On Joe Pleasant’s journey from being shunned in pickup games to NCAA shining moment

As Joe Pleasant of Abilene Christian stepped to the free-throw line, transfixed by the basket with 1.2 seconds left in his 14th-seeded team’s meeting with No. 3 seed Texas in the NCAA Tournament late Saturday night, his mother, Renita, stood as she had all game at Lucas Oil Stadium except for during timeouts.

Her hands were red from clapping so much, and she had observed the promising signs of how calm he’d been all game and how he was focused on his breathing in the moment. Even knowing he had made just 58.8 percent of his free throws this season, she fixated on his past of being a clutch free-throw shooter at Blue Valley Northwest.

Just the same …

“I’m a nervous wreck all the time,” she said Sunday, laughing.

In the same instant Saturday night, Ed Fritz stood up “prancing around” in a Las Vegas restaurant called The Front Yard.

“Somebody asked, ‘Oh, you must have a lot of money on the game,’” Fritz said.

None at all, actually. While visiting family on spring break, the pacing was just nervous energy for the Blue Valley Northwest coach watching another of his former players on the cusp of lending further enchantment to March Madness. Three years ago, Clayton Custer and Ben Richardson were instrumental in Loyola’s Final Four run.

Like Pleasant’s mother, Fritz had faith and noted the “epic” concentration on his face. He recalled seeing him win a game with late free throws in his freshman year of high school, and later make five in the final quarter of the 2018 Kansas 6A title game victory over Lawrence Free State as one of two state championship teams he played on.

But it still was hard for anyone connected to Pleasant to feel peace seeing him in this situation: down one in such a crucible.

Turns out they needn’t have fretted.

A riveted gaze that to some might have appeared reminiscent of a deer in headlights instead was the demeanor of consumed concentration.

Pleasant was absorbed in a routine of breathing, visualizing making the shots and trusting his practice habits. The engineering major his mother calls “mild-mannered” told himself it was no different to be on the line to win or lose this game than it would be shooting in a gym by himself.

Then, by lasering in on what he’d later call not making “the moment too big,” he sank both to create the biggest moment in the school’s basketball history.

For that matter, the 53-52 victory over Texas in the final game of the first round figures to stand as one of the marquee scenes of the entire tournament that was missed so much a year ago.

Abilene Christian became a Division I school in 2013-14 and went 2-12 in the Southland Conference, prompting coach Joe Golding to say it was “the worst Division I team in the country” at the time.

Now, it’s an essential part of the DNA of the NCAA Tournament and its revival. As Golding pondered the “incredible story,” he thought about the anguished year for our country with the pandemic, social-justice issues and the divisive presidential election.

“We needed March Madness, man; we needed some type of normalcy to our country,” he said during his post-game news conference. “We needed people to fill out brackets. We needed people to cheer for the underdog. This is what March is about in our country, man. … It’s magical.”

Whatever else is to come as the Wildcats prepare to play 11th-seeded UCLA on Monday, the same could be said for this moment in the life of Pleasant, a 6-foot-8 junior forward who went to the line after being fouled following a block of another player from the Kansas City area, Damien Daniels out of Hogan Prep.

Their collaborative presence is no coincidence: The former AAU teammates were recruited by Abilene Christian assistant Antonio Bostic, a Shawnee Mission West graduate.

As the son of a former NFL player, two-time Super Bowl champion with the Patriots and Chiefs assistant coach, Anthony Pleasant, it might seem Joe had a natural path towards such achievements.

But he wasn’t as immediately into or obviously gifted in sports as his sister and brother. If he wasn’t quite like his mother, who said she had no athletic genes and “it was me and Forrest Gump on the bench,” he certainly was more into reading than sports and what she called “kind of a late bloomer” as an athlete.

Told during his news conference Saturday that his dad actually had said he was terrible at basketball when he was young, Pleasant shook his head and laughed but said, “Trust me, it was brutal. People didn’t want to pick me in pickup” games.

Around seventh grade or so, though, he said he came to love the process and embrace his father’s lessons about the benefits of putting in the extra work. He’d come to believe, as his mother summarized his father’s words, “It doesn’t matter who you play: It’s who shows up. It’s mental.”

By the time he got to high school, where his teammates included two others who became part of this NCAA Tournament, Christian Braun (Kansas) and brother Parker Braun (Missouri), Pleasant was vastly improved but still a work in progress.

“Joe was not what I’d call smooth,” Fritz said. “He was just kind of really mechanical and still kind of growing into his body a little bit.”

But grow into it and himself he did, all leading up to another out-of-body moment in the NCAA Tournament that was sealed when he intercepted Texas’ inbound pass.

A team whose only previous appearance was a 79-44 loss to Kentucky two years ago beat the Big 12 Tournament champion and now goes up against one of the most storied programs in the history of the game.

If there’s another shining moment ahead for Pleasant and Abilene Christian, well, it still wasmade possible by one that will stand fine on its own for a young man Fritz calls “an All-American kid” and Golding called “a winner his whole life.”

“Good things happen to good people,” Golding said. “It was part of the story. The story was written. Joe was going to make those free throws. I had no doubt.”