How Barry Brown Jr. became the essence of a gritty K-State team

Barry Brown Sr., the father of Kansas State’s star guard, was “a knucklehead” as a teen, he’s quick to tell you.

And that’s why one night he fired a gun in the air and ended up being arrested for second-degree murder and spending 55 days in jail before being released for a crime he hadn’t committed.

“Sometimes, God puts us through things to prepare us for other things,” said Brown, now a school principal and long-time educator. “It changed my life. It was purposeful.”

What he considers the grace of a second chance led him to becoming a star basketball player at Jacksonville University.

More significantly, though it set him on a path to a true calling: to teach, to coach, to father.

To try to keep his children, not to mention his students and players, from feeling the need to “touch the stove themselves” even as he zealously sought their best.

He looked at his first son, Barry Jr., as “my opportunity to get it right,” so that meant unleashing his love and fierce demands upon a young man who has come to embody a Kansas State team in the Sweet 16 for just the second time in 30 years.

“I didn’t play,” the father said by telephone Wednesday from Florida. “He was going to get it …or get it.”

Now, when the father thinks about the qualities he wanted to see in all his children, he finds them in Barry Jr: an insatiable work ethic; being humble and generous; personal integrity …

And mostly just being “the best version” of himself.

“Now, we have dialogue as men,” the father said, adding, “I’m just walking around with my chest out and my chin up.”

Those traits show up off the court, but they’re evident — and pivotal to the Wildcats — on the court.

The All-Big 12 guard who averages 16.1 points a game is the best defensive player on a team whose trademark is just that — something he emphatically reminded in K-State’s NCAA Tournament victories over Creighton and UMBC en route to their showdown on Thursday with Kentucky.

Epitomizing a relatively low-profile group, he was overlooked by many on the recruiting trail. Coach Bruce Weber called him the eighth man (he was actually sixth) on a Florida AAU team led by Ben Simmons and several other high-profile major-college recruits.

K-State more or less blundered across him when it was looking at others, and at the time it was seen as less than a coup.

He’s the lightning rod for the team now, really, the guy Weber says he yells at when he’s mad at other players because he knows he can absorb it and get stronger by it and diffuse it among teammates.

His work ethic sets the tone for the team, freshman guard Mike McGuirl said, saying “he never takes anything off: He never takes a play off, a day off, a rep off” and adding “he’s as resilient as anybody.”

About that resilience:

When Brown got poked in the eye by Devonte’ Graham less than two minutes into K-State’s Big 12 tournament game against Kansas at the Sprint Center, his father was back home in Florida watching on television and jarred at the sight of his son writhing in pain.

“Falling down and wallowing, we don’t do that,” said the father, who coached his son at multiple levels. “They were taught, ‘You fall down, you don’t play any more. You do all that acting stuff, you don’t play any more.’ ”

No, he wasn’t acting. Not when he realized blood was coming from his eye.

“I was scared out of my mind,” said Brown, who briefly wondered if he might lose sight in the eye. “I was scared, I was nervous. I didn’t know what the future was going to hold.”

He wasn’t able to play that night, what with his eye remaining swollen and seeing two rims and all when he tried to shoot.

(He understood that it was inadvertent by Graham, who apologized after the game and touched based with him a few days later).

Sure enough, though, he was back days later to score 18 in each of K-State’s NCAA Tournament wins while squelching the likes of Creighton’s Marcus Foster (two of 11 field goals) and UMBC’s Jairus Lyles (four of 15) … and will need to have a similar kind of impact against Kentucky for K-State to have any chance to advance further.

The dynamic of father being harsh on his son was a thread of Barry Jr.’s upbringing, something Barry Sr. acknowledges made some believe he was too hard on him.

Perhaps one night in elementary school illustrated this as much as anything else.

As the son remembers it, this was the day he was going to learn to make right-handed layups on the basket they had in the front yard.

But his brain couldn’t make his legs plant the correct foot, and so for hours they stayed out there trying to do it right.

The son cried, the son was fed up, the son was done with basketball. And now it was after 11 p.m., and the father kept saying, “ ‘I know you can do it, you’re going to do it, and we’re not leaving until you do.’ ”

That, he added, “was just the bottom line. That’s the way it was with a lot of things.”

It wasn’t about basketball; it was about teaching him the meaning of work — and that he will be defined by that.

As much as he hated it that night, it all ultimately took.

Even as the son wants to be known for making his own way, he also credits his father with instilling this hard drive.

His father’s “tribulations,” his stories of jail time, his fierce edicts, made for guideposts in both what to do and what not to do.

“It’s like taking a test and having all the answers,” said Barry Jr., who is studying financial planning and had a 3.2 GPA in high school, according to his father.

With the help of considerable trial and error of his father, now in his eighth year as a principal in the Pinellas County (Fla.) school system.

“I think the biggest part of parenting is the modeling,” he said. “Sometimes, we have to show our imperfections to allow kids not to make those same kinds of mistakes and for them to really understand where we’re coming from.”

This story was originally published March 21, 2018 at 6:39 PM with the headline "How Barry Brown Jr. became the essence of a gritty K-State team."