Keno Davis recalls getting on the school bus as an eighth-grader and being greeted by his middle school classmates chanting “USSR.”
Tom Davis, Keno Davis’ father, and the Iowa Hawkeyes basketball team had just lost an exhibition game to the Soviet Union National Basketball Team prior to the 1986-87 season.
“All of the sudden,” Davis said. “I knew that Iowa basketball was big.”
Occurrences such as these were a theme in Keno Davis’ life growing up as the son of an NCAA Division I basketball coach.
His first memory of the game is as a ball boy at Boston College where his father coached from 1977 until 1982.