AUSTIN — The size-16 right foot belonging to Mohamed Bamba, known to the world as Mo, rests in a pool of 40-degree water. “It can’t be 40 degrees,” he says, leaning in from a stool to inspect the thermometer more closely. He is inside Texas basketball’s hydrotherapy room for a 15-minute cold-tub session after dunking in practice, landing on a teammate’s foot and rolling the ankle. Everything is fine. The extent of treatment is this soak, a walking boot and three rounds of aspirin. Longhorns staffers who heard their prized freshman moaning in agony may require some counseling, yes, but as he submerges his foot and munches on a cheese slice from East Side Pies, a 6-foot-11 vessel of almost impossible proportion and boundless possibility, Mo Bamba has no worries.

“So what brings you to Austin?” he asks, smiling. He is aware this is not my first visit. A migraine headache confined Bamba in his dorm-room bed between workouts on Texas’s first official day of practice. He couldn’t open his eyes, let alone hold an audience, so he was unavailable to chat. Now he’s dealing with the ankle. I suggest he may be trying to duck the interview; Bamba says I’m bad luck and should be banned from the premises. He is 19 but precociously sharp and self-assured, a teenager who addresses Shaka Smart by his first name and who smacks the Longhorns coach on the rear end before an afternoon practice.

He knows who he is, and where he wants to be. Bamba chose to leave his native Harlem for one boarding school and then another. He asked Texas to recruit him, not the other way around. He followed the fairly standard grassroots basketball path, yet he distanced himself from its influence when evaluating his college options.

The ongoing federal investigations into college basketball recruiting have cast a pall over the methods that schools (and agents and others) use to procure talent. Yet at a time when many prospects of his stature have little say in their future, brokered by others as commodities, Bamba appears to be the rare elite player in control of his destiny. He’s here, it seems, through no one’s will but his own.

“Your college choice is ultimately a reflection of who you are,” he says.

Along the way, he also learned there’s only so much that’s up to him.

* * *

Mo Bamba was a consensus national top-five recruit. He is the Big 12 preseason Freshman of the Year, by way of media voting done in early October. He has a 7-foot-9 wingspan and can be one of the most impactful defenders in the nation, but he also has a fluid stroke from the perimeter that suggests, with more reps, he’ll add a long-range dimension to his game. Texas coaches have green-lighted him to corral defensive rebounds and initiate transition offense. Mostly, though, Bamba is just a preposterous physical specimen, the kind of player who can leap, snag a lob and maintain enough body control to finish a 360 dunk off the pass, as Bamba did on the last weekend of pickup games before official practices commenced. “I’m telling you, people are going to be, I don’t want to say surprised,” Texas assistant coach Mike Morrell says. “They’re going to be enlightened by how he can play.”

Bamba will not be in Austin for long; no one has delusions about that. But a keen understanding about where to go next, and when to go there, is what got him this far.

He grew up at 112th and Lenox in Harlem, living with his mother, Aminata Johnson, in a fourth-floor apartment just north of Central Park. Both his mother and his father, Lancine Bamba, immigrated from Cote d’Ivoire; they met in the United States in 1997, and Mo was born in 1998. (They are married but no longer live together.) He has two half-brothers from Aminata’s previous marriage, Sidiki and Ibrahim (Abe) Johnson. When asked to talk about his family, it’s as if Mo creates two folders: There is a mother he describes as the “best person ever” and a father, he says, who runs a close second. Then there are the brothers, six and four years his elder, whom Mo looked up to, who stoked his love of basketball with what Mo calls his “Kodak moments” of watching them play, whom he would laugh uproariously with, but who also made decisions that landed both in jail.

When people try to explain the divergent path Mo took, they usually begin with Lancine, a car-service driver known for a strict adherence to wearing a suit. Mo cannot remember his father’s wearing casual clothes until Lancine planned to don a coat and tie for a Texas football game during his son’s official recruiting visit, at which point Mo insisted upon a wardrobe change. Once, Lancine bought matching royal blue suits for himself and Mo, which thrilled Mo then even as it embarrasses him now, because he was able to dress like his dad. “The boy would listen,” Lancine says. “He grew up this way. He asked me a lot of questions when he was little. He followed me, whatever I was doing. Then more questions.”

