Happy Hour with John Gaskins
Mike Daum on SDSU glory days, his overseas pro career since, and his Nebraska farming roots
Beskrivelse
Perhaps you've heard about this wild basketball journey covering hundreds of thousands if not millions of miles. The only son of two stud University of Wyoming athletes — his 6'5 dad, an NFL tight end for a cup of coffee and his 6'1 mom, the basketball program's leading scorer and rebounder — grows up tassling corn and shooting endless hours of hoops on the farm in the Nebraska panhandle. Kid grows to 6'9 by age 16, dominates in hoops, makes a three-hour round-trip drive to Fort Collins, Colorado twice a week for AAU practice, travels country for club ball. Kid gets few Div. I offers and not a whiff from home-state schools Nebraska, Creighton, and Omaha. Goes to South Dakota State, blossoms into the most dominant scorer and rebounder in Summit League history, leads the Jackrabbits to three NCAA Tournaments and climbs into the Top 10 NCAA scorers of all-time. Somehow, someway doesn't get drafted by an NBA team and gets tossed aside by the Portland Trailblazers after a brief summer camp stint. Heads to Spain to play for two years. Then, Italy for two years, Turkey for a year, Serbia for a year, and Japan for a year. You probably knew all that about Mike Daum, statistically the most decorated player in SDSU history. What you probably don't know are some of the crazy stories behind his journey and just how fun, goofy, engaging, and energetic a storyteller Daum is. From playing pranks on his farming grandfather and crashing expensive ag equipment to all those Jackrabbit wins, spending COVID lockdown in Spain, and winning over his future wife—a professional volleyball player—by "sliding into her DM's" when they had never met in person, Daum has poured a lot of (mostly joyful) life into his 30 years. Now married and back home in Happy Valley, Oregon during the offseason — how fitting he lives in a place called Happy Valley—Daum found 70 minutes of quiet time away from tending to his 11-month-old first child to gleefully glide down memory lane. Does Daum think he'd actually stay at SDSU if he were part of the NIL/portal era that allows unlimited payment to college athletes? Why didn't the NBA work out for one of the Top 10 scorers in college history? Which of the five countries he has played in has Daum enjoyed living in the most? Dare we ask, what kind of money does a journeyman pro like him make overseas? And how much longer does he want to keep balling for a living? The gregarious "Dauminator" is more than willing to share his unfiltered answers. Before that chat, the Happy Hour host describes why going Div. I was such the crystal clear right move for South Dakota State 22 years ago, with the baseball team's trip to Lincoln for the NCAA Baseball Tournament being the latest example. This occurred despite the Jackrabbits' 17-0 loss to Arizona State, a brutal end to the season that highlighted the harsh reality of the gap between Power Four clubs and a northern mid-major. Now what?
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