Former NBA player wants to slam-dunk stuttering

Mar. 4—Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was quite calm in his own skin Friday afternoon as he ambled to the front of a classroom in WVU's Applied Human Sciences Building.

Perched in the seats, in that classroom in that building on the Evansdale campus, were students planning on careers as speech therapists and other communication professionals.

They're going to be working one-on-one with children and adults suffering from fluency disorders. Stuttering, especially.

Their future clients know what they want to say, and are quite capable of thinking about what they want to say — but simply, maddeningly, can't get the words out.

Kidd-Gilchrist smiled and made eye contact, while tossing one-liners that brought appreciative laughs among the assembled.

Such ease comes from winning NCAA's Final Four, as a University of Kentucky Wildcat, no less.

One might also get reasonably comfortable in the public eye — as one graces the cover of Sports Illustrated the way to a consistent, starring tenure in the NBA with the Charlotte Hornets, Dallas Mavericks and New York Knicks.

Bounce it back for a second, though, back to New Jersey, and middle school.

Well, make that elementary-middle school: Kidd-Gilchrist, and his friends and foes, started in pre-kindergarten and journeyed all the way to eighth grade.

Everybody knew everybody, strengths and weaknesses included.

Weaknesses, especially.

The once-and-future pro athlete then was still growing into the skillsets on the hardwood that would eventually land him on that marquee magazine cover.

He was still growing, period.

The tallest kid in class.

The tallest kid in class who stuttered.

Sometimes, kids did make fun, he said — because that's what kids do.

"I gotta be honest, " he said.

"If it hadn't been for being tall and having basketball, I don't where I would be."

He was in front of that WVU classroom on the rainy day in Morgantown as the founder of an organization he calls, "Change and Impact: Voices for Stuttering."

It's an advocacy group talked into life two years ago for people who suffer from the disorder.

Now he's traveling the country on its behalf.

Friday, he toured WVU Medicine Children's before stopping off at that classroom.

He met with families later that afternoon whose children are being treated at the university's Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic.

Kidd-Gilchrist's goal is to improve healthcare resources and insurance plans, in order to offer easier, affordable access to the therapies needed, so people can manage, and conquer, their stuttering.

A big goal is to get stuttering listed on one's driver's license, which could mean all the difference during a traffic stop.

Visit https://changeandimpactinc.org / for an overview of the mission.

Meanwhile, "disorder " is a word he never has trouble saying, as related to his new role as an elocution advocate.

"That's what stuttering is, " he said. "It's a disorder."

And some 3 million people of all ages across the U.S. suffer from it, according the Stuttering Foundation of America.

On the road to talking and communication, stuttering is like a sudden landslide — or a series of potholes that just suddenly materialize without warning.

The Stuttering Foundation of America breaks it down, as such: There are the broken repetitions ("li-li-like this ").

And what it calls, prolongations ("llllike this.")

Those abnormal stoppages — no sounds or syllables at all, while a sufferer grasps for a word — also considered a form of stuttering, the foundation says.

Ken St. Louis just might have the most unique form of it ever.

He's a WVU professor emeritus and speech pathologist internationally known for his research in the field.

The professor had a quite pronounced stutter as a kid, but he knocked it in college.

He joined the Peace Corps in the early 1960s and was sent to Turkey, where he found out he had an affinity for languages, despite everything.

Well, an affinity for Turkish, at least.

Six months in the country, and he was all but fluent.

Then, it happened.

His stutter came back.

But only when he was speaking Turkish.

He almost had to laugh. He was a stutterer in a second language.

"I don't know what it means either, " he said.

Kidd-Gilchrist knows what stuttering means to him.

He's all over it, like a power forward going one-on-one inside the three-point line.

If you're going to defeat it, he said, you have to say its name out loud.

"Hey, I'm a stutterer, " he said.

"Everybody's got something. This is mine. And this is what I'm doing about it."

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