BROWN SHAKES STAGE FRIGHT
Senior forward key for Wisconsin
NEW YORK Picture this: Vitto Brown is 5 years old, and he’s dressed as a zebra. He’s part of a local performance of Broadway’s The Lion King near his home in Bowling Green, Ohio, with no songs to sing and no lines to speak. But he won’t stop crying. “He did not want to be on stage that night,” said Sheila Brown, Vitto’s mother, laughing. “Now, every night up to that point, we had practiced and practiced, and he was fine with this little role, but for some reason that night he was just irritated. And I remember he was just crying all through the performance up on the stage in front of everybody.”
But that brief phase — call it stage fright or simply a moment of stubbornness — didn’t last long. Brown loved to sing too much not to perform in the future. The whole family loved to sing; Sheila got her children started young, singing nursery rhymes to and with Brown and his siblings as they grew up. By the time Brown turned 7, his mother realized he had a beautiful, rich voice.
The rest of the country has now come to the same realization — for some, it came when CBS played a clip of Brown singing March’s iconic song, One Shining Moment, last week. Plenty of others realized it earlier, remembering Brown from three years ago, when he, along with three other student- athletes, sang the national anthem before playing alongside his Wisconsin teammates at the Final Four in Indianapolis.
“That was probably a top- two or topthree moment of college for me, maybe of my life,” Brown said Thursday. “There were 75, 80 thousand people there and millions watching at home; that was in the back of my mind. But to get to start that song off … it was just such a blessing.”
At that point in his basketball career, Brown wasn’t playing much, averaging just over a point and six minutes per game. But his teammates insisted and predicted ( correctly) that he’d be an integral piece of this program someday — and not just because of those dulcet tones and the handful of times he and his family would sing the national anthem before Wisconsin home games over the course of his four- year career.
Now, Brown is no longer seldomused but rather a starter and key contributor for this year’s Sweet 16 squad, averaging 6.8 points and 3.9 rebounds for the Badgers, who will face Florida on Friday for a spot in the East Region final. And he’s perhaps even more crucial on the defensive end; Brown made the game- winning defensive stop to secure Wisconsin’s upset of No. 1 overall seed Villanova last weekend.
Singing actually comes easier to Brown than basketball. He’s never nervous to perform, whether a teammate asks him to belt out a song on the spot or when he’s about to sing the national anthem before a big game.
“Music is therapy for Vitto,” Sheila said, “because Vitto’s the type of kid who’s super analytical and highly intelligent, right. … With basketball, I think he overanalyzes, overthinks sometimes. But with singing, he knows he’s good at it — and he knows he’s good at it because he’s experienced what that success looks like. He’ll sing and people will be weeping, visibly weeping in the audience — some of the church performances we’ve done have moved people to tears on many occasions. He’s seen the power and the emotion and the universality of music and how you don’t have to know what I’m singing in terms of language. But if your voice is beautiful, it cuts through any language barrier that might exist because I’m hearing the beauty of your instrument, which is your voice. He knows he has that. That is something that is a God- given talent that he possesses and he knows that it’s a powerful, powerful instrument that he has. Knowing that gives him that confidence.”
As Brown’s father, Angelo Brown, pointed out, Brown’s self- confidence clearly now extends into basketball — but it’s taken awhile to get to this point. Angelo said his youngest son “played hot potato” with the basketball his freshman year of high school. He’d made varsity, but he was too nervous to shoot the ball in games.
Eventually, once he became an upperclassman, Brown got more comfortable on the offensive end of the floor, which meant he actually shot the ball.
As if following a script, Brown has done just that, developing from a shy reserve player who didn’t even attempt a single three- pointer his first two collegiate seasons to an important contributor on both ends for these Badgers.
And if things continue to go well the rest of this month, Brown could become the first player featured in One Shining Moment for both his on- court performance and his voice. It’d certainly be a special moment, but one that’d be welldeserved — twice over.