The standards Lancine demanded of himself applied to his son. “If you didn’t put your head down and earn something the honest way, [Lancine] couldn’t care less [about the success],” says Greer Love, a vice president at Huron Capital in Detroit and a mentor to Mo since elementary school. When Lancine drove late-night routes in New York, he sometimes brought Mo along, and Mo observed how his father treated everyone with respect, even if they hadn’t earned it. “I think he always knew I was watching,” Mo says.

As Bamba approached eighth grade, he resolved to expand his world beyond Harlem. The dangers — violence and drugs, most notably — were too real. The people hanging around his brothers, in particular Sidiki, who had emerged as a top 100 basketball recruit himself, were too suspicious. Bamba craved both an escape and the exposure to something new. Bill Mitchell, the associate director of educational services at The Boys’ Club of New York, introduced Bamba to the possibility of attending Cardigan Mountain School in Caanan, N.H., an all-boys junior boarding school of about 200 students. When he presented the opportunity to his father, Lancine wondered if his son wanted to, as he puts it now, “go over there by the rich people.” Mo assured his father that he simply wanted to see what he was capable of. Off he went.



Bamba hardly could have conceived of a setting so different from the one he knew. Cell phones were not permitted. Students wore sport coats every day, even in the spring, when shorts and polo shirts were allowed. (Thursdays required “chapel dress,” which included a coat, a tie and dark socks — and it had to be a gray suit or the green blazer Cardigan provided with gray pants.) Conduct was strictly enforced. Show up late for lunch, for example, and “wait duty” was the consequence: serving and later clearing the trays for everyone in the cafeteria.

None of it was foisted upon him. It was necessary to bypass potentially deleterious forces at home. And Bamba never looked back. “It took me two to three months to get into the swing of things and develop habits,” he says. “But everywhere I’ve gone, thanks to Cardigan, has been kind of a breeze. I was able to get a college experience at the age of 14.”

After two years he had to find a new experience; Cardigan only serves students from sixth through ninth grade. Among the spots to get a call from Mitchell was Westtown (Pa.) School, another bucolic boarding institution founded in 1799 and located about 25 miles outside of Philadelphia, on the outskirts of the Main Line. Mitchell told Steve Tulleners, the school’s assistant director of upper school admission and an assistant basketball coach, that he had a kid for him. Then Andrew Cook, the basketball coach at Cardigan, sent Tulleners game film of Bamba competing in a tournament held at a tiny Boys & Girls Club gym in New York City.

From the camera’s severe vantage point on an elevated track above the floor, it was difficult to discern a 5-foot-8 kid from one who was a foot taller. But Tulleners saw a gangly player constantly talking to teammates, putting his arm around them and his coaches during stoppages in play. “That’s a lot of what we look for: What’s their presence on the floor?” Tulleners says. “That just matters to us.”

Bamba arrived for his visit to the school in a shirt and tie and boots, to mask the fact that his slacks were a few inches too short. He met the school’s director of admission, Nathan Bohn, and, unprompted, extended a hand: Hi, sir, I’m Mohamed Bamba. “Mo might be the only kid that’s ever done that,” Tulleners says. There ostensibly to explore the next outlet for his basketball talent, Bamba nevertheless asked what parts of the curriculum set Westtown apart. The senior project, which sends students almost anywhere in the world for roughly two weeks to explore disciplines that interest them, caught his attention. (As a senior, Bamba traveled to China with other classmates to hold clinics in various communities.)

Bamba decided to attend Westtown in April, fairly late in the admissions process. The timeline reflected not on Bamba’s laziness but his meticulousness. “He’s a detail-oriented kid,” Tulleners says. “He wants to know every single thing about everything, and then he wants to process.” The progressive, inclusive dynamic at Westtown — no dress codes, for one — allowed Bamba’s effusive personality to flourish. He’d put his arms around teachers if he sensed they were stressed. He was a prefect, essentially the boss of a dorm floor, a position that requires faculty vetting. He acquiesced to the public’s copious requests, even one by Tulleners’ four-year-old daughter, Mili, who wandered onto the floor about 45 minutes before the state championship game last spring and handed Bamba a tablet to autograph mid-warmup. “It was clear he’d have to make a choice someday,” says Tulleners. “Be a basketball player or a senator.”

The choice was really no choice. Once Bamba’s body control matched his on-floor IQ, he grew into one of the nation’s most sought-after prospects. In the summer of 2016, he attended a minicamp for USA Basketball’s U-18 team, coached by Smart. Bamba had only tangential knowledge of Smart, who after a stint at VCU, was entering his second season as Texas’s coach. An AAU teammate, Terry Larrier, spoke about how relentlessly Smart had pursued Larrier as a VCU recruit — waking up early to watch Larrier work out, introducing Larrier to his wife and daughter, and so on.

