If you haven’t heard of college standout basketball Antoine Davis, you’re not alone. But for basketball fans, it’s clearly time to start brushing up. Davis is on the cusp of breaking one of the most unbreakable records of all time: Pistol Pete Maravich’s all-time NCAA scoring record. Maravich tallied 3,543 points in his three-year career at LSU in the late 1960s.
As of today, Davis, a senior at the University of Detroit, is 124 points away with two regular season games left and (at least) one Horizon League tournament games after that. Today is Senior Night for his Detroit Mercy squad and after the game, Davis will have his jersey retired by the school—a big and rare honor. Going into the game, Davis is also 22 three-pointers away from Stephen Curry’s single-season NCAA record.
For many, this would be a blur, even an impossible task to complete. But Davis, the son of a coach, Mike Davis, formerly of Indiana University (first an assistant under Bob Knight and then as the school’s head coach from 2000 to 2006) and then University of Alabama at Birmingham from 2006 to 2012 and then Texas Southern University from 2012 to 2018 before taking over at Detroit, poise isn’t a problem. For the 24-year-old Davis, the sky is the limit.
Davis, who was the first freshman to be named to the First Team All-Horizon League team since Gordon Hayward, has broken scoring records, shooting records and has put the University of Detroit, a school formerly coached by Dick Vitale, back on the map in a major way. Here, below, we caught up with the star collegiate player to ask him about his roots, his style, LeBron James and which NBA player he patterns his game after.
Antoine Davis: I first heard the name Pete Maravich growing up in middle school, like sixth or seventh grade, just learning when he had those videos of him doing the dribbling stuff and showing people his little dribbling drills and his shooting and stuff like that. That’s when I first heard of him.
Malcolm Emmons- USA TODAY Sports
AD: Not ‘til the summertime, that’s when I heard about it was this summer, that [breaking his record] could be done. I try not to think about it too much. I just go out there and enjoy playing basketball. So, it was like a focus of—you know, this summer I just worked out and did all the things that I always do during the summer. And if the record came, it came to me.
AD: Yeah, I mean, it’s a certain amount of shots I get up. I try in the summer to get, like, 2,000 shots up a day. I’m always around there, 2,000-2,500. Maybe even 3,000 sometimes. With that and just lifting weights and stuff like that.
AD: About two-and-a-half hours.
Kirthmon F. Dozier / USA TODAY NETWORK
AD: I mean, sometimes I don’t even notice it, I’m so locked in. I won’t even catch myself in it. Just to have the confidence of the players that you’re playing around and then my dad, the confidence he has in me. I can miss two or three shots in a row and know I can make the next three or four shots in a row. So, just being able to have that leverage and ability to play, it’s good to have.
AD: No, no, I’ve definitely had moments like that before in games where you’re just, like you said, not completely blacking out, but you’re so locked in and focused that you’ll kind of forget all the stuff that you were doing because you’re so locked into it.
AD: Yeah, that’s it, basically.
Albert Cesare/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK
AD: Yeah, just like you said, a lot of work and a lot of time put into the game. I did a lot of one-on-ones and stuff like that this summer and we played 100 one-on-ones with “the arms,” or whatever. We’d do something just to get me—to have the feeling of playing that in a game. The one-on-ones, my dad has these things, it’s called the “silent player” and it’s like these arms. If you put them on, it makes you feel like you have these eight-foot arms. And when you contest, you have to get your shot up fast. So, it just helped me being able to—for somebody who’s my height—it helped me to just be able to shoot over them, knowing they can’t block it because I’ve seen it before.
AD: I’m thinking about the shot, really. Just the right moment to shoot and knowing a lot of players can’t block my shot. So, I take my time to just don’t rush shots and just shoot them.
Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
AD: Yeah, well you know, they try to correct it. But if you notice Kyrie Irving even shoots the same type of shot where his guide hand faces out. And his guide hand doesn’t go straight to the rim. So, there are a lot of unique ways of shooting the ball, you know. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Just keep working on it and if that’s your shot, that’s your shot. At first, John Lucas tried to fix it because he saw it and my dad was just like, ‘I don’t think he should change it. There are lots of unique ways of shooting the ball.’ Kyrie Irving, as I said before, shoots the ball like that and he hasn’t changed it. So there’s no point in really changing it.
