20 hours Ago
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The seconds ticked away as Chucky Hepburn rushed the ball up the floor in a tie game against No. 8 Purdue in a sold-out Kohl Center with the Big Ten’s 2022 regular season title on the line.
Hepburn crossed over, took a big step to his left in front of his own bench and shot one of those 4-3-2-1 shots kids shoot over and over again in their driveways. The ball banked off the glass and went in with 1.2 seconds on the clock.
Moments later, Hepburn was bouncing at the back of a Wisconsin mosh pit as the students rushed the floor. And when the hero of the Badgers’ 70-67 win got back to the locker room, he went straight to his stall, found his phone and pulled up Vincent Burns’ name on his contacts list. Hepburn searched for the FaceTime button, then remembered why it wasn’t there.
Burns, his best friend and travel basketball teammate, had been shot and killed five weeks earlier outside a sports bar in their hometown of Omaha. In the pandemonium, out of habit, Hepburn had gone to share his triumph with Burns. Advertisement “That’s when it really hit me the worst,” Hepburn said.
Hepburn spoke publicly about that time a year later for a Big Ten-produced video, but last offseason during a summer team-building exercise after transferring to Louisville, he stood to tell his new teammates the whole story. This season Hepburn is the best player not named Cooper Flagg in the ACC, while the Cards are tied for second in the league after back-to-back last-place finishes. And their leading scorer’s willingness to open up about his mental health and a year of loss is helping drive one of the season’s best surprises.
Hepburn had never been comfortable sharing his emotions. “Stoic,” his father Greg said. But he is compassionate, a trait that runs in the family.
Greg worked at a group home for at-risk youth and would bring his two sons to stay with him during the overnight shift every weekend. Meliza, his mother, works with autistic individuals, and the Hepburns are a shared living provider. Ever since Chucky was 8, the Hepburns have had at least one autistic person living with them.
“You just realize it’s a blessing to be able to be around people like that because you can’t take stuff for granted at all,” Chucky said. “You just look at life differently.” The Hepburn boys were homeschooled until high school, and many of their best friends, including Burns, were those they met through basketball.
Vincent and Chucky ran in different circles as they went through high school but still talked often. Burns was Hepburn’s biggest fan; he proudly looked on as Hepburn signed his letter of intent to play at Wisconsin. One year later, after Hepburn played one of the worst games of his freshman year in a loss at Michigan State, he got a call with some advice.
Burns, who was planning to attend the next game at Nebraska, told him to be more aggressive and look to score more. Burns was killed two days later. Advertisement It didn’t really sink in until Hepburn went to the funeral and saw the casket.
“After that, it just seemed like I was just trying to get through the day,” he said. What followed made it even more difficult. In May, Hepburn’s grandmother died after a recurring battle with cancer.
She had kept her latest diagnosis to herself, so her loss felt sudden. That summer, as he tried to drop some of the weight he’d put on as a freshman, he struggled to focus. Then in August, his childhood friend Alon Reed, who used to text him encouragement before every game, was murdered by a 13-year-old who broke into his home.
“Life just did not seem real at that point,” Hepburn said. Hepburn returned to campus, but he wasn’t in the right mental space to perform like he knew he could. He saw a therapist in Madison, but he thought sharing his emotions or giving off the impression that he was looking for sympathy was “soft.
” His numbers improved as a sophomore, but the Badgers got worse, missing the NCAA Tournament for only the second time since the turn of the century. His perspective started to change during his junior year. There was no seminal moment.
He just started to see the world differently. “I kind of realized that it was OK for me to share my emotions, because we all have feelings, especially being athletes,” he said. “Mental health (awareness) is a serious problem.
” When two of his best friends from back home moved to Madison to live with him, he started to feel more like himself off the floor, but his numbers regressed slightly. Soon after Wisconsin’s upset loss to James Madison in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, he went to Las Vegas for a weekend to work out in front of his agent. He’d been on the fence about returning to Wisconsin — he’d already gone through the Badgers’ first week of offseason training — but his agent gave him some feedback that helped push him to look elsewhere.
Advertisement “He just saw how well I shot it, and he believed that I would do better in a different system that shot a lot more 3s and played a lot faster,” Hepburn said. His parents had a difficult time with the decision. They were looking forward to attending his Senior Night at Wisconsin and loved the staff there.