A high ankle sprain sidelined Bamba for the USA Basketball workouts, but he was struck by Smart’s commitment to player development and how he jumped into drills and competed with teenagers. “The great thing about it is, we really clicked in terms of relationship and getting along before there was any recruiting,” Smart says. “Because we weren’t recruiting him.”

Before the group left Colorado Springs, Bamba, mindful of his injury, asked Smart if he’d made the cut for the next minicamp in Houston, just before the team was to leave for the 2016 FIBA Americas Championship in Valdivia, Chile. Smart smiled and told Bamba he’d see him in Houston. During the tournament, Bamba averaged 7.0 points while logging just 69 minutes in five games, largely because Smart deployed Jarrett Allen, a five-star forward and a Texas signee, for extended periods. (Allen, by comparison, played 119 minutes.) To this day, Bamba chides Smart for playing favorites, but this actually worked in the Longhorns’ favor. “When you’re around a coach for that long, and they’re asking you things like how are you doing, and they’re not trying to get something out of it, it changes the whole dynamic,” Bamba says.

It prompted Bamba to ask Smart to recruit him, and he continued to be swayed by a personal touch. Smart was the only coach to tour the Westtown dorms and engage Bamba’s roommate in conversation. Still, Smart couldn’t quite grasp the reality of this relationship. Twice, he asked if Bamba was serious about his interest in the program. On the second occasion, Bamba assured him: He wouldn’t waste his time or Smart’s if the interest wasn’t genuine.

From there, Texas’s attention to detail vaulted it to the front of the line. If Bamba conducted a postgame interview at a high-profile event, he could count on a text message from the Longhorns within a day or two, with one of his quotes incorporated into a graphic featuring, say, a photo-shopped picture of he and Smart talking. When Bamba announced his commitment to Texas in May, in an essay for The Players’ Tribune, he cited Smart’s ability to pick up “something I mentioned in passing and [bring] it back full circle several months later.”

When he arrived in Austin this summer, later than most freshman because of academic commitments at Westtown, he was picked up at the airport by fellow first-year Longhorn Matt Coleman. This innocuous gesture nevertheless confirmed to Bamba that he had come to the right place.

Then, sitting in a summer school class one day in late June, his phone buzzed.

* * *

What is going on? the text message from a family member read.

What are you talking about? Mo replied.

Soon, Bamba had his explanation: His half-brother, Ibrahim, had recorded and published a 22-minute Facebook Live video in which he accused Mo of receiving impermissible extra benefits from Love, his longtime mentor. If that were true, it could have compromised Mo’s eligibility. Ibrahim talked about trips paid for by Love and cash given to Mo. Ibrahim talked about an agreement that had been in place to make him Mo’s agent, from which Love and Mo supposedly backed off. He said he had “exposed” his half-brother to the NCAA.

“I knew how I went through my recruiting process,” Bamba says. “I was very straightforward about things like that. My whole thing was just, Why? Why is this happening?”



The exact why is difficult to discern. It appeared to be retaliation by Ibrahim for being sidelined in decisions about his half-brother’s future, with Love the primary target of the ire. “That didn’t just happen. There were a number of events that led up to that,” Tulleners says. “I wanted to say [to Mo], ‘Yo, cut [Ibrahim] off. Enough is enough.’ But from listening to Mo, it was very clear he was heartbroken this was happening. Not, Woe is me. Like, I just don’t want it go this way.”

Ibrahim’s video brought renewed NCAA scrutiny to Mo’s relationship with Love and thrust it into the national consciousness: Was Love uncompromised and well-intentioned, as his history suggested, or was he another profiteer aiming to cash in on a top talent?

Their relationship dated back to 2008, when Love was 25 and working for Watch Hill Partners, a boutique investment bank, clocking the 70- to 80-hour weeks typical for young finance guys in Manhattan. Seeking a way to contribute to the community, Love searched the database at New York Cares, an organization that matches prospective volunteers with something that might fill a passion, from working with the elderly to taking care of animals. When Love was an undergraduate at Indiana, he served as a tutor in the athletic department, which instilled in him the value of merging academic mentorship with athletics. His new venture brought him to a Saturday basketball clinic at P.S. 208, an elementary school in Harlem. Believing the program could use more structure — “Sixty kids in a small gym, dump out 20 basketballs,” as Love describes it now — he worked with principal Susan Green on developing a program in which the kids on the team would do schoolwork for 90 minutes after classes and then practice basketball for another 90 minutes. Love networked with other physical education teachers in Harlem to create an ad hoc league and funded the program himself. He called the participants Locke’s Lions, an homage to the proper name of the school (Alain L. Locke Elementary) and Love’s favorite NFL franchise.

