Detroit Mercy’s Mike Davis Jr., and a season of hope after his stroke

DETROIT — Mike Davis Jr. is the son of Detroit Mercy head basketball coach Mike Davis, who you’ve probably heard of. The older Mike Davis has been a household name in college basketball since 2000. He has taken three programs to the NCAA Tournament, famously replaced Bob Knight at Indiana and coached in the 2002 national title game.

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Mike Davis Jr. is also the older brother of Antoine Davis, who you should know by now. Antoine is the leading returning scorer in NCAA basketball. He’s a 6-foot, 155-pound inferno, the game’s most audacious mismatch of size and scoring since Steph Curry. He averaged 26.1 points per game as a freshman, playing through double- and triple-teams by season’s end.

Who, though, is Mike Davis Jr.? On this day, he’s a man who’s happy to be here, happy to have this conversation, happy to tell his story for the first time. You don’t know who he is and that’s OK. He says he’s got a lot more living to do.

“Just happy to see another season,” he says.

Davis Jr. is 34. He’s entering his second season as an assistant coach on his father’s staff at Detroit Mercy, a hard-luck place that requires coaches who believe in second chances. He’s single, no kids. He’s trim, a former player himself. He tore an Achilles tendon during a team workout last year, and, as far as he can remember, it’s the only major injury he has ever suffered. As a college coach, his specialty is connecting with kids and serving as a generational translator between the players and the 59-year-old head coach. “He talks to them on their level,” Mike Davis says.

All this makes that night back in early June all the more unfathomable.

Sitting perched in the bleachers during a Monday afternoon practice at Calihan Hall, Mike Davis Jr. flashes through the memories. He holds his right arm, squeezing his forearm. He remembers when it went numb. He remembers trying to call out, but no words coming out. He remembers trying to stand and collapsing to the floor. He remembers trying to type a text message into his phone and only producing a jumble of letters.

It was Thursday, June 6, when Davis suffered a stroke. He still can’t understand it. No one can. Despite endless blood tests, doctors have been unable to determine what caused the stroke. All that’s known for sure is this: The ending could’ve been far, far worse.

A dutiful son, Davis was in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on an offseason visit to his mother, Teresa Washington. He drove there from Houston, a nine-hour haul, after spending a few days with his goddaughter. It was around midnight when he went to bed feeling unusually fatigued. He jokingly sent a text message to his mother in the other room. “Momma, it’s hot in here. You’re gonna make me go get a room.” In fact, the house temperature was fine. It was Davis who was heating up.

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That’s when he began to lose feeling in his right arm.

Picking up his phone, Davis couldn’t type in his passcode.

“That’s when I knew I was in trouble,” he says now.

Getting out of bed, Davis immediately fell to the ground.

“At this point, I’m like, ‘OK, what is going on? I’ve never felt like this,’” he says. “I thought it was just my right arm. But then I realized it was my whole right side. The crazy part, though, was that my mind felt right, but I couldn’t move or speak. I thought I was yelling, ‘Help!’ but really, I was just speaking gibberish.”

Trapped in his body, Davis laid on the floor for 10 minutes before his mother walked in. She thought she’d heard a yell and a crash. In fact, Mike cracked a slat on the bottom of the bed when he fell. Washington did her best not to panic. She called 911 but had no idea what to say. She didn’t know what was wrong with Mike because he couldn’t tell her. She held the phone up, pleading with Mike to explain what was happening.

“I was saying, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him! I don’t know! I don’t know!’ ” Washington says. “He was just saying nonsense words. Once they heard that, they sent an ambulance right away.”

Finally, Mike stood up under his own weight, getting back to his feet. The medics arrived, taking him to a hospital 10 minutes away, racing through the still night with lights swirling. Once there, he still struggled to find his words. At one point he blurted out, “Did I have a stroke?” Tears welled in his eyes.

Washington called her ex-husband in Detroit and said something was wrong with Mike.

“A bad call to get for any parent,” Mike Davis says. “What do you do?”

Father and son tried to speak on FaceTime, looking at each other, the young and the old. Mike’s words remained scattershot. His dad could see the frustration on his son’s face. “He knew who I was, but he couldn’t communicate.” After saying goodbye, Mike Davis booked a 10 a.m. flight from Detroit to Alabama.

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The elder Mike Davis didn’t sleep that night. Recent years have brought him closer and closer to his son, making up for lost time. Mike Davis Jr. was 5 when his parents divorced. He remained with his mother in Alabama but eventually begged to join his father in Indiana when he was hired by Knight as an assistant in 1997. Young Mike arrived as a child and eventually enrolled at Bloomington North High. He was a good, emerging player on the court, but rarely saw his father. Mike remembers: “My dad felt like he had to be in the office earlier than Coach Knight and leave later. He’d be gone before 7 a.m. and home after 10.”

