COLUMBIA — He stepped off the plane into John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, a world away from where he had started. Chris Silva was supposed to be met by a basketball coach, but he didn’t know what he looked like, and he didn’t speak the language. He was 15 years old, and scared — and yet, knew the most difficult part of the journey was already behind him.
“If I got here,” he said, “that means anything could happen.”
These days Silva is a dynamic freshman forward at South Carolina, and already a crowd favorite thanks to an athleticism that can deliver rim-rattling dunks.