A Story of Love for Valentine’s Day

Here’s a love tale of Valentine’s Day coming up.

In reality, five years ago, it began on Mother’s Day.

On Mother’s Day, he gave me a card, and as soon as I read it, I started crying,
Sara spoke to her youngest sibling, Ted, who was a senior at Illinois Community High School in Geneva at the time. He said that by changing his name, he decided to respect me. He wanted Love to be his last name.

He was Ted McDonald at the time. That last name belonged to his father, who had ended his marriage to Sara when Ted was 10.

Sara recalled. “I was like… if you were confident… if you were sure… if you were sure.”

He said that he was completely confident and that he told me very nicely right on the card.

The split between his parents was tough on Ted, who was a kind and compassionate child.

Abruptly, he and his mom left Vermont and went back to Illinois, where their parents were staying. He hadn’t had time in Vermont to say farewell to his friends and he was struggling to find new friends.

“He was,” Sara said, “a very, very thin kid. Basically, he didn’t gain weight until he got divorced. There was stuff I’m sure that irritated him. It can be a very unpleasant situation because you are the youngest (of five kids) when it happens and you’re at home.”

Thanks to the encouragement and embrace he got from his mother and her parents, especially his grandfather, Leonard Love, a veteran of the Korean War who was an accomplished golfer and soon developed an indelible — and often difficult — relationship with his grandson, he found his footing.

Ted just liked him too much. Sara was talking about her dad, who passed away two years ago. With him, he loved every moment.

Ted — who had continued to rise — started to make a name for himself in football and basketball at high school. He was recruited by the likes of Illinois, Bowling Green, and Western Illinois in football, and Northern Kentucky, Northern Illinois, South Dakota State, and a few other basketball colleges as an offensive and defensive lineman.

But he ripped the ACL and meniscus of his left knee during the very last football game of his senior season. It cost him his basketball season, and colleges withdrew their scholarship offers from him as his weight rose to almost 320 pounds.

The State of South Dakota, then coached by Adam Diaz, had not reneged. But when, after 21 seasons, Adam quit school that spring and took the Wright State position, Love accompanied him to Ohio — paying back the devotion the coach had shown him.

Love has grown up over the past five seasons at Wright State — a redshirt year, followed by four seasons on the field — as he has become smaller.

He’ll be 23 in two months. His body has undergone an extraordinary transformation and now he’s down to just over 250 pounds. While his first three seasons here were classified as 6-foot-9 by WSU, the last two were presented as 6-foot-8.

He has maintained the openness and kindness he had as a child despite it all — and unnoticed to anyone in the Raiders’ program or Love’s circle of family and friends.

The most amazing part of him is that.

He has been one of the best stars in the history of WSU Basketball. He’s the all-time top rebounder of the Raiders — he has 1,076 heading into tonight’s game at the Nutter Center versus Milwaukee — and he’s sixth with 1,694 in career points. He could be third by the end of the season, behind only Bill Edwards and DaShaun Wood.

As a newcomer, the conference’s player of the year last season, he was named the Horizon League Rookie of the Year and is currently on the midseason watch list for the Lou Henson Award given to the country’s best mid-major Division I player.

It’s a fair bet Love would forgo the extra eligibility year that the NCAA is giving to all players from this truncated COVID-19 season and go off to play professionally after this season, having already graduated and now focusing on his masters.

I’m dwelling on this season and, Love said, I haven’t made a decision yet. And when I do, they’ll be the first to meet my coaches and my mom.

In matter-of-fact earnestness, he said it and it made you see once again that the more things changed with him, the more the same things stayed.

He’s a pleasure to mentor.

Nobody cherishes passion more than Adam:

He’s been a godsend, from my viewpoint. I feel like God sent Ted to get me through this time, shifting roles as I did after 21 years. He was encouraging us to continue what we were trying to do here.

Love redshirted his first year here, still healing from knee surgery and struggling to keep his weight down.

He’s played for the Raiders in four seasons (115 games), he’s averaging 14.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a night — he’s averaged 25 points and 11 rebounds over the last three games — and WSU has gone 86–25.

The relationship between Adam and his straight-laced fixation over the years, particularly in the beginning, and Love, the “gentle giant” as his mother referred to him with his ever-changing hairstyles, may have been a remake of The Odd Couple, the famous comedic movie starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

But now, both Adam and Love helped the other develop, and there is a real connection between them.

With admiration and an appreciation that his tough love is supposed to make him happier, Sara said her son looks at Adam somehow the same way he looked at his late grandad.

Adam said he’s a delight to mentor. And he’s been a wonderful team-mate for our players. He doesn’t have much ambition, which I admire, for personal glory. Still, however, in terms of his game, I wish he was a little more selfish.

When he’s the focal point of the crowd, the opposing teams or the press, love becomes uneasy:

In reality, because I think it takes away from my teammates and how valuable they are, I hate it. A lot of them, frankly, are more professional than I am.

All the publicity I don’t want. We’re not here for these particular items. We’re a squad.

He could also do without being seen as the musclebound enforcer of the squad, although he has a cardboard cutout — propped up, fanlike, in the seats at the Nutter Center — that shows him double flex in a bulging biceps.

He said. “But, well, there’s more to me than just a flat cutout of cardboard.

When Ted was young, Sara recalled a school conference: his teacher said, ‘What an empathetic little kid! He cares for others, and today, I can still see that in him.

She said that it bothered him that the players he was buddies with left the team early to play anywhere else.

And if you’ve been seeing him before games in years gone by, you’ve seen the relationship he’s had with one of the coaches, and how they’re going to shoot out on the floor.

Then he honored his wheelchair-bound teammate, Ryan Custer, during Senior Night last year by taking off his regular No, 11 jerseys before the game so he could wear Custer’s no-longer-used No33 and send it one final spotlight on the court.

He gave me his confidence,

Adam said he appreciates Love’s devotion in particular.

For whatever cause, Adam said, he had given me his confidence. It is really tough, in this day and age, to keep a really good player like him in a program like ours. There are too many entities seeking to pick them off. But because he trusts in us and what we’re doing, he stuck with us.

Sara said that in a daily diary he maintains, her son has chronicled his career here.

She said he was such a good writer, referencing the Mother’s Day letter and then going back to a school assignment that he once had:

The teacher wanted them to compose a story about a song. And he did Like a Rolling Stone for Bob Dylan.

The instructor placed a dollar sign at the end of the page and wrote:

“Well, Ted, it looks like you’re definitely going to make some money one day doing this.”

The teacher was correct.

The tale of Love is his.

It’s a true Valentine.

This post previously published on Medium.

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