Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin basketball’s Napoleon Dynamite

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Underneath the goofy routine, though, pain is evident as he recalls his youth in his blog.

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Not terribly happy years either, as Kaminsky tells it on the blog he started writing at Madison, called The Moose Basketball. He was a shy kid, not much for words and with not many friends. And to get attention, he took a route parents and anyone who’s been through adolescence will recognize as a classic: In school, he tried to be the funny guy, the goofy guy, the clown — and make people laugh.

His shyness, he wrote, came from the fact that he was “never very good at speaking.” That’s evident in some of his interviews now, as his eyes dart around, up, down, sideways — everywhere but at the camera. “During a conversation I always mess up and say something I didn’t mean to,” he wrote. “I ended up switching letters around in words, saying a word I didn’t mean to say, mispronouncing something.”

And he was kind of lonely. Even in seventh grade, his mom was setting up play dates for him. “At points I was picked on and ostracized for my height,” he wrote. “… Other people took the view that I was older than I was acting.” One day, his mom told him, he threw a temper tantrum in a grocery story. A woman came up to her and asked her: “What’s wrong with her 8 year old. I was 4 at the time.”