He wondered if everything had changed. Following minor surgery that caused him to miss four games, Willie Cauley-Stein couldn’t keep all the negativity out of his mind. Most of it, yes. But some still creeped in. “I didn’t feel like I was going to be the same player anymore,” Cauley-Stein said.
Then he read a book, assigned to him by coach John Calipari. The title: “God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours.”
“It kind of got me thinking in the right (state of) mind,” Cauley-Stein said. If anyone, including himself, doubted whether Cauley-Stein could be the same player that had started five straight games before the surgery, he disproved that with a 13-point, six-rebound, 22-minute effort in Kentucky’s 77-55 win against South Carolina.