How cool would it be to be Nick Collison’s kid brother?
Just ask Michael.
“It’s pretty cool,” the sixth-grader says shyly.
Pretty cool?
The 11-year-old Iowa Falls, Iowa native is like a mini celebrity when he comes to the University of Kansas’ campus.
Before Sunday’s game against his home-state Cyclones, Michael was in the midst of all the Jayhawk mania.
“Chaos Collison,” as his friends, the Phog Phanatics — who he sits with at every home game — call him, was creating his own carnival.
If he wasn’t slapping skin with former Kansas players, such as Nick Bradford, he was handing out high-fives to Phanatics after any of Nick’s highlights.
Nick grabbed a game-high 11 rebounds and tied for game-high honors with 19 points with fellow Iowan and another one of Michael’s men, Kirk Hinrich. The pair played their final game against Iowa State, the school who sought them both.
And lil’ Mike was just as calm chatting with friend Raef LaFrentz as he was calling out to one of his ball boy buddies.
“Everyone always says I must be the luckiest kid in the world to be able to come here and watch all of this,” Michael said.
Yeah, he his.
But he doesn’t look much different than any of the other young dreamers whose eyes light up in awe when they enter Allen Fieldhouse — except for his height.
“I was 5-foot-4 the last time I measured,” he proudly states, while standing over some of the shorter female Phanatics.
The differences quickly develop when one takes a closer look at Michael.
He’s already got a basketball frame like his brother and the unmistakable freckles to match.
His white Kansas home jersey — the staple outfit in his game-day wardrobe — proudly promotes his brother’s No. 4 and their last name.
The bond between the two is not just of blood, there’s of course — basketball.
But basketball didn’t always mean so much to the Riverbend Middle schooler, who has a speciality for social studies but not science.
In fact, just two years ago as a fourth-grader, he didn’t understand what the big deal was with his big bro.
“I think people put a lot of pressure on him,” Nick said. “Here’s this 9-year-old kid, and everyone’s always coming up to him and asking if he’s going to be as good as his older brother. I think it kind of turned him off.”
But basketball and being a Collison inevitably collided.
“We never tried to put pressure on any of our kids to play the sport,” said dad Dave Collison, who guided Nick through his All-American career at Iowa Falls High School and currently coaches Michael’s sixth-grade team, the Cadets. “But Michael, like Nick and our daughter, Katie, has developed a love for basketball.
“Once you have that love, everything else starts from there.”
And make no mistake, Michael wants to play the game, maybe even as a Jayhawk.
“But if North Carolina calls, I’ll have to listen to them,” Michael says with a grin.
He wants to be an inch taller than Nick, and he already has a bet with a classmate that if he doesn’t have a shoe contract within his fifth year of the NBA, he owes him 500 bucks.
But as childishly normal as Michael sounds one moment, he’ll spit out sentences that would astonish any college grad the next.
“I’m really fortunate to be able to meet some of the players that made all the tradition here possible,” he said. “Men here today like Milt Newton and Rex Walters helped build the foundation of this program for players like my brother.”
Being the brother of Nick Collison has it’s perks.
Michael has traveled all around America with his All-American sibling.
Hawaii and New York offered him trips of a lifetime.
But he feels best when he and his brother are at home in Iowa Falls during school breaks.
They have practiced countless hours at the same gym were Nick polished his low-post maneuvers.
“He’ll show me some of his moves, and then I’ll go out and try them,” Michael said. “He’s really taught me a lot about the game.”
Yet the game, their mother Judy says, has taught the two more than both might understand right now.
“Basketball has really brought them close together,” she says with a smile. “Nick and Katie were always close because of their ages, but it’s been different with Michael because he’s younger.
“Basketball has been really special the last couple of years, in bringing both of them together.”
Nick said he pondered the possibility of having had a childhood like Michael’s.
“I was such a basketball junkie that I would have loved getting to go to all the games like he does,” Nick said, with the same sheepish grin as Michael’s. “And I think he realizes how awesome it is.”
Maybe, in another decade, Fieldhouse fans will watch another Collison control the court at Kansas. Until then, Michael is happy just being a kid.
“It’s so cool,” he says with a grin, hopping to his feet as he waves the wheat with 16,299 fans who can only wonder what a childhood as cool as his could be like.
