× Thanks for reading! Log in to continue. Enjoy more articles by logging in or creating a free account. No credit card required. Log in Sign up {{featured_button_text}}

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Taped on the wall above Kyle Guy’s bed is a reminder of defeat.

In the photo, snapped last March, Guy is deflated, hunched and with tears welling in his eyes. In the background, UMBC’s players are joyous. They are hugging and screaming. Two players are preparing to chest bump, meeting for mid-air ecstasy, after the Retrievers became the first No. 16 seed in men’s NCAA Tournament history to knock off a No. 1 seed.

The photo captures the magic of the NCAA Tournament in a frame. The underdog knocking off the top dog. The unrealistic made real.

For Virginia, however, the photo came to define failure. And for Guy, it cut even deeper.

What outsiders couldn’t see was the pressure bearing down on Guy, two decades of doubts coming into focus in the form of public humiliation. A 6-foot-2, 175-pound guard, Guy doesn’t look like a star basketball player. He’s the anti-Zion Williamson.

If sports lets fans live vicariously through larger-than-life heroes, Guy seems to have slipped through the cracks, and people don’t like him for it. The UMBC loss provided proof of his fallibility.

It also was Guy’s breaking point.

He had been battling anxiety for much of the season, fighting through double teams and panic attacks, and after the UMBC loss, he burst into tears. He returned to Charlottesville after the tournament intent on finding the root of his anxiety, and that included owning what happened. He found a newspaper with that infamous image on the cover and purchased it, displaying it in his room so he’d never have to look far for motivation.

Friday afternoon, Guy and the No. 1-seeded Cavaliers kick off the 2019 NCAA Tournament at Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, South Carolina. On the other end of the court will be No. 16-seed Gardner-Webb, this year’s Cinderella hopeful. Much of the nation will watch with wide eyes, giddy to see Virginia choke again, to see Guy fail.

The Indianapolis, Indiana, native knows this. As he’s continued to work on his mental health, he’s heard the “UMBC” chants in opposing arenas, and, in an era when the door to college athletes has been opened through social media, seen the trolls in his Twitter mentions entertaining the fantasy of punching him in the face.

He has little interest in proving them wrong, though. He’s more interested in taking his story back.

“We’re ready to put on a show this year, so we can talk about something else,” Guy said.

On a weekend back home last spring, he handed his father a note. A former Marine, Joe Guy is not one to speak openly about his feelings. He once confused a panic attack for a heart attack. Then he read the letter, which detailed his son’s inner narrative.

“Not everyone knows, but you’ve been taking medication for your anxiety attacks all season. You’ve kept it a secret because you didn’t want to be viewed as weak. You were worried people might think you aren’t built for this,” Guy wrote in the letter he later shared on Facebook. “They don’t understand you couldn’t smile through the latter half of the season because the anxiety and pressure was eating at you, but you still kept pushing.”

Positive comments flooded in. As a new season approached last fall, Guy continued to speak openly about his anxiety, following in the footsteps of former teammate Isaiah Wilkins. He shared with reporters that he was still journaling his feelings, and he hosted a mental health panel for Virginia athletes on Grounds.

A third team All-American last season, the junior led the team in scoring through much of the 2018-19 regular season. But his anxiety still weighed on him. He had a panic attack before one of the first games of the season, his mother, Katy Fitzgerald said, and she spent much of the team’s nonconference slate in Charlottesville hotels, the eight-hour drive from Indianapolis becoming routine.

“Sometimes I left on Tuesday, came back Wednesday then went back on the weekend,” she said.

Guy’s fiancée, Alexa Jenkins, spent several weeks in Charlottesville with him, too, Fitzgerald said. On Jan 2, Jenkins uploaded a video to YouTube of herself and Guy reading some of the mean tweets he’d been tagged in.

“Virginia’s Kyle Guy might as well be Grayson Allen, in other words, someone everyone should hate,” one read.

“Not actively suggesting, but if somebody wants to casually take Kyle Guy out during halftime, I would not be mad,” read another.

“Those are the ones that make me mad,” Jenkins said in the video. “Like, how would you like it if you had 20 people saying, ‘I hope you get hit by a car?’ Because people say that to you. Like, ‘I hope you get punched in the face.’ ‘I hope you die.’”

Lost in the hoopla of March Madness, with the office pools and bracket busting and with an ongoing federal corruption investigation shadowing the sport, is that the players are amateur athletes, just kids on the court playing a game they love.

Virginia players were the object of jokes in the wake of their tournament defeat, but they also received death threats. They were national punching bags, and Guy seemed to get the worst of it.

“If you’re a fan, you’re supposed to ride with the team through wins and losses. Maybe we lost some fans, but if we lost some fans, they weren’t real fans,” said De’Andre Hunter, who wrapped his arm around Guy as the guard cried into his jersey after the UMBC loss.

After Virginia’s 83-45 win over Morgan State on Dec. 3, Guy addressed the media wearing a blue hoodie that read: “Just a kid from Indianapolis” in gray lettering. He flashed the smile that struck a chord with the family and friends in attendance that follow him to every game.

“They mean the world to me, and that’s why I put on this jersey every night,” Guy said. “For people like them.”

He was in less-friendly territory Nov. 28. When he stepped onto the court in College Park, Maryland, for pregame warmups, the Terrapins’ faithful reminded Guy of what happened last March. They chanted “UMBC” and flashed signs bearing that photo.

What they didn’t know was Guy, who scored 18 points in Virginia’s 76-71 win, had become friendly with the image, sleeping under it every night. In the months that followed, as the Cavaliers rolled to their second consecutive ACC regular season championship, Guy made the image his Twitter avatar. He retweeted references to UMBC’s historic win. He encouraged former Retrievers guard K.J. Maura to attend the Cavaliers’ game at Duke on Jan. 19 and stand among the Cameron Crazies, as some gleeful Blue Devils fans had called for.

After the Maryland game, he confirmed a reporter’s suspicion that the team was playing with more determination this season. He was asked to elaborate.

“I think everybody here knows why,” Guy said.

His mother has noticed a difference in recent weeks. His voice no longer sounds flat and empty. He calls home less frequently. In an early-March sitdown with his uncle, Bryan Patterson, who also is a former Marine, Guy learned the phrase, “Calm is contagious,” and wove the sentiment into his life.

But there are still challenges.

On March 14, Guy scored 29 points in Virginia’s win over N.C. State in the ACC Tournament quarterfinal, but he couldn’t shoot them to victory in the following night’s semifinal loss to Florida State.

Afterwards, he sat at his locker in the Spectrum Center, the same Charlotte, North Carolina, arena his family had slogged out of a year earlier, tears dripping from their eyes.

“I would say you can throw this on there, too, because we had expectations and goals and aspirations,” Guy said. “There’s only one way to go when you fall down, is back up.”

And then he packed up his uniform, plopped in his earbuds and boarded the flight back to Charlottesville, leaving behind the sight of the defeat that no longer defines him.