The centerpiece of Louisville's next basketball team came from Congo by way of Kokomo and Kansas, and brings a remarkable story.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WDRB+WAVE) — Ten years ago, Flory Bidunga figured he’d be playing soccer in Spain by now.

Life had other scouting reports.

One day in Kinshasa, Bidunga and his mother were going shopping for clothes when a stranger noticed him.

“You should play basketball,” the man told him.

That was about it.

No recruiting service. No AAU coach. No shoe-company scout lurking behind a rack of shirts. Just a guy who saw a tall kid walking with his mother and made a suggestion that changed the direction of a life.

Bidunga doesn’t know the man’s name.

“Man, unfortunately, I don’t remember,” Bidunga said Tuesday at ACC Tipoff. “I should probably, because it’s the reason why I started playing basketball. I hope he sees this. He reaches out to me.”

Then he laughed a little at the randomness of it all.

“I’m really thankful, you know, because just me going shopping with my mom and a dude suggests me to play basketball, and then here I am,” he said.

Here is Louisville, where Bidunga is expected to be one of the centerpieces of a team with national championship ambitions.

Here is the reigning Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year, a 6-foot-9, 235-pound junior with a 7-foot-3 wingspan and a 40½-inch vertical leap.

Here is a player who averaged 13.3 points, nine rebounds and 2.6 blocked shots at Kansas last season, made first-team All-Big 12, went to the NBA Draft Combine and then withdrew to return to college.

Here, maybe most notably, is an Indiana Mr. Basketball.

The road from Kinshasa to Louisville did not exactly follow MapQuest. It went through Kokomo.

And if that sounds like a peculiar route from the Democratic Republic of Congo to big-time college basketball, consider that basketball wasn’t even Bidunga’s preferred sport when the trip began. Soccer was.

“That was my first goal,” he said. “It’s just something that I loved.”

He loved it enough that even after basketball recruiters had discovered him and he had become one of the best high school basketball players in America, he went back out for the Kokomo soccer team as a senior. He scored eight goals. He had three assists.

“I have that little touch,” he said Tuesday, smiling. “You’ve got to look it up. You’re going to see some. That little shimmy-shimmy.”

Somewhere Cristiano Ronaldo can rest easy. He still has his soccer cleats, by the way. He’s waiting for a day off.

But consider the speed of the rest of it.

Bidunga didn’t seriously begin playing basketball until his early teens. He moved to Kokomo at 15, leaving one of Africa’s largest cities for an Indiana city of roughly 60,000. He hadn’t even studied the language.

“It was a big culture shock,” Bidunga said. “And then, mind you, I didn’t speak English back then, so that was really hard for me.”

Kokomo’s international program softened the landing. Bidunga found classmates from around the world. He learned English in roughly a year and a half to two years. He already spoke Lingala and Kikongo, languages from home. He speaks French, too.

But basketball, as it turned out, may have been the easiest language.

Basketball was the easy language

By his senior season at Kokomo, Bidunga averaged 19 points, 12.9 rebounds, 4.4 blocked shots and 3.2 assists. He shot 81.4% from the field.

And in 2024, Indiana — a state that has spent considerably more than a century treating high school basketball as a branch of municipal government — named a kid from Kinshasa Mr. Basketball. This is not an award Indiana hands out casually. Oscar Robertson won it. George McGinnis won it. Steve Alford. Damon Bailey. Glenn Robinson.

Trey Lyles, who later played at Kentucky, became the first foreign-born winner after coming to Indiana from Canada. Bidunga became the second.

He also became Kokomo’s third Mr. Basketball, joining Tom Schwartz, who won it in 1945, and Jimmy Rayl, the IU All-American and Indiana Pacer who won it in 1959.

Louisville coaches have spent plenty of years trying to get their hands on an Indiana Mr. Basketball.

Denny Crum once went to Springs Valley High School and tried to get Larry Bird to promise a Louisville visit by beating him in a game of H-O-R-S-E.

This turned out to be a tactical error. Bird won. He never made the visit. Half a century later, Louisville finally landed an Indiana Mr. Basketball whose route to the award was considerably longer than Bird’s.

Louisville's Flory Bidunga goes up for a basket during a summer exhibition game in the Bahamas on July 28, 2026.(University of Louisville)

When Bidunga first arrived in Indiana, he barely knew what Mr. Basketball was.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Bidunga told the Indianapolis Star after winning the award in 2024. “But with time I learned about it.”

He understands it better now.

“That was a big deal,” Bidunga said Tuesday. “It’s a big thing for my state. ... People remind me of being a Mr. Basketball from Indiana. So, yeah, that was a big deal, and still will be.”

But the geography isn’t the most remarkable part of the story. The speed is.

People have always noticed how quickly he moves. Coaches noticed how quickly he learns.

His former Kokomo coach, John Peckinpaugh, has described a player who could be shown something once, absorb it and execute it, often without making the same mistake again.

That helps explain how someone could arrive so late to basketball and make up so much ground so quickly. Ask Bidunga how he does it, though, and he makes it sound considerably less complicated.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I just love it. I feel like if you love something that much, everything will be fluid and easier.”

Then came two years at Kansas. As a freshman, he averaged 5.9 points and 5.4 rebounds while shooting 69.8%, a Kansas freshman record. Last season his role expanded dramatically. He blocked 91 shots. He had 13 double-doubles. He became a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award finalist.

Kansas coach Bill Self said there wasn’t a better defender in college basketball, regardless of position.

Pat Kelsey has another description.

