The clock hadn’t even come close to striking noon when Kendrick Williams, director/coach of North Carolina’s buzzing AAU program, Team Wall, heard his phone chirping.
Ky Bowman had been doing some thinking, and wanted to get it off his chest. He had a scholarship offer secured to play football at North Carolina, but he reconsidered whether that was the path he wanted to take.
When Williams picked up the phone, Bowman said, “Coach, I’m going to tell you before it hits that I’m decommitting from Carolina.”
Williams had to hear it one more time.
“I’m decommitting,” Bowman said. “I’m quitting football.”
Williams couldn’t wrap his head around what he was hearing. Bowman was a three-star recruit as a wide receiver. The offer to play for the Tar Heels was lined up when he was a just a high school sophomore. It was a sure thing. But he wanted to walk away from it?
Williams asked him one more time, “You’re quitting? Football? You’re not going to play high school football either?”
They ended up on the phone for two hours.
Bowman tried to explain that it came down to him loving basketball more than football. In the year that Bowman had spent with Team Wall up to that point, Williams could see that. From his first practice with Team Wall, Bowman was practically a gift-wrapped star.
“He was flat-out the best player in the gym,” Williams said.
The program was based in Raleigh, N.C., a 2½-hour drive from where Bowman grew up in Havelock. His mother and stepfather drove up and back every Friday and Saturday for practice.
The only players Williams could compare him to were Dez Wells, who went from Team Wall to Maryland to the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the player who gave the program its name, John Wall of the Washington Wizards.
Williams tried to get Bowman to see the bigger picture. The only basketball offer Bowman had at the time was from East Carolina.
Williams said to him, “Kyran, I understand you love basketball, trust me. I don’t even like football. But you’re in a situation where you’re in a win-win. Why don’t you just keep the scholarship and still play basketball and see which one gives you the best avenue?”
Bowman told him, “No, coach.”
Williams realized Bowman’s mind was made up.
I said, ‘Kyran, I understand. But do you understand what you’re walking away from?’
Bowman said, “Yes, sir.”
“So you understand you’re walking away from a high major football scholarship to absolutely no basketball offers?’
“Yes, sir.”
“I wouldn’t do it,” said Williams, “but you trust yourself. Only you know who you are.”
The decision didn’t go over well at home. Bowman’s mother was disappointed. So was his high school coach. He heard over and over again that he didn’t know what he was doing. He was making a mistake. But he stuck to it.
Even after going to Tuscaloosa to see Alabama play Auburn and getting a call from Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban with an offer, he told Saban, ‘‘I’m not playing football.”
When he eventually chose to commit to Boston College’s basketball program, one coach texted him, “You just made the worst decision of your life.”
But the circumstances that made Bowman who he was — being the youngest of three children, losing his father when he was just 8 years old, watching his mother pour her energy into keeping the family together, seeing the same college opportunities he had slip through his brothers’ hands — were at the heart of his choice.
Special connection
The sound of the bouncing ball in Lauretha Pritchard’s backyard kept the neighbors up through all hours of the night.
Her sons never called it quits.
It was only the three of them — Ky and his older brothers Michael and David — but the games were fierce and the rules were rigid. They didn’t play the normal version of 21. They played 22 — no free throws, all twos, no fouls, and if you didn’t have at least 8 points by the time someone got to 13, you were eliminated.
“You have to play defense,” Michael said. “You can’t slack off.”
More often than not, they’d play until well past midnight.
Michael was two years older, but he and Ky were essentially inseparable. Ky was the free spirit. Michael was there to toughen him up. Whatever his brothers did, Ky did. Playing Pop Warner football wasn’t on his mind, but when Michael asked if he wanted to play, it was different.
“I figured my asking him rather than anybody else, he’ll answer the question with a yes because we’re brothers,” Michael said.
Ky played above his age to be on teams with his brother.
They were young when they realized how important their bond would be.
Ky was just 8 and Michael was 10 when their father, Tom Bowman, died. The loss took a heavy toll.
“They were really young,” said Sherlean Tindal, Ky’s aunt. “It really, really affected them. They were so hurt, they were crying so much. It really took a toll on them. They were really torn up.”
Michael and Ky had a football game the day word got back to North Carolina that their father had died. They sat in the locker room and sorted through the shock.
Michael remembers telling Ky: “Our dad passed away, but you’ve got to remember, he’s always looking down on us, no matter what goes on. If you want to talk about him, you can tell me and we’ll have a little time together and we can talk.”
He kept his word.
“If he wanted to break down about it or think about it, we’d just sit down and talk,” Michael said.
Before Ky was on any recruiting radar, Michael had his own path laid. He had a scholarship lined up in March 2014 to go to South Carolina as a wide receiver.
“Everybody expected, like, ‘He’s the one,’ ” Ky said.
But six months after committing to the school, he was charged with multiple counts of misdemeanor larceny.
The mistake instantly altered his fate. South Carolina pulled the scholarship. Because of the arrest, he wasn’t allowed to play his senior season at Havelock. Without Michael, Ky’s outlook changed.
“After my brother got in trouble, I saw he didn’t get a second chance, so it kind of fazed me to not want to play anymore,” Ky said. “I played because my brother played, and I liked playing with my brother.
“But that actually changed my standpoint, because he didn’t get to play his senior year. So after that season, I didn’t play my senior year. I just stuck with basketball. Basketball was what I loved.”
But the cloud that formed over Michael ended up casting a pall on Ky. In class, people would murmur about his brother.
“People looked at me in a bad way because my brother got in trouble,” said Ky. “That was a hard moment for us to get through. I remember one day, we were in class, and somebody said something smart. We were doing, like, a debate, then somebody said something smart about my brother. I just blocked it out, I didn’t say nothing.”
