Karl-Anthony Towns and Jordyn Woods lean on each other through grief

The Knicks are in the finals for the first time in 27 years, and for Karl‑Anthony Towns, 30, the run represents a dramatic personal turnaround. He survived a crash when his car was rear-ended by a semi‑truck and said he had a “5% chance of making it out alive,” later lost his mother, Jacqueline Cruz, to COVID‑19 at 58, and was hospitalized after being hit by a drunk driver in Los Angeles.

Towns and Jordyn Woods, 28, first became romantically involved in May 2020 and publicly confirmed their relationship with Woods’ September 2020 Instagram post that read, “I found you, then I found me.” They bonded over shared losses: Woods lost her father, sound engineer John Woods, weeks after he was diagnosed with aggressive cancer in 2017.

Woods told Extra, “The right person will bring a lot out of you.” The couple moved to New York after Towns was traded in 2024.

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