing a triumphant grin.

One by one, Johnetta shed all those contraptions. The cast for her foot? Gone. Compression socks? Buh-bye. As she graduated from each item, it found its way to a basement shelf, which the family calls “The Shrine.” The week before Christmas, Steve woke up and detected the scent of coffee. It was the first time since the strokes that Johnetta had made it herself, just like she used to. Steve straggled out of bed and joined her for a cup. It was another small step that felt like a giant leap.

“I’m just trying to get my boring life back,” Johnetta says. “When you’re sitting in a chair and you want that book across the room but you can’t get it, and then one day you can, it’s a huge difference.”

To be sure, Johnetta’s life is far from boring these days. But it’s better. She no longer needs home health care and can spend hours at a time alone, doing therapy and completing chores. She has gone to a couple of Steve’s games, but even though she watched from a suite, it was uncomfortable because the strokes permanently cost her the hearing in her right ear. She has also developed tinnitus, which causes her to hear a constant white noise in that ear. She prefers to watch the games on TV.

Her recovery is a full-time job. She checks her blood pressure and takes medications daily. She breathes into an expiratory muscle trainer, which swimmers and singers use to fortify their lungs. She spends extended periods at what she calls her “preschool table,” working with tools designed to strengthen the fine motor skills of her left hand. She rides a recumbent bike almost every day. Her legs have gotten strong enough that she can walk without the aid of a cane for about five minutes at a time, four or five times a day. When she walks, she’s constantly thinking, Squeeze your ass, lift your foot.

Johnetta’s doctors warned her that while she would make big gains during the first few months, the pace of progress would slow considerably from there. She gets discouraged sometimes, but then she snaps back into attack mode. “As coaches, we talk about resilience, toughness, attention to detail. Nobody exemplifies that more than my wife,” Steve says. “Every day she’s trying to get a little bit better, moving her fingers and her arm, trying to get up and stand. That, to me, is toughness. It’s not guarding somebody for a possession and getting a rebound. That ain’t toughness. That’s just basketball.”

Taking care of Johnetta occupies much of Steve’s time and headspace, but he’s still able to devote himself to his job. He has a good team, too. The Demon Deacons are in fifth place in the ACC with a 5-3 record (13-6 overall). They are ranked 46th in the NET, which puts them in position to play in the NCAA tournament for the first time since Forbes took the program over in 2020, and just the second time since 2010.

Steve can’t help but be changed by the ordeal. “It’s probably helped me as a coach in a lot of ways,” he says. “I really cherish those moments in the gym. I don’t fly off the handle as much as I have in the past. For a couple of hours, I have that sanctuary of doing what I love to do around a great group of guys.”

On January 19, Johnetta and Steve visited her neurologist, who showed them images from a follow-up CT scan that was taken of her brain in late December. The doctor was pleased with her progress, but he again cautioned that progress would be slow. He also showed her for the first time the damage the strokes caused in her brain. “It was kind of surreal to see that,” she says. “The brain is a very interesting thing, as we are finding out.”

Over the next two months, a small army of relatives will cycle through the house to help Steve and Johnetta get through the basketball season. Aside from her rehab, much of her spring and summer will be spent preparing for Chris and Annie’s wedding in August. Johnetta had long ago picked out her dress, a sparkly brown number that stretches to her ankles and belts at the waist. She would love to walk down the aisle and dance with the groom, but she has learned the hard way that not everything can be promised. She’s playing the long game here, and as a coach’s wife she’s learned a fundamental truth about competing. If you want to win, you have to stay on the attack