Why Kansas guard Nick Timberlake remained resilient & met the moment against Samford

When Nick Timberlake went to the free-throw line on Thursday night with 14 seconds left and Kansas nursing a one-point lead over Samford, his father, Jeff, clasped his hands over his eyes in the stands of the Delta Center before opening up his fingers up just enough to view the shots.

He made both to punctuate the best game of his KU career (19 points) and help the fourth-seeded Jayhawks escape with a 93-89 victory and advance to take on No. 5 seed Gonzaga on Saturday afternoon in a second-round NCAA Tournament Midwest Regional game.

“It was great to see him have the ice in the veins (from) all the practice and stuff you dream about when you’re a kid …” Jeff Timberlake said. “That was awesome.”

All the more so after what had to be a trying season for his son, who transferred from Towson as a sixth-year senior heralded for the 40%-plus 3-point shooting his last two seasons ... only to make less than 30% and play far less than he could have imagined most of the way.

“The thing that’s most impressive about Nick to me is that it hasn’t gone great for him, (by) his own admission …” Kansas coach Bill Self said.

But the attitude never wavered, Self said. And when it came to dealing with the coach-speak of keeping your head right for when your number could be called, well …

“His head is right, and I think that’s the biggest thing you need to know about him,” Self said. “He’s a winner.”

That’s why he had the capacity to meet the moment, a particularly urgent matter for KU with star guard Kevin McCullar ruled out for the tournament because of his knee injury and Self essentially going with a six-man rotation against Samford.

Frustrated as he might have been at times, Timberlake was able to keep what he called on Friday “a free mind” about it all.

In no small part because of a literal lifetime of dealing with more substantial challenges.

“He’s learned how to cope with things, and he’s overcame,” his father said, later adding, “You look back and you see that he’s been working and fighting basically his whole life trying to prove people wrong.”

Timberlake was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate, which the Mayo Clinic describes as “openings or splits in the upper lip, the roof of the mouth (palate) or both. Cleft lip and cleft palate result when facial structures that are developing in an unborn baby don’t close completely.”

His father put it more viscerally: “When he was born, the left side of his lips and the top of his mouth wasn’t there. All the pieces were there, but for some reason they didn’t connect.”

So doctors set about connecting and building surgery by surgery by surgery, around 10 of them, before he was a year old.

Once, when a procedure required 58 stitches from what Jeff Timberlake described as “connecting the lip … from inside all the way up to his nose,” the boy he still calls Nicolas apparently caught a virus at the hospital. He soon became so nauseated that the stitches ripped loose and they had to repeat the surgery.

“He would heal, and they would do another surgery,” the father said. “And then they put the lips together, and I don’t know how they built the roof of his mouth, but they did. It was crazy.”

All before Nick can remember, of course. But he embraces even the parts he only knows by intimate instinct and what he’s been told.

“I definitely think it just build a toughness in me being able to go through all that,” he said in the KU locker room on Friday, later adding, “It’s something I was born with, so I definitely take it to heart.”

Then there’s the part he more consciously lived: a bone marrow and grafting transplant (alveolar bone grafting) from his hip to his gums that Nick Timberlake said left him kind of having to “learn how to walk again” among other painful issues.

And while he was at Towson, just three years ago, he underwent corrective jaw surgery that led to him losing 30 pounds. But it also “streamlined his face,” as his father put it, “and he hasn’t stopped smiling since.”

Added Nick … with a smile: “Pretty much.”

For all that, in fact, Jeff Timberlake described his son as an innately happy child who came to love basketball — which his father had played well enough to be inducted in the Boston University Athletics Hall of Fame after a career that included playing for a 1988 NCAA tourney team that lost to Duke.

Nick loved the game and toiled at it but had zero Division I offers his senior year at Braintree (Massachusetts) High and maybe a handful after a post-graduate year at Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire.

In hindsight, though, it all tracks and folds together for someone who likely wouldn’t be at KU otherwise.

“The coolest thing about this is he’s the kid that when everyone says ‘almost anything is possible if you actually work hard enough,’ that’s what he’s done,” Jeff Timberlake said. “And then he started to grow into his body and started lifting and got bigger and stronger. And he just kept working and working and working.”

After flourishing at Towson, where his senior night was shared with some 20 children in various stages of contending with cleft lip and cleft palate, he entered the transfer portal after last season and was wooed by some 70 or more programs.

He chose KU, he said, at least in part because he believes “Self gets the best out of his players.”

In this case, it’s one who stands ready while also standing for something more as he seeks to be a role model for others who’ve dealt with the same trials.

“When I was little, I didn’t really like talking about it,” he said. “But now I’m pretty confident about it.”

And confident that the way he played Thursday can translate into his game on Saturday.