“Love wounds … and mars.”
That’s not only the opening of a song covered by everybody from the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison to the band Nazareth, but it is the final dispatch of a Wright State backboard by Raiders’ new big man, Loudon Love.
It happened before a mid-September workout in the Pavilion gym in the Mills Morgan Center.
“I dunked the ball two hands, nothin’ crazy, and I guess it’s the way I hit the rim or something because it took out the backboard,” Love said. “It just kind of shattered it all the way up and I got a little glass in my hair and some fell on the court.”
He said Nick Goff, the director of basketball operations, took a picture of the scarred and marred backboard and sent it on to athletics director Bob Grant.
“He sent it on kind of like to say, ‘Look what we did,’ and I was afraid it was gonna be bad,” Love said. “Instead our AD tweeted the picture out.”
Grant’s tweet said: “Hey pavilion backboard. Meet the new big guy!”
And now Love uses that image as the cover photo on his own Twitter account.
Back home in Geneva, Ill., Laura Love didn’t need to see the photo to picture the damage her son had done. She just had to think back to the backboards and rims in their driveway.
“We had five different hoops, so that should tell you something,” she said with a laugh. “I know he bent one down and I think he shattered the backboard on another.
“He’s a big boy.”
In high school he had the nickname “Big Lou,” and it fits. When you look at the latest rendition of the WSU basketball team, which opens its season Friday night at Southern Illinois, Love is the biggest thing you see. And, at just 18, he might still be growing, said his mom.
When he first got to campus, Love said he was 6-foot-9 and 315 pounds.
The school now officially lists him at 300 pounds, a designation that makes him shake his head … and one that we’ll get to later.
Yet there is no denying he looks like a football lineman and a year ago that’s just what he was. An offensive tackle and a defensive end at Geneva Community High School outside Chicago, he had been good enough that following his sophomore year, the University of Illinois offered him a football scholarship. Eventually, Bowling Green and Western Illinois did, too.
As a basketball player he got offers from Northern Illinois, Western Illinois, Northern Kentucky, Maryland-Baltimore County, UMass Lowell and South Dakota State.
He ended up at Wright State thanks to a lot of happenstance.
“The conventional wisdom, at first, was that he was going to play football,” said new WSU coach Scott Nagy. “That’s what everyone thought, so a lot of people didn’t recruit him because of it.”
Nagy, then the coach at South Dakota State, did go after him:
“When he told us that he didn’t like football, that he wanted to play college basketball, we took him at his word.”
But then almost a year ago exactly, Love tore his ACL and meniscus on the last play of the football season. His team was trailing badly in a game they had figured to win and on that final play, the seniors on the field tried a hook-and-ladder play.
Love ended up with the ball and was tackled by an opposing player, whose hit destroyed his knee. The ensuing surgery cost him his senior basketball season, which enabled South Dakota State — which had not rescinded its offer — to land him.
“If he had played his senior year, he would have been seen more and we might not have gotten him,” Nagy said.
But then when Nagy left in early April for the Wright State job, Love de-committed from South Dakota State and soon followed to WSU.
Nickname contest?
Love — who used to be known as Loudon Vollbrecht — was raised in Vermont until he was about 10. When his parents split, he and his mom moved back to Illinois where she, with the help of Loudon’s granddad, nurtured and supported him.
Over this past summer Loudon legally took on her last name rather than his dad’s.
Loudon Love is a little flashier and maybe, after he’s had it for more than just a few months, it will produce a new nickname:
Love Machine?
Tough Love?
Big Love?
“Nothing has really come up yet,” he said with a laugh, “Maybe something special will happen this season and then it will.”
If his hoops skills don’t initiate it, maybe his dance moves will.
“Even though I might embarrass myself, I love to dance,” he said. “I like to joke around too, so it goes hand in hand. My dancing’s kind of funny because it’s so bad. It’s something I’ll do for the guys as a little pick-me-up before morning lifting.
“On Picture Day they took a shot of me doing a dance move — I was dabbing with a basketball in my hand — and I might put that up (on Twitter) instead.”
Laura said her son has always been drawn to dance:
“Let me tell you, Loudon was very observant from a young, young age. His three older brothers and his sister all took Irish dancing and he used to sit in my lap — he wasn’t even a year old — and he was mesmerized by it. Even in high school, he did a few ballet dance lessons.”
She says that passion, as much as his hoops, might just produce that new nickname.
“We’ll see what happens if he starts doing some real dance moves,” she laughed. “Then we’d all be in trouble.”
Could sit a season
Nagy said the big decision he’s wrestling with now is whether to have Love redshirt this season.
“We’re wondering if he wouldn’t benefit from sitting out a year so he could get better defensively and develop,” Nagy said. “You weigh a freshman year when you’re not sure how much he would get to play against a fifth year when he’d play all the time and hopefully be a dominant player.
“That’s the big question now. I’m concerned about his defense, but at the same time he can be a mismatch offensively now because he’s so big and hard to get around.
“Right now the game is coming at him pretty fast and it’s because he hasn’t played in a year. I know it’s tough for anyone to sit out — especially in today’s world where everything is microwaved and you got to have it now — but he could develop and really make some strides.”
Love said on one front he really has made some strides, even if his coach doesn’t always see it.
“I’ve lost 20 pounds since I got here,” he said. “But coach will get on one of the other guys and say, ‘You’re getting beat down the floor by a 300-pound man!’
“And I’m like, ‘Hey, coach, 295!’ ”
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