Anthony Lamb despises losing. When his Vermont Catamounts fell to Rider at the Mohegan Sun Casino on Nov. 25, Lamb coped by walking aimlessly around the resort for about an hour. This has always been his way. Once, his high school team lost on the road in the playoffs. The team bus dropped off the players back at school, and Lamb’s mother, Rachel, drove to pick him up. She couldn’t find him anywhere, until she remembered to look in the one place he most likely would go. Lamb was at the YMCA, running off his frustrations on the treadmill. Just call me when you’re done, Rachel told him.

Advertisement

Emotion has long driven Lamb. It fueled him to develop from a so-so, ’tweener recruit into a four-year starter and star at Vermont. He could be the first Catamount to catapult into the NBA — Sam Vecenie of The Athletic ranks Lamb No. 58 in his latest draft Big Board. He’s one of the best mid-major players in the country, a uniquely versatile 6-foot-6 power forward who paces his team in scoring (17.0 points per game), rebounding (7.8) and blocked shots (1.5) while also bringing the ball down the floor and initiating the offense.

For a long time, Lamb hated losing because basketball meant so much to him. “It was,” he says, “my escape, my meditation, my freedom.” Give him a ball and a rim, and he could channel the anger and pain he’d built up from an all-too-familiar situation for many athletes. Lamb grew up in Rochester, N.Y., without a father, believing the man wanted nothing to do with him and never understanding why he wasn’t worthy of that love.

But just as Lamb embarked on his wildly successful college career, he discovered that everything he thought he knew was wrong. His father had been unaware of his existence for nearly 18 years. And when the two finally did connect during Lamb’s freshman season, his dad happily embraced him as family.

It looks, in many ways, like a happy ending. But it’s not quite so simple. Lamb has quietly wrestled with the implications of his new reality throughout his college career. What if everything that motivated you to be great was based on a false foundation? What do you do with all the hurt that swirled inside you for so long? Where do you find the inner fire going forward?

“It’s hard to explain because my emotions are always changing, and my understanding of it is always changing,” Lamb says. “This definitely left me with a lot of things to sort through, and I’m continuing to work through it to this day.”

Rachel Lamb received an ultimatum when she got pregnant with Anthony at 16: Give the baby up for adoption, or get kicked out of the house.

Advertisement

She’d had a rough go of things growing up in St. Petersburg, Fla. Her mom committed suicide when she was 8. Rachel spiraled after that, landing in and out of juvenile detention and even on house arrest at one point. Her pregnancy, which happened while she was on probation, became one drama too many for her father to handle. He invited a couple who was looking to adopt over to the house to meet his daughter. Rachel cried during the entire visit.

She wasn’t going to give her baby to these strangers, or anyone else. An aunt living in Rochester offered to take her in, so Rachel fled there on Nov. 1, 1997, the date still seared into her memory. Anthony was born the following January, two weeks after Rachel’s 17th birthday. Rachel knew she had to straighten out her life. She got her GED. She became a certified nursing assistant. The job allowed her and Anthony to move into their own place, but it also required as much as 80 hours a week of her time. Rachel made sure Anthony played a lot of sports to keep him occupied — and off the streets and out of trouble.

“My mom worked a lot of hours, and that hard work rubbed off on me,” Lamb says. “I know that whatever work I put in creates the result I’m going to get out of it, and that all comes from her. That might be the greatest thing she’s given me.”

Anthony showed promise in basketball from an early age and earned a big break when he was invited to join the prestigious Albany City Rocks grassroots program in high school. He’d make the 3½-hour drive from Rochester to Albany to spend weekends practicing and playing with the team. All of that time in the car paid off, as Lamb’s profile increased on the Nike EYBL circuit. He attracted dozens of scholarship offers, all of them coming from the mid-major level. Lamb also met Hamlet Tibbs through the City Rocks program, and when Vermont hired Tibbs as an assistant coach in 2014, that paved the way for Lamb’s commitment to the Catamounts a year later.

“A lot of schools definitely missed out on me, probably because of my size,” Lamb says. “People didn’t really know what I could do or what motivated me. I’m not upset about it, because maybe those bigger schools wouldn’t have been the right fit for me. Maybe I wouldn’t fit in their system the way I do here.”