And in the Lions’ first year, because the team was to be for fifth-graders only, Love cut a lanky fourth-grader named Mo Bamba — it irked Bamba because they made an exception for his close friend, Denario Watkins, also a fourth-grader. “It was kind of BS,” Bamba says now. “But it’s O.K. I’m over it.”

He pauses, then adds: “I’m getting over it.”

As a fifth-grader, Bamba earned his spot on the team. Love continued as a mentor. He even taught Bamba long division. “I have the same method to this day,” Bamba says. After Love moved back to his home state to pursue an MBA at Michigan, he stayed in touch with all of Locke’s Lions, participating in text-message threads, offering them help with academic work, meeting for meals when he visited New York or setting up trips with the group with an educational underpinning, like a venture to Detroit where they toured the Henry Ford Museum and saw the Rosa Parks bus. Love’s overarching message to the group: He was always just a phone call away. As Bamba moved from New York to New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, he maintained his connection with Love.

He played for the PSA Cardinals grassroots program, and his coach, Terrance (Munch) Williams, was involved in the early stages of recruiting. When things got serious later on, Bamba, whose parents were indifferent to the world of athletics, increasingly turned to Love for counsel. Being a finance guy, Love drew up spreadsheets. The two of them dove into advanced basketball metrics, tracking the usage rates, rebound percentages, block percentages, 3-point percentages, etc. of frontcourt players at various schools. They catalogued how many first-round draft picks and one-and-dones a program had produced in recent years, as well as how many NBA front-office personnel were alumni of a given school. They noted how many Fortune 500 CEOs a school produced and its number of living alumni worldwide. They put it all in a binder for Bamba to reference. And then he pored over the data to inform his decision.

“He’s seen the results of what happens when you get torn in too many directions and how these types of competing influences can negatively affect people,” Love says. “Unfortunately in this industry, there are five sad stories for every positive story. He was just really looking to be different.”

The combination of hard data and Smart’s personality drove Bamba to Austin. It was, for a time, all good. When the Facebook video surfaced on June 29, Bamba’s first impulse was to address the incident with his team. He wanted them to understand the context. He wanted to assure them everything would turn out fine; it was just going to be weird for a few days. “[Bamba] handled it so well outwardly that sometimes I worried about how he was feeling on the inside,” Smart says. “But Mo has been through a lot in his life. And Mo has also had to grow up fast. He’s a little bit farther along in terms of dealing with things than most people.”

His father told him to worry about his education and his team. Go play your ball, Lancine advised. Take it off your mind. It wouldn’t be on Mo’s mind long anyway. The NCAA, which had already investigated Bamba’s relationship with Love and the Locke’s Lions during the initial eligibility certification process, reexamined the issue. (In fact, to ensure they weren’t bound for a pitfall, Love and Bamba had been in weekly contact with a former major-conference compliance officer during Bamba’s recruitment.) After a relatively expeditious 12 days, the NCAA reissued a verdict: The involvement with Love passed the pre-existing relationship test, and similar benefits had been provided to all the Locke’s Lions, including those who didn’t pursue athletic endeavors. Bamba was clear. “To have something like [the Facebook video] happen,” Love says, “it sort of feels like no good deed goes unpunished.”

But it also underscored why Bamba felt compelled to dictate his own fate. His brothers had always set the examples, good and bad. “I said if you follow [my] way, it’s going to be better for you,” Lancine says. Sidiki rose to prominence as a 6-foot-10 recruit out of Harlem, signing with Arizona in 2011, and Mo was as wowed by the glamour of it as any middle-schooler might be. But Sidiki played just three games with the Wildcats before leaving the team due to a violation of team rules. He transferred to Providence and left that program after 11 games in the 2012-13 season. His professional career subsequently fizzled out, and in June 2015, Sidiki was jailed for robbery and attempted robbery. He’s currently an inmate at medium-security Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., awaiting a possible January 2018 parole date while serving a maximum four-year sentence. Ibrahim may have begun to drift away from Mo before he posted the video; Lancine recalls a conversation with Mo during his time at Westtown in which Mo voiced trepidation with foreboding behavior he saw in Ibrahim. And Ibrahim effectively disappeared from Mo’s life after the Facebook video — “They don’t talk,” Lancine says — and then was arrested on Oct. 9 in Iowa on forgery charges. He remains in Polk County Jail, per county records, awaiting a November court appearance.

