Doyel: Another hard day in brutal college career for IUPUI star Camron Justice

Gregg Doyel
IndyStar

INDIANAPOLIS – The emotion you don’t see coming — that’s the one that hits hardest, isn’t it? Take it from Raymond Justice. He didn’t see this one coming.

Not Saturday at the Indiana Farmers Coliseum, where he’d driven five hours from eastern Kentucky to watch his son, IUPUI junior guard Camron Justice — the Jaguars' best player since George Hill — make another return from another injury in a college career I’m calling brutal, a career that just hasn’t gone the way anyone would have wanted, including this game Saturday against Illinois-Chicago. Camron Justice, the country’s No. 47 scorer at 19.9 points per game, scored a season-low six points and missed the last of his seven 3-pointers in the final seconds of this 76-75 loss.

Justice was playing for the first time since suffering a broken nose last week against Wright State, when he saw a loose ball and dived for it, banging into the hip of an opposing player and splattering his nose all over his face.

► Don't miss any of Gregg's columns. Get an IndyStar digital subscription.

IUPUI guard Camron Justice in Saturday's game against UIC.

For this game, for the rest of the season I’m afraid, Justice has to wear a protective mask that had him in fits in the second half. He was clawing at it during timeouts, taking it off and putting it on, adjusting it, fiddling with it, hating it.

In the huddle before that 3-pointer with seven seconds left, Justice had pulled off the mask in disgust and handed it to IUPUI coach Jason Gardner. Nothing doing. Gardner, the 1999 IndyStar Mr. Basketball winner from North Central, shook his head and handed it right back.

Up in the crowd, Raymond Justice saw it.

“No,” he was yelling, aware he was yelling to himself, that his son couldn’t hear him. “Put that thing back on!”

Camron put it on, missed the shot and then ran the final play as called: A pass inside to 7-1 Ahmed Ismail, whose shot rolled off the rim at the horn. The Jaguars lost after rallying from an 18-point deficit in the final 13 minutes to take a brief 75-74 lead.

The game, the final score, this whole day would have been different if Justice had shot like he normally does. And he normally shoots like one of the best players in the Horizon League, ranking among conference leaders from the floor (44.8 percent), foul line (85.3 percent) and 3-point arc (2.8 makes per game, at a 37.6 percent clip). But not Saturday, when he was 2-for-10 from the field, 0-for-7 on 3s and 2-for-3 on free throws.

This game, this bizarrely bad outing in a season where Justice had scored in double figures in 23 consecutive games, blindsided everyone in the building — but it isn’t why the emotions blindsided Raymond Justice. Nah, he coached 34 years himself, coached his son in eighth grade and was an assistant throughout his high school career, when Camron finished third in Kentucky high school history with 3,588 points and was named Kentucky’s Mr. Basketball in 2015. Raymond Justice can handle losing. He can handle a bad game by his boy.

IUPUI guard Camron Justice in Saturday's game against UIC.

What he couldn’t handle, he was surprised to find out as we spoke afterward, was another injury to his son — whose college career, as I’ve said, has been brutal. Go back to the beginning, when Camron committed to Tennessee but then saw coach Cuonzo Martin leave the Volunteers.

Camron went to Vanderbilt instead, to play for Kevin Stallings, but Stallings left for Pittsburgh after Justice’s freshman season. Bryce Drew arrived in Nashville the same week that Justice underwent a lengthy surgery on his midsection, a surgery that addressed two injuries that had kneecapped his freshman season (3.4 ppg): a torn groin, and a sports hernia. Camron returned from the surgery but was diminished, averaging 1.7 ppg and shooting 25 percent in seven games in 2016-17 before transferring to IUPUI.

More:How Camron Justice went from nearly giving up basketball to IUPUI's top scorer

“Nobody knows how bad that surgery was,” his father is telling me after the game. Raymond Justice and I are standing in a coliseum that is empty other than the Justice cheering section lingering on the court to visit Camron: his parents, Raymond and Bethany; his younger brother, Caleb; and his girlfriend, Kaylee.

Raymond is about to show me how bad that surgery was.

“He was black and bruised from here,” Raymond says, chopping his hands twice — across his belly, and then just above his knees — “to here. He had 80 stitches. He couldn’t do anything for six months. I’m just so …”

Raymond stops. He needs a second, because the emotions are hitting him now, and he’s as stunned as …

Sorry. Another pause.

IUPUI guard Camron Justice in Saturday's game against UIC.

Look, let’s give Raymond a second and remember that, until the broken nose, Camron Justice had it rolling: Double figures in 23 consecutive games, the third-longest streak in IUPUI history, within range of George Hill’s record of 29. In the previous four games Justice had averaged 22.8 ppg on 51.4-percent shooting from 3-point range (18-for-35). It didn’t work out at Vanderbilt because of those injuries and that coaching change, but Justice is an elite talent, a super shooter with vision and passing ability and the chops to make the following two moves on Saturday:

Early in the first half: The 6-3 Justice dribbles into the lane and is cut off by 6-8 UIC wing Michael Diggins. Justice stops, pauses, pivots away from the rim and then drives his shoulder back into Diggins, creating the 6 inches of space he needs to loft a 5-footer into the basket.

Doyel:Blackford phenom Luke Brown leads state in scoring, lifts community

Moments later: Justice shoots a 3-pointer and is fouled, landing in a heap in front of the UIC bench. A few feet away, UIC coach Steve McClain — the manic former IU assistant under Tom Crean — is screaming in this mostly empty, utterly quiet arena: “He flopped! He flopped! He flopped!” Justice hears him, looks over and sneers.

He has game, this kid, and moxie. But on Saturday he had that damn mask, and …

“I think he might have been overthinking it, and he could be in a little pain as well,” Gardner said. “He shot the ball well this week, but he missed his first couple of shots and I think he probably overthought it a little bit.”

Justice was agreeing: “I have to get used to (the mask), not make it bigger than it is.”

He plans to do that by wearing it every time he goes into the gym from here on out, even if it’s just to get up some jumpers on his own, which he does all the time. For now, after the game, he’s walking back onto the court to see his parents, his brother, his girlfriend. Camron is taking pictures with family as I talk with his father, and now, yes now, Raymond Justice is ready to finish our discussion.

“I’m sorry,” Raymond says. “I thought this would have happened the first time I came here."

He’s referring to the Jaguars’ 71-65 victory Nov. 10 against Eastern Illinois, when Camron scored 21 points after a nearly 700-day layoff between his final game at Vanderbilt and IUPUI’s 2018-19 season-opener four days earlier at Xavier.

“But, noooo,” Raymond says, teasing himself. “I managed just fine then.”

He’s not managing so fine now, pausing one more time as the emotions grab him, but he finishes. He needs to say what he’d been trying to say the first time it happened:

“I’m just so proud of him,” Raymond Justice says of his boy, Camron.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.