Advertisement

Lamb was a senior in high school getting ready to enroll at Vermont when his world turned upside down. Rachel had a boyfriend when she’d gotten pregnant in Florida. He and Anthony had no relationship. But Rachel had also slept with someone else around the same time Anthony had been conceived. Her sister, Julie, kept bugging her to check with the other man and see if he might be Anthony’s real father. Julie did some Internet sleuthing and found Nate Larkins, who was still living in St. Petersburg. He and Rachel hadn’t spoken since she moved to New York.

At her sister’s urging, Rachel finally sent Larkins a Facebook message. She wrote that she didn’t want anything from him, but that he might have a son. She explained her situation and attached some pictures of Anthony, including one in his basketball uniform. Larkins remembers the moment he saw that picture. “Aw, shit,” he recalls thinking. Anthony was a dead ringer for his other three kids.

Larkins was so sure Anthony was his son that he told Rachel they could skip the paternity test. She decided to do one anyway. The results came back with Anthony and Larkins as a 99.9 percent match.

“He wasn’t mad at all,” says Rachel, who’s now a commercial roofer. “He was very grateful and understanding.”

Larkins began to reach out to Anthony, first through text messages.

“I grew up without my father,” Larkins says, “so I already knew how he grew up. I told him I’m sorry for everything. Even though there was really no one to blame and it wasn’t his mom’s fault. I just wanted to apologize for not being there.”

Larkins let Lamb define the relationship on his own terms. Lamb was unsure how to proceed at first but agreed to a face-to-face meeting. In November of his freshman year, Vermont played in a tournament called the Gulf Coast Showcase, near the campus of Florida Gulf Coast. Rachel arranged for Larkins to drive down and meet Anthony at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point, where the team was staying.

Advertisement

“Imagine meeting your dad for the first time in a hotel,” Lamb says. “I was scared.”

When they came face to face in Anthony’s hotel room, both started cracking jokes to relieve the tension. They discovered they had the same dry sense of humor. Larkins told Anthony, “I’d love to grab you and give you a kiss, but you’re 6-5.” Larkins had even played some junior college basketball and cracked that he provided the source of Lamb’s talent.

“There was a connection right away,” Lamb says. “It felt natural, which was the coolest part.”

Lamb didn’t just find his dad. He inherited three new siblings, to go along with his younger half-brother, Timothy. Larkins’ three kids — Tyrese, Naomi and Nate Jr. — were all born within a couple of years of Lamb. Larkins’ mother, Dorothy, also became the first grandmother Lamb ever knew.

All of this, understandably, was a lot to take in, especially for someone just beginning college. Lamb led the Catamounts in scoring and rebounding as a freshman, helping them go undefeated in conference play and make the NCAA Tournament. He was also, by his own admission, immature and emotionally volatile. Some days he’d be the life of the room, other times he’d be down in the dumps. And if the Catamounts lost? Forget about it.

“His freshman year, man, it was so hard to talk to him after a loss,” teammate Everett Duncan says. “He’d just sit there and be quiet. He’d be mad. Then five minutes later, he’d be in the gym getting up shots for two hours. That’s how he dealt with it.”

While the team and coaching staff admired his competitiveness, they knew it was no way for Lamb to become a leader. Not to mention what it was doing his mental health. Luckily, as Lamb tried to sort out his emotions and grow as a person, he had another father figure in his corner.

Ari Shapiro-Miller was coach John Becker’s director of basketball operations during Becker’s first three seasons as Catamounts coach. Shapiro-Miller, who has a master’s degree in clinical psychology, left for a while to work at a high school until Becker brought him back in a much different role: team psychologist and counselor.

Advertisement

Shapiro-Miller worked as a consultant for two years before being hired full time in 2017. Though he is available to all Vermont athletes, he travels with the men’s basketball team and even attends practices. Duncan’s older brother, former Catamounts guard Ernie Duncan, has credited Shapiro-Miller for helping him combat depression and anxiety so severe that he contemplated suicide. Vermont is believed to be one of the few teams, especially at its level, to employ a full-time team psychologist.

Lamb has talked with Shapiro-Miller about his family situation numerous times over the past few years. Their sessions have been invaluable, he says.

“We’ve worked to break down my childhood and why I see things the way I do,” Lamb says. “My whole life I thought my dad didn’t want me. I had a lot of anger growing up. I was grateful to figure out that wasn’t the truth, but even though I wanted to move forward and be myself, it was hard because I couldn’t really put that anger anywhere.”