AD: Well, you know, I first started liking basketball, like really loving basketball, probably in high school, my freshman year of high school. And then I gradually started to fall in love with it even more. Growing up in Indiana, I really don’t remember a lot of it. But it was hard for the most part, kinda sorta, because my dad was the head coach of IU. I was going to school every day in first grade, kindergarten, and the way our school was set up, it was K-12, so kindergarten through 12th grade, so if Indiana lost, I had to, I would hear it from people, kids at school. It was rough to deal with. But I didn’t really know a whole lot about it. I just didn’t pay it any mind because I was so young to think about it. But I used to get really, like, not bullied. But if they lost, they’d blame my dad for a while. Indiana basketball was big. So, it was crazy.
AD: I mean, it just came to the point where I wanted to be a kid. So, I really didn’t have an interest in basketball yet. I really loved football when I was in Alabama. When we moved to Alabama, I played football and everything. I played basketball but I didn’t really like basketball as much. I really loved football. Then when we moved [again], I started to really play basketball a lot more and more.
AD: Well, I don’t really remember the stories, I was too young to know those stories. He hasn’t really talked about them like that to me. But it just really taught him—you can see some of the similarities in how he coaches and the way Bob Knight coaches. Just the passion of the game, the wanting you to know what you’re doing and the wanting you to work hard. I just see that in him, seeing where he got it from.
AD: John Lucas, he’s a great basketball mind, he’s a great coach. And he knows the game so well. He has two sons that play the game, John Lucas Jr. and Jai Lucas, he’s coaching at Kentucky right now. You know, he’s a big motivation for me. He was really hard on me but at the same time, he knew what he was talking about. Him and my dad, with them both being as hard on me as they were, it just helped me grow as a player, to be tough with things and to deal with coaching, even if my dad wasn’t going to be my coach, just to deal with coaching in general.
AD: Yeah that and just telling you stuff, like trying get you motivated to play. Hard on you from a standpoint of like to get on your really hard just to see if you’ll break or not. It taught me a lot to just persevere through that type of stuff, when stuff gets hard, not to lay down.
Albert Cesare / USA TODAY NETWORK
AD: Yeah, well, it’s special. You know, even to have my jersey retired, and having it retired at the end of the season, that normally never happens. It’s very rare for that to happen and it’s special. It’s something you can’t really take for granted, because, you know, that doesn’t happen for everybody. So, it’s a special moment for me. For it to happen, it’s going to be really emotional after the game when they put it in the rafters. It just shows that all my hard work that I’ve done over the years has paid off and it’s special.
AD: Yeah, to break it along with him would be special. Two records broke, one of the NBA and one for the NCAA is just, like, a crazy thing. You know, it’s kind of random. But it happens. So, it’s special. Records are always meant to be broken.
AD: No, he hasn’t. He has not. I’m sure if the record is to be broken, he would reach out with a text.
AD: No, he hasn’t. Not yet.
Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK
AD: Yeah, it’s changed. I normally don’t think about it, I live in the moment of everything. But looking back on it, too, just all the hard work I’ve put in over the years into this game, it’s just paid off. I wouldn’t have even known that I would have been here—if you had asked me if I would be a top-two scorer of all time in middle school, I would have looked at you crazy because I didn’t even really like basketball as much as I do now. So, it’s so just changed. I’m so thankful to be in this position and this is just a blessing.
AD: Yeah, my dad always taught me never to look the rankings. That rankings aren’t really an important thing. There are a lot of really great players—if you can play, you can play. So, there’s a lot of players that are not highly recruited or highly ranked, but they’re just really good and you never notice them until they go to college, and they play. And then those are they guys that are the really, really good players because they have a chip on their shoulder. They know that to get it a certain way, they have to be different from everybody else. So, it’s just, it’s a process of believing in yourself and working at it every day.
AD: You know, every team in the NBA needs a shooter and a scorer and somebody that just knows how to play the game and that’s what I feel like they would get from me, somebody who’s a great teammate and somebody that can shoot the ball and somebody that can score really well. I’m sure every team will look for it and every team needs somebody like that.
Petre Thomas-USA TODAY Sports
AD: My favorite player is Lou Williams. I watch so many Lou Williams highlights, I’ve probably seen every Lou Williams highlight ever put out, at least three or four times. Just his poise and his shot-creating and his knowledge of the game, his ability to score. I take that from him, knowing how to find the right spots on the floor. It’s just amazing to watch him play and score the ball.
AD: I love the grind. Basketball has really taught me, you know, even if I weren’t to play this game, or if this were to end tomorrow, or whatever, and that would be my last game ever played, I would just—it taught me how to grind through everything and to just stay humble. And when times get rough, just to keep going and put your head down and keep working. It just taught me so much.