As close as Mo might have wished to be with his siblings, he recognized where his path must diverge from theirs. “I had my older brothers to make mistakes and live through them,” he says. After years of controlling damn near everything, though, he could not control an attempted betrayal. He could only control what came next. He says he learned about himself, and what he could overcome.

It is probably too much to say Mo Bamba forgives his brother. But it says something that he refuses to damn him altogether. “I wouldn’t wish it on someone else,” he says. “But at the end of the day, he’s always going to be my brother.”

* * *

“As crazy as it sounds,” Mo Bamba says of Matthew McConaughey, “his voice is very soothing.”

Aside from the occasional literal or figurative headache, life is actually pretty good. To wit: As Bamba was closing in on a college decision, Smart heard from McConaughey, the Oscar winner, Texas grad and football-game sideline fixture. Like any fan, McConaughey wanted to know where the program stood with this five-star phenom. So, once Bamba had enrolled, and mindful that both sides were not-so-secretly keen on each other, Smart put in a call. It went to voicemail. Then, during lunch at the Texas Athletics and Nutrition Center, his phone rang. Smart answered. He said things were going well and that he was sitting with someone who wanted to say hello.

Which is how McConaughey and Bamba came to talk for 10 minutes about Texas, life in the spotlight and enjoying the moment in college. It was as if they were longtime acquaintances finally reconnecting. “I’m not saying he’s on the level of Matthew McConaughey,” Smart says, “but Mo thought he was.”

He is now at a place where no one puts a limit on what he can be. Bamba has outstanding instincts for defense, rebounding, and shot-blocking, and the rest of the package is being refined daily. Bamba is lean and lithe at 225 pounds, but the Longhorns believe the stature betrays some natural strength. He has completed a chin-up with 90 pounds chained to his waist and came up just short with 100 pounds attached— no minor feat given the dimensions of the arms doing the pulling. A next step is Bamba playing with more balance to become a more efficient scorer. “That’s a lot of length and moving parts,” Texas assistant coach Darrin Horn says. “If he’s not on balance, it’s harder to use his gifts around the rim.”

And the gifts are plentiful.

“I’ve seen him get the rebound, push it full court, dunk on one of our players,” Coleman says. “I saw him jab step, three. I saw him jab step, pump fake, one dribble and dunk. We call it his ‘bag.’ He goes in his bag sometimes.”

Bamba remains advanced in other ways too. Texas coaches have implored their guards to simply throw the ball in the general vicinity of a star freshman with exceptional length and bounce and let him go get it. One day, Bamba pulled Horn aside and addressed a concern: The guards will be less aggressive throwing lobs, he argued, if coaches harped on them about turning it over when they do. “That’s some pretty high-level stuff,” Horn says. “Not just the what, but the why and the how.”

Bamba is probably the first player, as far as manager Austin Northcutt can recollect, to inquire about Northcutt’s family. Mo tells inquisitive strangers that he’s a volleyball player. He has taken piano lessons from a student who lives in his dorm, and so far has learned a bit of “The Eyes of Texas,” “One Love” and “Happy Birthday.” He ate ribs for the first time on the Longhorns’ preseason tour of Australia. He’s put on a cowboy hat for a stadium video during a football game and sat in on the Texas GameDay set for Longhorn Network. The next enterprise at hand is adding a new identity: the recruit who fuels the Texas program’s ascent into national elite status. “What I envision for the program was to completely turn things around,” Bamba says, noting the 11-victory season that preceded his arrival. “As I went on with my basketball career, I kind of fell into this thing that I loved winning and hated losing. Losing is part of the game but you don’t want to lose so much that you’re becoming O.K. with it. I wanted to bring that mentality to wherever I was going. This was the place I felt I could have the most impact.”

Many players say this, of course. And Bamba has learned he cannot control all of what comes next, no matter how hard he tries. But he does continue to try. And given the issues besieging college basketball, it would be nice to believe Mo Bamba’s way can work, that no one uses anyone and everyone gets what they want in the end.

(Top and bottom photo courtesy of the University of Texas)

(USA Basketball photo courtesy of Sam Forencich)

(Childhood photo courtesy of Greer Love)