Bro Krift, Class of ’99, who has season tickets even though he lives in Pittsburgh, e-mailed me a question last week:
“In all of your reporting on the team for
the book, which player impressed you, and how? I have a feeling it’s one of the guys that hasn’t made headlines.”
It’s true.
One of the very few shames of having Stephen in these last eight or so months go from star to superstar to phenomenon is that some of the other guys on the roster who have great, great stories aren’t really having those stories told.
Andrew Lovedale is a kid from Nigeria who sings gospel songs and brings old sneakers and basketballs back to his country when he goes home in the summers for goodness sake.
Bryant Barr is a double major in math and economics who
speaks to church youth groups and to celebrate his math major last year got together with his fellow math majors and made pies with Pi logos on them. Just a nerd with a jumpshot, Bryant is, and proudly, and admittedly, and unabashedly.
Steve Rossiter? The kid was offered a scholarship in part because of the way he cheered for his backup at the ends of games in high school in Staten Island.
Certainly, though, at or near the top of this list, at least for me, is Max.
Today,
given yesterday, it seems maybe particularly apropos to say as much.
It was a bad foul.
It was.
It looked even worse.
And I haven’t talked to Max since, haven’t even seen him, not down in Charlotte after the game, not up here in Davidson, but I can say that he absolutely didn’t go toward that kid with intent to harm. It’s just not Max.
The first time McKillop ever saw Max was at an all-star camp in Atchison, Kansas, and Max was running and jumping and diving in a game being played in a gym that was so stuffy and so hot that other players started calling it “the oven.”
McKillop went to visit Max in the suburbs of Montreal and told his parents their son was the rare sort who could have, he thought, an enormous influence on the outcome of a game without scoring a point.
Fine Davidson fan Meg Clark told me last spring that Max was working the fall of his freshman year at the carnival at Belk Arena to kick off the season and that he came over to a game where young kids were trying to throw rubber rings onto bottle necks. He got down on his knees and talked to the kids and helped them with their throws and called them all “buddy.”
Max, Meg thought then, and thinks still now, has a gift that is hard to explain but plain to see:
He makes the people around him feel good.
Max:
He spoke no English three years before he got to Davidson.
He didn’t understand why some of the coaches from some of the schools that were recruiting him were telling him about how hot the girls were or how good the weather was on their campuses.
He picked Davidson, he told me in April, because he is so close to his own family.
“Human relationships,” he said.
“I didn’t want to just be a teammate.”
He has a habit of touching guys on their shoulders in huddles.
“I think physical contact conveys a lot of meaning,” he said in that meeting in April. “I think of the team as family. Are you going to tell your mother every five minutes that you love her? No. But you can touch her shoulder, lean against her, and feel close.”
He doesn’t watch TV.
He doesn’t watch sports on TV.
The only basketball games he watches are the ones he plays in.
He majors in sociology because he is fascinated by how people who are different try to get along.
He is one of the best students on the team.
I have found Max, always, to be bright and open, and interesting and interested, and the best kind of curious.
“In life,” he has written on his Facebook page, “everything is a first time.”
In June, in Chambly, Quebec, I met on a sunny Saturday morning for a long breakfast with Max and his parents.
Max’s father’s father was a pig farmer and a beet farmer and did that from early in the morning to 2 in the afternoon and then went to work his shift treading tires at a local factory. He did that for 27 years.
Max’s father is one of Canada’s most successful importers of cheese. It’s a
family business.
“We work not in the spirit of
we have to,” Jean-Philippe Gosselin said. “We work because we like what we do and the feeling of accomplishment.”
The motivation in his work, he explained, sometimes in English to me, sometimes in French to Max, who then translated, is not motivated by fear or money, but by the belief that the pursuit and the competition are intrinsically worthwhile.
At this point in the notebook I had with me that morning, written in scribbles, is a note to myself -- I’m looking at it right now -- and it says:
The goal was never to make it to the Elite Eight or the Final Four. The goal was to play so hard, and so well, and so together, that such a thing became a possibility.
Bro Krift, today on the phone, edited and condensed: “It was March 20, 2003. We were there in Indianapolis for the NCAA tournament first and second rounds at the RCA Dome. We stayed in an Econo Lodge the night before across from a place called the Classy Chassy. We took the picture in the morning. Tripp had a screen printer do the uniforms with the HICKORY and the 15 on the front. There was a pickup game going on, professors and random people, and we walked in there dressed like that. That place is so cool. The windows and the bleachers, cold spots, drafty spots. It kind of has that drippy-faucet feel. On my fridge I have the schedule magnets from ’07-’08 and ’95-’96, I have a picture of Stephen as a freshman shooting a layup against Charleston, I have a picture of me and Tripp and Stephen after we beat Georgetown, and I have a picture of the UTC game from January of ’08. And I have a picture of Tripp Cherry as Jimmy Chitwood.” Bro and Tripp.