Greg laid out to Chucky the risk he was taking and said to make sure he didn’t let the money available in college basketball’s transfer portal become the only factor in his decision. Two programs that stood out as playing style fits were Louisville and Creighton, but Hepburn knew he couldn’t go back to Omaha. He was looking for a fresh start.
Louisville, meanwhile, checked all of the boxes: Playing fast, shooting 3s. And Hepburn really liked coach Pat Kelsey and Peyton Siva, the point guard on the 2013 title team who is now on Kelsey’s staff. Siva was his all-time favorite college point guard.
Hepburn knew he made the right decision this summer when he started to feel so comfortable around Kelsey that he finally opened his heart and told him about the tragedies in his life and how he’d struggled with trying to hide how he felt. “That was really the first time I’ve actually opened up about deep stuff like that,” Hepburn said. “I haven’t even opened up to a therapist about that stuff and I was able to just sit down with Coach Kelsey and he listened.
That’s when I really felt like he cared about his players, when he was just able to sit down and listen.” In Louisville’s first team meeting last summer, Kelsey revealed a homework assignment each player would have throughout the season. It was called “the shield,” and it was introduced to him by Navy coach Ed Dechellis, one of his mentors in coaching.
In ancient times, every warrior had a shield that told his story. Kelsey had a team of 13 new players, and his belief in what wins has always been the power of a unit based on the most powerful force in the universe: love. “And I can’t ask you to love your teammates,” Kelsey said, “if you don’t know your teammates.
” So he asked them to use “the shield” to tell their stories: What were their greatest triumphs, greatest tragedies, hopes, fears? Advertisement Hepburn was among the first set of players to present. The Big Ten video played, and then he stood to speak. “It’s a vulnerable spot, especially early on where we didn’t really know each other,” fellow starting guard Reyne Smith said.
“We knew Chucky was going to be the starting point guard, and for him to open up and take the presentation seriously and how emotional it got, he showed it’s all right to open up and put yourself in that position. It’s hard not to connect after that.” On the floor, Hepburn had to have a similar vulnerability playing in a new system.
He wanted to play fast and free, but it was still a process. “We wanted him to be more of a risk taker,” assistant Mike Cassidy said. “I think that’s one of the things you have to break the mold a little bit on is when you have played in those regimented systems.
” Cassidy said the shackles came off at the Battle 4 Atlantis, when Hepburn led Louisville over Indiana with 16 points and what was then a career-high 10 assists, and then followed that up with his career-high in points with 32 against West Virginia. This was when it became clear the Cards were going to be a factor in Kelsey’s first year hitting reset on the program, with Hepburn as the leader. “There was like a glow about him,” Kelsey said.
“There was a bounce. There was a determination that that was going to be his opportunity to show the college basketball world that Chucky Hepburn’s one of the best point guards in the country.” Hepburn is getting noticed now, leading Louisville in scoring (15 ppg), assists (6.
2 per game) and steals (2.3 per game), which also leads the ACC. His averages are the best of his career and his efficiency has gone up as well.
The Cards have won 13 out of 14, and Hepburn has likely locked down a spot on the All-ACC first team. Advertisement Kelsey’s daily messaging keeps him in attack mode. Before January’s game at SMU, when the Cards won by 25 and Hepburn had a career-high 16 assists, Kelsey held a long film session with the team offering constant reminders of the mentality he expects: “I want you cooking and playing with ultimate confidence.
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Never want to split hairs. Want you to play free and loose.” “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a coach have that much faith in me and believe in me,” Hepburn said.
“I feel like he means it. I just really love that about him.” Since those first meetings in the summer, Hepburn has set the tone in the locker room.
Smith says it’s clear that Hepburn “cares more for other’s success than his own.” There’s a maturity level that comes with age and comfort where you are. Hepburn has that now.
He says it has helped that his buddies who moved in with him in Madison last year followed him to Louisville. And anytime he wants to share his triumphs with those he lost, he can look to his inner forearms. On his right arm is a tattoo of Burns, his grandma Lynda Hepburn and Reed walking the stairs to the pearly gates of heaven.
On his left is a text message from his grandma: “I love you grandson, remember always God loves you unconditionally and the Best! Listen at your convenience.” Their stories are on his shield, and he’s not afraid to share any longer. (Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images).
