Frank Kaminsky, His Story

Fred Barbash:

Still, while Ryan was grooming him in his first two years in Madison, he didn’t play much. So the road to the championship was a little bit longer and more challenging than it is for some superstars. And then there was the disappointment of getting beaten by Kentucky in the Final Four last year, especially after he started his “What It Was Like” blog series to describe the NCAA tournament.

“I said in the intro that my blogs … would take only a week or so,” he wrote last April. “That was a lie. The truth of the matter is that it is hard to write these because ultimately I would have to tell the tale of a losing event. I hate losing. I may be the worst loser of all-time. I can’t tell you how much I hate losing.”

The great gift he got from basketball success, he wrote, was friendship, he explained last year when he decided to stick it out at Wisconsin rather than go for the NBA. “My teammates have become my family away from home. Admittedly a dysfunctional family at times, but a family nonetheless.”

Still, he wrote: “What I didn’t realize is that my story needed to be told. … I was a relatively unknown, 7-foot, goofy white kid who hardly played for 2 years, then all of a sudden led his team to a Final Four. That is news worthy.”

“I don’t care if I look like the biggest dork in the world,” he wrote in his blog. “I embrace who I am.”