Becker has also had plenty of long talks with Lamb about his family. While Becker says the details of those conversations are personal, he notes that “we’ve gone through all of his growing up stuff together.” The two share an unusually close bond, with Lamb saying Becker “has come to understand me probably better than anyone ever has.” And Becker has helped Lamb learn how to be more consistent every day, how to channel his emotions in a more productive way.

Lamb also continues to get to know the new side of his family. The demands of being a college athlete have prevented him from spending too much time with them in Florida, something he hopes to do after graduating. Larkins told him before this season that it was OK to be selfish, to enjoy his senior year and not worry about reaching out. Last March, Vermont played its first-round NCAA Tournament game against Florida State in Hartford, Conn. Larkins, who had never been on a plane, overcame his fear of flying to surprise Lamb at the site. Rachel organized the whole thing and made sure Larkins wasn’t spotted in the team hotel. Anthony was lying on a trainer’s table after practice when Larkins snuck up on him and said, “What’s up, dude?”

The two talk or text about once a week, still learning new things about each other. Larkins considered it a milestone when Lamb recently asked his advice about a personal problem he was having.

“That kind of call is better than anything else you can get because it’s like, I can help my son,” Larkins says. “I didn’t get to see his first walk or hear his first words or toss a ball with him. I missed a lot. That’s a lot for him too, not to have that.”

Advertisement

“It’s not the best situation,” Lamb says, “but it’s my situation. It’s all I know.”

The Catamounts (10-5) haven’t had the season they and many people expected, considering they returned 10 lettermen and added two transfer big men. They started 4-0, which included a Nov. 16 victory at St. John’s on Lamb’s game-winning jumper in the final seconds. A few days later, they led much of the game before losing by six points at Virginia, with Lamb pouring in 30 points and going 7-of-14 from deep. But Vermont, which received votes in the Top 25 in the first few weeks of the season, has also lost to Rider, Yale, Cincinnati and UNC-Greensboro, killing any shot at an at-large bid.

Injuries have been a factor. Starting point guard Ben Shungu suffered a hamstring strain in the preseason that caused him to miss eight games. Oklahoma State transfer Duncan Demuth (concussion), 6-11 Alabama transfer Daniel Giddens (leg) and junior guard Stef Smith (back) have also been slowed by ailments.

Lamb went through the NBA Draft process last summer and reworked his formerly stocky frame, dropping his body fat by about 6 percent. Becker had planned to play him some at the 3 this year and have the ball in his hands a lot on the perimeter to avoid double teams. But the injuries — including Lamb’s own hamstring strain that has bothered him since October — have mostly scuttled that idea. Lamb has struggled with his outside shot, posting a career-low mark of 24.1 percent on 3s. He blames that on a lack of practice time and reps caused by the troublesome hamstring.

Still, the Catamounts are favored to repeat as America East champions. The only time in Lamb’s career when Vermont didn’t make the NCAA Tournament was his sophomore season, when he missed most of conference play with a broken left foot. He was nowhere near 100 percent in the league tournament, playing just 23 minutes and scoring only five points in a championship game loss to UMBC. (Just think how different college basketball history might be if Lamb had a healthy wheel that March; UMBC became the first No. 16 seed to beat a No. 1 when it stunned Virginia).

Lamb got his revenge in last year’s America East title game, scorching UMBC for 28 points and nine rebounds. He has been the MVP of that tournament twice and most likely will repeat as conference player of the year. “We’ve lost three conference games since he’s been here,” Becker says. “He’s been everything to us.”

He still hates losing, as that walk around the Mohegan Sun proved. But he has found better ways to deal with it, figuring out how to set a more positive mood in the locker room. Everyone around him notes how much he has matured in a few short years. Just listen to what he says when asked what he hopes to get out of his final season in Burlington: “I don’t think by any means that it will be marked by any win or loss. It will be all about how much did we get out of it personally and how we grew. Did we leave Vermont on a better note?”

Advertisement

Lamb is then asked if he would have answered that the same way a couple of years ago. He laughs. “It definitely would have been a lot different,” he says. Of course it would. He has had to redefine his whole life.

“He struggled for a while because he always felt like he had to prove himself,” Rachel says. “And then he meets his new family and they absolutely love him. So he had to put himself in check and remember why he plays basketball in the first place. And he realized that he plays because he loves it. He loves winning.”

He just has more relatives rooting him on these days.

(Top photo of Anthony Lamb: Michael Hickey/Getty Images)