LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — The story is in the smile. Mikel Brown Jr. had just scored 45 points, and the smile told you everything you needed to know about what it took to get there. It lit up a 22,000-seat arena.
Not the fake kind. Not the polite postgame one. The kind of smile that escapes like steam from a pressure valve. The kind that appears only when a weight has been lifted. When rhythm returns. When a gym becomes a chapel. When the ball obeys physics only for you.
Mikel Brown Jr. smiled.
He had just matched Wes Unseld’s 1967 school men's scoring record. His 10th three-pointer, launched from somewhere near the midcourt Cardinal Bird logo, also matched a school record. A smile crept across his face before he even turned toward the bench. He knew. Everybody did.
It wasn’t just history. It was release.
This wasn’t a performance. It was a purge.
And just like that, he was lifted from the game, he shrugged, hugged his coach, and disappeared into his teammates.
Mikel Brown Jr. and Ryan Conwell after they combined to score 76 points in a win over N.C. State.
Pat Kelsey saw it coming, or so he claims. A few days earlier, the Louisville coach gave Brown a history lesson, wrapped in wax paper and nostalgia.
“He's been frustrated because he hasn't shot it to his standard,” Kelsey said. “And Kel is not a good shooter. He's a great shooter. A great shooter, and you know, he was just frustrated. So I gave him the old talk about the bubble gum card.”
Of course, times being what they are, Brown’s first question was, “What’s a bubble gum card?”
Once Kelsey finished pining for a lost generation (and maybe his lost youth), he explained.
“I had lived and died with opening up baseball cards,” Kelsey said. “My favorite player was Pete Rose, and he's a lifetime 300 hitter. So if he's hitting .196 through May, law of averages, it's all going to even out. He's going to go 10-for-13 over a couple games. And I literally said this, and I'm not lying, I told him, ‘Kel, your process is great. Nobody works harder than you. You can't live or die on every miss. Just keep staying consistent. You're gonna have a game where you make 10 threes.’”
Monday night, Brown turned Pat Kelsey into Nostradamus with a clipboard.
Ten threes. Forty-five points. Matching school record for a men's player set by Wes Unseld in 1967. Breaking the ACC freshman record set by Duke’s Cooper Flagg a year ago.
This wasn’t just a shooter getting hot. This was a player coming unstuck. Brown had missed eight games this season. He had not heard the grumbling, because he had his own interior playlist: he was shooting only 26 percent from three, was frustrated over his sore back, was worried his freshman year was slipping away and he couldn’t get into a rhythm.
Then he found it. Relentlessly.
Ryan Conwell, who scored just 31, kept whispering in his ear. “You’re a killer,” Conwell told him. Over and over. Like gospel. Like scripture. “Killer's kill.”
Brown started saying it back.
They’re the first Louisville teammates to score 30 in the same game. In history. In the same throwback jerseys people call “the Wes Unselds.”
Louisville coach Pat Kelsey greets Mikel Brown Jr. as he leaves the game after a 45-point performance against N.C. State.
And of course it was those jerseys. Poetry doesn’t need a ghostwriter.
He started with a rebound, then an assist, then another rebound. Then a layup. Then another assist. He built his masterpiece the way you build anything meaningful: brick by brick. Strike that. Those weren’t bricks. They were brushstrokes.
The first three came in front of the NC State bench. Their coach said he knew right then. Brown did too. “It got me going,” he said. “I trusted my work.”
By halftime, he had 21. He wasn’t done.
Second half? Corner three. Steal. Dunk. Another three. A logo pull-up that brought down the house. He scored in waves. Surfed them. And when he came out with two minutes left, the scoreboard read 45.
He’ll never forget it. Neither will the 23 NBA scouts. Or the ushers.
Two weeks ago on another ESPN Big Monday, Louisville got pantsed at Duke. Thirty-one-point blowout. The only thing worse than the score was the silence.
“I was really hard on them after the Duke game,” Kelsey said. “It sure wasn't all their fault. I coached bad. We played bad. Everybody on the roster played bad. But I really challenged those guys, as kind of the -- I don't know if the head of the snake is the right word – but those guys are our point guards. … It comes back to them.”
This time, it did. In all the right ways.
Kelsey admitted he didn’t know it was Wes Unseld’s record until after the game. “That’s storybook,” he said. “That’s unbelievable.”
So was Brown.
His grandkids may never know who Wes Unseld was. They may never know what a bubble gum card is. But they'll know this:
Their grandfather once scored 45 in a Louisville jersey on national TV, in a must-win game. They can look it up.
And he did it with a smile.
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