I am afraid for Alonzo Mourning.

	Mourning's first game back wasn't bad for someone who had sat for so long.

He is afraid for himself.

I am afraid because he doesn't know, his doctors don't know, his family doesn't know.

We are in the deep water here.

I am afraid for Alonzo Mourning because just six days ago, in Miami, I spent an hour with him and his wife, Tracy, and they seemed so at peace with what focal glomerulosclerosis had done to their family. They didn't like it, but they were dealing with it. He was taking his seven pills in the morning, and seven pills at night. They had explained it to their friends and they had heard from hundreds of people who had the same thing, adults and kids. They had explained it as best they could to their 4-year-old son, Trey, who kept asking why daddy wasn't playing.

"I told him 'Daddy is dealing with a kidney condition right now. Something is wrong with Daddy's kidneys,'" Mourning said. "And he asked what kidneys were, and I told him. I told him that someday, Daddy will be back on the court, but Daddy has to do what he tells you to do all the time -- to be patient."

	“	In the beginning, no one understood. We didn't understand it. The doctor had to explain it to us. After they tell you the name of the disease, you're like 'okay, can we break it down very simple? What does this mean?' Your first questions are, 'is he going to die? Answer that. And then, let me know, so we can get through this.' Then you're like, 'all right, are my kids going to have this condition? Is there something I have to worry about there?' ”
		— Tracy Mourning

And I can't help but wonder if Daddy shouldn't take Daddy's advice on this one. One of his friends recently reminded him of the three Ts -- Things Take Time. And Alonzo Mourning thinks enough time has gone by, and he may not have that much time left, and so he's playing again.

I wonder if he should.

Because I don't think anyone close to Alonzo Mourning really wants him back on the floor right now. They will smile and say it's what he wants, and that he has to do it, that playing is as vital to him as breathing, and maybe that's right.

But I don't think they like it much. Not after six months of uncertainty.

"In the beginning, no one understood," Tracy Mourning said last week. "We didn't understand it. The doctor had to explain it to us. After they tell you the name of the disease, you're like 'okay, can we break it down very simple? What does this mean?' Your first questions are, 'is he going to die? Answer that. And then, let me know, so we can get through this.' Then you're like, 'all right, are my kids going to have this condition? Is there something I have to worry about there?'"

"It's just another adverse situation that I've had to go through in my career," he said last week, "whether it be an injury, or just a loss, or an altercation with the Knicks. It's another learning experience for me. And the good thing about it is, throughout all the adversities I've gone through, each and every time I think I've come back even stronger."

But I am afraid for Alonzo Mourning. Because while we all agree the doctors know best, the scholarship on this disease is still relatively new, and everyone, including a lot of doctors, is kind of on the same learning curve here, and that's limited some funding for researching the disease. Some doctors would put someone in Mourning's condition straight into dialysis. Some are more aggressive. The medication makes up the bulk of his treatment, and because he's 6-10, 250 pounds, the amount of doses are larger than they are for just about everyone else. And what does that mean? Even though he said last week that he felt a lot better since starting treatment, he was still concerned about "putting all this toxic stuff in my body."

"The doctors, they're pleased with my condition, but at the same time, they're not satisfied at all," Alonzo said last week. "They understand that I've still got a little ways to go. And usually, when they make their close to final assessment of it all, it's usually after a year of treatments. And it's only been six months. So we're kind of halfway there."

So, I say, why not wait? We are dealing with, potentially, life and death issues here. And I can't help it, I like the Mournings. They are a beautiful, smart, important, young couple. They have two beautiful kids. They are about a lot more than a championship parade down Biscayne Boulevard. Why not wait until there's more information on the transom, more certainty about how this disease is progressing? For three or four months, Mourning says, his vital levels were rising. But since then, they've leveled off. What does that mean?

"If he wasn't at the gym pressing his nose up against the window, he'd be pressing his nose up against the television screen," Tracy Mourning said last week. "I appreciate the time that we've had together, but I know how important it is for him to get out there and do something that he loves, what makes him happy. Because if he's home miserable, he's not doing anything but making everybody else around him miserable. So if he's happy, then we're all happy."