“He’s a space-alien defender,” Louisville’s coach said Tuesday.

This requires some explanation. Bidunga is not an especially tall college center. He measured 6-7¾ without shoes at the NBA Combine. But his reach, explosion, lateral movement and instincts make the normal measurements somewhat beside the point.

“He can guard one through five,” Kelsey said. “If he switches onto a point guard, I don’t care who it is, he can keep him in front of him and contest the shot.”

That’s the player Louisville knows it has. The more intriguing question is what else is in there.

Bidunga entered the NBA Draft last spring and went through the Combine before deciding to return to college. He does not talk about that experience as a rejection. Quite the opposite.

“That was great,” he said. “That’s a great experience. That was my first time doing it. Obviously, I did not know what was going on, what to expect. But I feel like that’s good, meeting teams, just hearing what they have to say.”

Some players, he said, might view going to the Combine and returning to school as failure. He didn’t.

“I had feedback,” Bidunga said. “I need to work on these things to be better and be a good player.”

Which brings us to Louisville. Kelsey doesn’t need to teach Bidunga how to jump or block shots. He doesn’t need to teach him to run the floor or play hard.

What Louisville is trying to do is widen the definition of what Flory Bidunga can be. It doesn’t necessarily mean turning him into a 3-point shooter. Kelsey believes people overlook Bidunga’s ability with the basketball.

“Flory doesn’t get enough credit for the type of playmaker he is and his passing and his ability to play with the ball in his hands,” Kelsey said.

So Louisville is putting it there. Kelsey has encouraged Bidunga to rebound and push the break himself. The Cardinals can initiate offense through him. He can operate in dribble handoffs, make reads and find cutters. At a recent Louisville scrimmage, Kelsey said Bidunga had six assists and one turnover.

“I’m not saying he’s going to do that every single game,” Kelsey said. “But that tells you, like, he makes people around him better.”

There will be mistakes. Kelsey is counting on them. His instruction to Bidunga this summer has essentially been to explore. Go. Try it. Find out.

“I’ve just really encouraged him to explore, push the break, play in transition,” Kelsey said.

It won’t always be pretty, Kelsey acknowledged. The decisions won’t always be good ones.

“But I just think that confidence that you pour into guys helps them grow the fastest.”

There’s that word again. Fast. The kid has been catching up for a decade. He had to learn basketball. He had to learn English. He had to learn Indiana. He had to learn Kansas basketball under Bill Self. Now he’s learning what NBA teams want from him and what Louisville thinks he still can become.

And somehow he has managed to do all of it without appearing particularly burdened by the journey.

Basketball is what he does, not what he is

Ask where his personality comes from and Bidunga laughs.

“I’m just a happy dude,” he said. “I try to bring joy to my teammates and stuff. Always joke around, make sure everybody’s comfortable. ... I just want everybody to be great.”

Basketball, he is quick to point out, isn’t all of it.

“People see us just like a basketball player,” Bidunga said. “But ... basketball is something that we do, but it’s not what we are.”

Spend a little time with him and you begin to understand what he means.

Roller coasters? There’s a fear factor. He’s not a fan. Actually, that’s not totally fair.

“I’m not scared,” he said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

The distinction is best left to the jury. He has taken up golf. He readily admits he’s not good.

Louisville center Flory Bidunga talks with reporters during ACC Tipoff men's basketball media days in Charlotte, N.C.(Eric Crawford)

He likes to cook. His father cooked from scratch, and Bidunga picked it up from him. He says he makes a pretty good steak. His first meal after arriving in America? A Big Mac. He remains sufficiently devoted to McDonald’s that teammates apparently know his breakfast habits.

And then there is No. 40. Surely there must be some great meaning behind a number that followed him from Kokomo to Kansas to Louisville. There is.

“They call me 40 because 40 goes with Flory,” he joked Tuesday.

Then he confessed. “Actually, not.”

The number was simply the biggest jersey available when he arrived at Kokomo. It fit, so he wore it. Sometimes a jersey number is just a jersey number.

And sometimes a shopping trip is just a shopping trip. But it wasn’t for Bidunga and his mother.

Bidunga’s parents remain in Congo. He hasn’t seen them in five years. They follow his career as best they can from thousands of miles away. And for a while, his mother didn’t quite understand what her son had become in America.

So he gave her an assignment. Google me.

That’s when, Bidunga said, she began to understand.

“She was like, ‘How my son — why my son’s face is on Google?’”

The woman who was beside him when a stranger first suggested basketball eventually had to search the internet to discover just how far the suggestion had carried him.

Five years is a long time not to see your parents. Bidunga said he looks forward to bringing them here someday.

At ACC Tipoff, he laughed easily. He teased. He invited a reporter to Kinshasa. He talked about food and golf and soccer and basketball and the places it has taken him.

And when someone asked him to imagine the kid he was 10 years ago, and whether that kid could possibly have imagined sitting in Charlotte wearing a Louisville jersey, Bidunga didn’t need long.

“Man, not at all,” he said. “You know, what an incredible journey. I’m really glad. I appreciate being here, being in this position. You know, 10 years ago I was thinking I’d be in Spain playing soccer right now. I was hoping. But I’m really glad to be here, for sure.”

The sport he picked up almost by accident has carried him halfway around the world.

And apparently, he still isn’t finished learning it.

Somewhere in Kinshasa, there is a man who saw something first.

Flory Bidunga would very much like to know his name.

Home

CRAWFORD | A stranger sent Flory Bidunga toward basketball. Louisville’s new star has learned fast ever since.