With the sun still hiding below the horizon and the cold pinching at anybody who dared expose themselves to it, Ethan Happ would grab his fully-packed school bags, jump into his white Pontiac Grand Am, and begin his winter days. Before a basketball could be bounced, an engine had to be revved, an exhaust pipe had to belch, and the 17-year-old version of the Big Ten’s most intriguing player had to roll out into the early morning Midwestern darkness.

And before he could do that, the night before, he had to compose a quick text message. A few miles away, the cell phone of Rockridge High School head basketball coach Toby Whiteman would beep. Ethan’s name would flash on the screen, and underneath it would be a short message:

I’m coming by to get the keys tomorrow morning.

Whiteman knew what the text meant. It wasn’t the first time he’d received it, nor would it be the last. He also knew all it needed was a quick response:

You know where they are.

Whiteman would leave his keys, including the one to the Rockridge High gym, in a cup in his van, and he’d leave the van unlocked, so when Ethan would swing by around 6:45 the following morning, he could grab them. During his junior and senior years, he’d also grab Whiteman’s oldest son. The two would cruise through the sun-stained western Illinois morning to school, and specifically to the gym. Around 7:15 or 7:30, Whiteman would arrive to hear the pounding of a ball on the hardwood floor, the occasional clang of a rim, the squeak of sneakers.

It’s here, four miles away from the Iowa border, in this cramped gym with the baselines only a few dangerous feet away from the building’s walls, that college basketball’s most paradoxical superstar came to be, a guard in a big man’s body who won’t shoot outside the paint, a 6-foot-10 defensive player of the year favorite who averages twice as many steals as blocks, a bruiser who quarterbacks fast breaks, a powerful gazelle in the open court.

Every once in a while, Ethan Happ’s skills will converge to produce a truly breathtaking sequence, a back-tip post steal on one end, a no-look pass on the other, maybe a behind-the-back dribble in between. When they do, television viewers’ eyes bulge; GIFs inundate social media; hoopheads in attendance oooh and ahhh.

Happ hears the oohs and ahhs, usually from adoring Wisconsin fans, and occasionally even from Badger teammates. “I know it feels out of the ordinary for other people,” he concedes. “But it’s something I’ve been doing since first grade.”

***

He’s been doing it since elementary school adjourned in May or June and childhood summers commenced in Milan (pronounced MY-lan), Illinois, a small town near the Quad Cities that self-identifies as a village rather than a city.

On the south side of the village, on a slab of pavement 57 feet long and 24 feet wide, is where the skills that now dazzle the Big Ten were first honed, in the Happ family’s driveway. There, with father Randy off at work, the two Happ boys, Eric and Ethan, would weave in and out of cones, around chairs, 57 feet in one direction, 57 feet in the other.

When they finished, they’d bound over to the garage, where a clipboard hung from a nail. The clipboard held a spreadsheet. Randy had concocted the spreadsheet on his computer, and printed it out before leaving for work. It was full of basketball exercises — mostly ball handling and defense, occasionally shooting — for his sons to complete before he returned home in the evening. So Eric and Ethan would scurry up and down the driveway, working in crossovers, steering the ball behind their backs or between their legs. Then they’d scribble check marks on the spreadsheet to denote completion of the specific workouts.

There were some complaints, as there would be from any 8-year-old kid doing relatively monotonous drills with the freedom of summer otherwise at his or her feet. Randy wouldn’t force the boys to practice, though; when they didn’t, he’d let it pass with nothing more than a passive jab: “OK, somebody else got further than you today,” he’d say. When they did, he stresses now, “it was all them.”

Of course, there was nothing stopping the Happ brothers from filling out the spreadsheets without any basketball being played at all. Randy would take the odd vacation day to come home and work with them, but Eric and Ethan were usually on their own. Their skill development from week to week and summer to summer, however, was proof that they were out on the pavement almost every day. “Rather than just stay in and play video games, we would go out and work on two-ball dribbling, and stuff with tennis balls,” Ethan confirms.

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