“I wasn’t there,” Mike Davis says. “There was so much demand on my time. I didn’t know how to balance it. Now I do.”

In 2000, their world spun off its axis when Knight was fired and Davis was named interim head coach, a job he locked down after reaching the NCAA Tournament in his first season. Two years later, Mike Davis Jr. was a high school senior leading Bloomington North in scoring, but there was no spot for him at Indiana. His dad didn’t want to put his son in what he says was a potentially toxic situation. He told The Courier-Journal in Louisville: “I catch enough crap. I can take it, but when you start talking about my boy, that gets real personal. Why put him through that?”

Mike Davis Jr. instead trekked off to prep school at Bridgton Academy in Maine, then played junior college ball at Black Hawk Community College in Illinois for a season. But his dream was in Bloomington. All he wanted to do was play for his father at Indiana. Finally, the chance came when Mike Davis allowed his son to walk on for the 2005-06 season. He needed to redshirt his first year, though, and, as a result, never suited up for the Hoosiers. Mike Davis resigned at the end of the 2006 season and ultimately moved on to UAB, where his son followed him and spent three seasons as a reserve role player.

“I never really got to play for him the way I knew I could play,” Davis Jr. says. “Could I have been better off somewhere else, playing-wise? Playing for my dad was really hard, but that’s what I wanted. It was way harder being the coach’s son than it was being on his staff, I can tell you that. I had to sacrifice everything, but it was worth it. I learned the game.”

Their roads met again a few years later. Mike Davis Jr. got his coaching start with an Alabama AAU program from 2010 to ’12, then spent the 2011-12 season as an assistant at Chipola Junior College, living in a closet in the coach’s office. He thought he was going to join his father’s staff at UAB as a graduate assistant the following season, but Davis was fired in 2012, despite making the NCAA Tournament the year prior. That’s when Texas Southern approached Mike Davis and handed him the keys to a program coming off of major NCAA sanctions that hadn’t reached the NCAA Tournament in more than a decade. Davis took the job and promptly hired his son as a GA. A year later, he was promoted to an assistant. The two have been together ever since.

Amid all this, Antoine Davis moved to Houston along with his father and half-brother. Both Mike Davis and Mike Davis Jr. went all-in on his training. Antoine was built like a table leg, but his skills grew rapidly. He was home-schooled and spent endless hours in the gym. He worked with John Lucas Jr. beginning at age 14. He’d take anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 shots per day. His brother was there every day and his father rarely missed a workout, let alone a game. Antoine was so good that he’d play on Texas Southern’s scout team in practice, running around and arcing in 3s over his dad’s college team.

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“What (Antoine) had was everything I wanted, but that kind of attention just wasn’t possible for me when I was his age,” Mike Davis Jr. says. “He was able to get that opportunity and we were able to do it together.”

Today, Mike Davis thinks back on what he was able to provide for one son, but not the other, and stares straight ahead over the court. “I was a totally different person then,” he says of his time at Indiana, when Mike Jr. was growing up. “It was much harder on him.”

These last seven years coaching together made up for so much of that time.

All of this sat in Mike Davis’ subconscious as he squeezed his iPhone, watching his son struggle to speak that night.

By the next morning, though, as Davis prepared to drive to the airport, young Mike called back again, this time clear and articulate. He said he was fine. He said not to bother coming down. He said, of course, he’d be back to work soon. Father told son to take as much time as he needed — a span that ended up being four weeks as all scans and blood tests failed to reveal why Mike Davis Jr. had suffered a stroke.

They still don’t know. “Can’t explain it,” he says, “but I’m here now.”

Teresa Washington and Mike Davis are left closer to their faith than ever before. Their son lives alone and spends the majority of his evenings in an apartment or a hotel room. The odds of him being at his mother’s house the same night he suffered a stroke are exceedingly slim. It’s something neither can shake. (And a good reminder to visit your mother.)

“Timing was everything,” Washington says. “The Lord allowed him to get home to me.”

“It just shows how short life is,” Mike Davis says. “It could’ve been so different. It doesn’t hit home until it happens to you.”

As for Mike Davis Jr., the 2019-20 season is taking on a whole new meaning.  This is a season of hope. Not just for young Antoine to live out his dream. Not just for Detroit Mercy, which is appealing an NCAA postseason ban for a four-year Academic Progress Rate score that came under previous coaching staffs, to turn the corner in the Horizon League. Not just for him continuing his coaching career. But for tomorrow.

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“Every day is an extra to me,” Mike Davis Jr. says. “Everything is a bonus. Enjoy life.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of UDM Athletics)