There's a fire burning in this guy

Most of you reading this will know very well who Max Paulhus Gosselin is. If you do, you should consider a Oui Oui Max tee-shirt. If you don't, he's the Tim Lincecum of Davidson basketball. The physical freak who finds a way to get the job done no matter how he has to do it... the guy who wills himself to success with smarts, guts, and unnatural anatomical composition. That's him in the photo to the left, probably on one of those gorgeous ally-oop passes that Steph used to get into his hands , coming out of nowhere from the weak side.

Max and I had breakfast at The Egg yesterday morning to talk about his big post-graduation endeavor, the working title for which is "From the Hardwood to the Ocean." I won't try to explain the whole thing here, but the synopsis is as follows:

• Max and his girlfriend, Katherine, will sail unassisted from Miami to the Azores, then to Morocco, and then once they pass through the Straits of Gibraltar, they will circumvent the Mediterranean. Completing that, they'll take stock of their health, their energy, and the condition of their boat and other equipment, and at that point will decide whether or not their year-long journey has satisfied their quest. They might continue on to Brazil and other points in South America (he even talked about making it around Cape Horn - yikes!).
  
• Max has been a boat owner for a year. One year. And the 25' vessel that he uses to tool around Lake Norman? NOT the boat he'll be trusting to deliver him across the Atlantic. He's in the process now of finding a seaworthy craft more in the 38' or 39' range. That's a lot more boat to manage, but it will allow him to sleep in something better than a contorted position at night and will be more suited to ride out storms at sea (more bulkheads = less torque).
• Max and Katherine will be learning how to do this and survive by taking pretty much every course known to man in the next few months. They'll start "CPR at Sea" a couple of days after he returns to P.Q. next week, and then move on to navigation, boat repair, and language classes after that. Yes, language classes. He's not going overseas to affect lives (more on that in a moment) without speaking their languages!
• He's going to make it a point to do some things that he really feels he should do along the way. They'll try to make it to Bulgaria to see the home of Darina Spasova, who has been one of the team managers. They'll shoot for Istanbul so that they can see the home of Can Civi, one of his teammates. Max really wants to see Sicily and Egypt. He'll stop in Algeria to visit a friend there (as well as a friend in Casablanca, that they'll probably hit on the way in and again on the way out).
• And they will do everything they can to touch the lives of children along the path of their journey. You see, Max isn't content with the way he's affected and inspired people during his four-year basketball career at Davidson. He wants to meet families and children in every country they pass along the way to spread the message of hope, dreams, and the promise that one can achieve them. He wants to show that you can make a difference in people's lives even if you don't have a million dollars in your bank account. That sometimes you can make a difference just by having smarts and guts. And an unnatural anatomical composition.

The adventure aspect is certainly looming large for Max. I sense that now that his life as a basketball player at Davidson is behind him, he needs something new and crazy to match his innate energy level (and being the first time I've really sat down for a long conversation with Max, I was struck by the similarities in watching his mind work on something and watching him play basketball - he's absolutely kinetic). But he's SO stoked about making a difference for all of these people that he has never met - and will likely never see again after he departs. I don't know if these guys are just trying to one-up each other now or what, but it's just so refreshing and inspiring to see the way our guys are making their mark on the world. Math major and three-point specialist Bryant Barr? Just raised over $16,000 to combat malaria in poor African communities. Gospel-singing, shot-blocking, fade-away-jump-shooting adonis Andrew Lovedale? Leaving in a couple of weeks to deliver and distribute more than 11,000 pairs of shoes to children in his native Nigeria. By night, they're mild-mannered D-I basketball players making an improbable run to the Elite Eight. By day, they're freaking superheros. Thank you, Davidson College student-athletes, for showing America exactly what is possible when a quality academic institution runs a quality athletic program. It's a shame that other schools are afraid to recruit the athletes we do.

Anyway, you should keep your eye on Max's blog. His ability to make updates will be limited over the summer - he'll be on board a boat doing some training somewhere near Greece - but I for one am excited to see where this journey takes him.

Good luck, Max and Katherine! Be safe.