Lucas: A Different Motivation

By Adam Lucas

This story is supposed to be about getting to know Christian Keeling, and on this day, there's no way to get to know Christian Keeling without first getting to know Deirdre Keeling.

The interview with Carolina's graduate transfer from Charleston Southern took place on Monday, and Keeling quickly admits he has his mother on his mind. Monday would be her birthday, and as he walks around campus as a graduate student—having graduated from Charleston Southern in three years—and likely contributor to one of the nation's best basketball teams, he knows exactly what his mother would say:

"Make sure your head doesn't get too big," he says with a grin. "She would be so happy for me, especially on the academic side. She would be crying about me graduating in three years and going to grad school."

One of the newest Tar Heels knows exactly how his mother would feel because that's how she raised him. The rule in the Keeling house in Georgia, where Deirdre was a single mother and sometimes worked two jobs to provide for Christian and his siblings, was simple: "I will take basketball away if you don't do your school work."

There were times when a younger Christian might spend a little too much time having fun hanging out with his friends (which led to another Deirdre rule: "Get inside before the streetlights come on or else I'm locking you out") and even getting into some occasional trouble in a neighborhood where trouble was easy to find.

But ultimately, the example set by his mother was too powerful for him to follow the path some of his friends took into gang activity or legal run-ins. "I never met a harder working woman," Christian says. "There were times she didn't eat because she was making sure we ate. She gave me a role model on how to love other people, how to be unselfish, and how to be humble. She taught us we had to be gritty and how to deal with obstacles. She always told us that the character of a person is shown by how you persevere with adversity."

And it wasn't long before the Keeling household would deal with the most difficult type of adversity. During Christian's junior year at Laney High in Augusta, Ga., his mother told him she was having some pains in her side. She was a Licensed Practical Nurse, so he knew she knew how to take care of herself. Eventually, she told him she had stage one stomach cancer.

"She would lose weight and get real skinny, and then she'd put on a little weight, and then she'd lose it again," he says.

But Christian had a teenager's view of the world. He couldn't imagine the world without his mother, so it made sense that she'd always be in his world. Even when Deirdre shaved her head, he went to the internet, researched stage one cancer, and decided the road ahead would be difficult but manageable.

Deirdre's condition deteriorated as spring approached, and she died on April 13, 2015. It was only at that time that family members told Christian his mother's condition had actually been the more serious stage four cancer.

"She didn't want to tell us what was happening," he says. "She knew I would've stopped going to school, stopped playing basketball, stopped everything in my life to be with her, because I care about her more than I care about that stuff. As I've matured and thought about it, she did it for the betterment of her kids. She wanted to make sure even until her last day that we would keep striving to get where we're going."

And so he has. Keeling and the Tar Heels will open practice on Thursday and debut for the public on Friday at Late Night with Roy Williams. He has big dreams for this season, most notably returning to Georgia with the Tar Heels on the final Monday night of the season for the national championship game.

His basketball career has ascended exponentially from that junior season of high school, when he barely averaged double figures in scoring. He was a 20+ point scorer his senior year in high school, then compiled three years of gaudy numbers at Charleston Southern. And now he'll compete for a year at the highest level of college basketball.

"There was a fire put inside of me going into my senior year," Keeling says. "Some people say it doesn't happen overnight, but this happened overnight. I was so determined. Basketball became a mission. I knew I wanted to use it as a tool to get my degree, but I also want to use it to change the rest of my life. I want basketball to help me honor my mother by building an adult care home or starting a foundation to build that type of facility. I'm driven in a different way."

Players Mentioned

Christian Keeling

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