And yet, I looked at Tracy Mourning's face Tuesday night, and the faces of those close to Alonzo Mourning, and they looked ... stricken. And I thought back to last week, when Tracy Mourning was talking about how all of this was going to be a test for Alonzo and her, as partners, as parents, how Alonzo had mood swings at first with the medicine, how he would "get evil" without sodium and hot sauce in his diet, how she would say 'wait a minute, you're the one who's not healthy right here; let me have mine.'

	“	The bottom line is, I'm taking a risk, regardless of when I come back. It's been nothing but an experiment for all of us ... it's a huge, huge blank spot for a lot of people. Especially the doctors. Because they don't know what the future is going to bring ... all of this is new to them. ”
		— Alonzo Mourning

"I was adapting," Alonzo said, laughing.

"And you were trying to push that on everyone else," she countered. "Anybody walked through the door, you said 'oh, I can't believe you're doing that to yourself.' Just preaching."

But he got through it. He substituted raw foods and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He had thrown himself full force into his Fund for the Cure, which he had started with Spurs forward Sean Elliott, whose kidney ailment was from the same family as Mourning's, but not exactly the same. (Technically, Mourning's disease is "collapsing," meaning his body deterioration is faster, than Elliott's "non-collapsing" version of the ailment.) He had written every NBA player and asked for donations, with a pledge to match each dollar for dollar. And he'd gotten some significant responses: half-game checks from his teammates, $100,000 each from Karl Malone and Grant Hill, $50,000 from Dikembe Mutombo and Gary Payton and Stephon Marbury and Patrick Ewing and Allen Iverson.

Life was, sort of, going on.

But I probably should have known better. He had, after all, been working out full court for six weeks, and Riles did say last week that he could have been physically, if not medically, cleared to play a month ago. There was so much blitheness about his timetable for returning. Maybe I should have pressed him more. But, you know, that isn't really even all that important right now, because this about Alonzo and Tracy and Trey and Myka Mourning.

	ALDRIDGE'S RANKINGS
	THE TOP 10 1. San Antonio 2. Sacramento 3. Philadelphia 4. L.A. Lakers 5. Portland 6. Dallas 7. Utah 8. Milwaukee 9. Minnesota 10. Miami THE BOTTOM FIVE 25. Atlanta 26. Vancouver 27. Washington 28. Golden State 29. Chicago

"The bottom line is, I'm taking a risk, regardless of when I come back," he said last week. "It's been nothing but an experiment for all of us ... it's a huge, huge blank spot for a lot of people. Especially the doctors. Because they don't know what the future is going to bring ... all of this is new to them."

And to him.

"I'm human," he said last week. "I'm gonna be afraid. The one thing that's gonna instill that fear in me is the not knowing. Because my doctors won't know. 'Cause if my doctors don't know, I definitely don't know. All I can do is pray on it, and hope for the best, and hope that I'm making the right decisions. It's not too much more that I can do ... I might not play up to my expectations, how people expected me to play. But at the same time, I know that I'm gonna be on the court, and I'm gonna be a contributor to helping the team be successful."

But could he live with not being as good as he used to be?

"I probably won't," he said. "Because I'm my own biggest critic. And I put so much pressure on myself. She'll tell you how much I beat myself up after games. Especially if the headlines say I played a perfect game. I still kind of beat myself up. I could have did this differently, I need to improve on that. That pretty much explains the determination factor that's been in me all these years, to want to continue to improve until I reach a point where that fire dies. Or we win it all. And we haven't won it all yet...

"I do know this, that I still have, even if I came back with half of the abilities that I had before, I can still be productive. And with half of the abilities that I have -- no degradation to my colleagues -- but half of the ability that I have is better than half of the guys in this league. I feel. And I feel I can make a positive impact.

I asked him how he'd feel if the Heat made the Finals without him.

"For the most part, I think I still feel like I'm part of the team," he said then.

Same as it ever was.

Wish him luck.