The chance to play in the Southeastern Conference on college football’s biggest stage was gone, but things seemed to be piecing themselves back together for Michael in 2015 when he committed to Winston-Salem State University.
It was a Division 2 school, but it was a chance to start over. Then, weeks after committing there, he got caught in the same pitfall, this time a felony larceny charge.
The weight of it all was hard for Ky to carry.
“How much we’ve been through, just me and him, it actually hurt,” said Ky, “but it hurt me even more, like, knowing that nobody wanted to give him a second chance just because he did bad one time. It hurt me to see my brother go downhill.”
Impact player
Since Bowman arrived in Chestnut Hill last fall, certain things have made him easy to identify: the smile that seems permanently stamped on his face, the bounce at the rim that’s made for reels worth of highlights, and the hair.
The comb of red twists has become his signature, but initially it was just a whim.
It was blond at first, but the Odell Beckham Jr. look was so popular that he didn’t stand out. So he decided to go red.
In January, he wanted to shake things up, but didn’t realize how dramatic it would be. He went jet black before BC’s matchup against Virginia and caught everyone in the locker room off-guard, including coach Jim Christian.
“My kids were saying, ‘Make him go back to the red,’ ” said Christian.
“Coach said it wasn’t me,” said Bowman.
It didn’t take much convincing. Bowman shot 3 for 6 that night, turned over the ball four times, and finished with just 7 points in a 71-54 loss.
He went back to red before the next game, which happened to be at home against North Carolina. The timing was perfect, since BC was planning on giving away red wigs to fans. In a 90-82 loss to the ninth-ranked Tar Heels, Bowman dropped in 33 points, showering the school he spurned with seven 3-pointers and showing that the hardwood was hardly a mistake.
In his first season, Bowman has been the kind of impact player BC was thirsting for after going winless in the ACC a year ago. He has given the Eagles 14.5 points, 2.9 assists, and 5.0 rebounds per game. It’s the best season by a BC freshman since Olivier Hanlan averaged 15.5 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 2.3 assists in 2012-13, when he was ACC Freshman of the Year.
If Bowman was inconsistent early in the season, there were reasons beyond just the typical freshman adjustment.
The person he has leaned on since he was a child wasn’t within reach. While Ky was getting the crash course in ACC basketball, Michael was behind bars.
“I know it affected him even when he got to Boston,” said Williams, the AAU coach.
But Bowman had a voice he could trust on BC’s coaching staff. Assistant coach Scott Spinelli could understand some of the family turmoil Bowman was going through, because he’d been through it himself.
Early in his coaching career, when he was an assistant at Nebraska on a recruiting trip overseas, he found out his father was brain dead after suffering a stroke. When he got back to the country, his father was on life support. He died shortly thereafter.
Scott’s brother, Anthony Spinelli, once a standout football player at Leominster High School, has had his share of troubles, too. He pleaded guilty to the beating death of a man in Worcester in 2000, claimed he was sexually abused by Penn State football assistant Jerry Sandusky when he was 16, and was charged last December with stabbing a man in the North End.
“It was natural for both of us to talk about that stuff,” Spinelli said.
Bowman never wore his worries, but Spinelli would constantly check in with him.
“Having gone through a lot of tragedies in my own family and seeing what it did to my family, meaning it ripped us apart, to share some of those stories . . . I think that was kind of the initial start on the life experience side,” Spinelli said.
“Sometimes you can’t really outwardly see the tragedies on a young person or anyone’s face, but they hurt inside.
“In Ky’s case, he’s very quiet, soft-spoken, always smiling. We would find ourselves talking about things on a daily basis, really, that are more about life rather than just basketball.
Usually when they talked, it had nothing to do with basketball. Spinelli routinely sends Bowman an image of Nelson Mandela with the quote, “I never lose. I either win or learn.”
Home for the holidays
Over the holidays, things shifted for Bowman and his family. BC beat Providence two days before Christmas, and when Bowman went home for the holidays, he got a surprise.
“I was his Christmas present,” Michael said.
His brother had been released on probation. Ky wasn’t expecting him home until January.
“He was shocked,” said Michael. “That’s when I gave him a hug. I said, ‘Hey, man, time to play with everything you’ve got. Now that I’m out, you know I’m watching.’ ”
BC’s next game was against Syracuse. Bowman peppered the Orange with 30 points, shooting an unconscious 7 for 8 on 3-pointers. Since Christmas, Bowman has averaged 17.4 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 3.6 assists.
Not long after he came home, Michael had a long conversation with Williams — almost as long as the one the coach had with Ky.
“I give him this talk about how important it is for him to do the right thing,” Williams said. “I said, you don’t understand what you’re taking your brother through.
“And I know you’re not doing it on purpose, because I know you love your brother. The reason your brother’s playing like he’s playing is because of his love for you and his family.
“Every time, before you make any decision, you’ve got to think about what’s at stake, because it not only affects you, your mother, it affects your brother — somebody who has the possibility of playing a professional sport and taking care of his mother and his family the rest of his life. But he’s not going to be able to focus with you behind bars.”
In that moment, it clicked for Michael.
“I saw the way he changed everything from the way he was playing before to now,” Michael said.
He doesn’t miss a chance to call, to text. Their routine is the same before every game. Ky calls two or three hours before tip, they catch up, laugh. Michael makes sure his brother is in good shape.
“I just want to see him develop better than anybody, and he’s doing real good,” Michael said. “I just want to see him develop as a man and become anything else after, and not in a bad way. I want to see him in a good way. I don’t want to see him go down what I went down.”
Instead, he can see the path Ky was paving all along.
“I feel like I am his second chance,” Ky said. “For something great to happen, I need a great thing for me to happen so everybody will forget about the past and look at it forward.”
Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @julianbenbow.