ESPN Men's Basketball

PHILADELPHIA -- There is no gentle way to say this.

Ernestine Grigsby, there's a hole in the door to your upstairs bedroom.

It's been there a while. Your son, Chris Wright, put his foot through it a few years back. He was practicing a dunk on the makeshift hoop he made out of a wire hanger and hung on the door and well, doors don't take charges particularly well.

He put a nice picture over it -- something he tore out of a magazine -- but if you lift it up you'll see the hole.

"I was trying to dunk backward," Wright explained sheepishly. "She doesn't know. Or she didn't."

The guess here is it won't surprise Grigsby. Her son has been sending tremors through the family's house for years. He thought he was sly, packing a pillow under the hoop, sliding a futon mattress up against the door, putting blankets down to pad the aisle he made for his dunk path.

"He didn't think I knew because I couldn't hear it," Grigsby said. "But I could feel it. All he ever wanted to do was dunk."

At least the door wasn't sacrificed in vain. These days Wright is a YouTube sensation, a high flier with some 20 entries detailing his "monstrous" slam dunks and "nasty" alley-oops as the leading scorer for the University of Dayton.

Yet if Wright plays much of his game above the rim, he toils under the radar. A high school star who shared the spotlight with the likes of Derrick Rose and Kalin Lucas at the Nike Skills Academy, Wright remains a hometown hero in Trotwood, Ohio, but a lesser known commodity outside the state borders.

It is the price of doing business in the Atlantic 10, a conference that annually has to shout and scream to claim its place among the nation's elite. Xavier, with two runs to the Elite Eight in the last four years, has finally passed the smell test, afforded credibility from the start of the season.

Everyone else still is screaming in the wind.

Wright and his Dayton teammates are 21-3, having beaten Marquette and owning a more-than-respectable RPI of 31.

And yet, until the Flyers play Xavier on Wednesday (ESPN Classic, 7 ET), the jury will remain out on the team's legitimacy. That Top 25 ranking will remain elusive as well unless they prove themselves against the X-men.

Fair? Perhaps not. But it is the reality for a talented team sitting outside the "Big Six" conferences.

"Does it bother me? It depends on the hour of the day," UD coach Brian Gregory said. "Because of this team's competitive spirit, I do think it gives them a little edge, but at the same time I'm very cognizant of not just our program, but our league. To be recognized with a national ranking would add credibility to our league, which always flies under the radar."

A year ago, the Flyers were poised for their breakthrough. Dayton ran its record to 13-1, disposing of Louisville and Pittsburgh along the way and cracking the top 25. And then eight minutes into a game against Rhode Island, Wright, who had racked up four A-10 Rookie of the Week honors in those 13 games, fell awkwardly on an already balky ankle, fracturing the bone. Two games later, fellow forward Charles Little broke the seismoid bone in his foot and suddenly the soaring Flyers were reeling.

Usually the life of the party, Wright was too disappointed to rally the troops. He saw his team in disarray, trying to regroup without two of its players, and felt helpless. He was in a pool instead of on the court, working on his cardio instead of working on the offense. He struggled off the court while the Flyers struggled on it, their hot start spiraling into a 20-9 finish, their once sure-fire NCAA bid sliding into an NIT ticket.

At least that's the way most people see it -- the loss of Wright coinciding with Dayton's downfall.

"I don't like that at all," Ernestine Grigsby said. "He's only one person."

That, Wright says, is vintage Grigsby. A loving woman, she doesn't tolerate fools, boors or braggarts and can cut someone to the quick with just a look.

"Everyone I ever played with, they all loved her but they were scared of her," Wright said. "They know you don't mess with her."

No, you don't mess with a woman who has raised 11 children, 10 of them boys, all on her own. Wright, the fourth-youngest of Grigsby's five boys, was just a baby when his mother adopted four more boys, all much older than her own children. Years later, she took in her niece and nephew when they were in elementary school. Now high schoolers, they still live with her.

And those were just the ones who stayed forever. Grigsby's was and is the house where kids congregated, where her stern hand and strict rules -- you better be wearing church clothes on Sundays -- were never a deterrent. Wright remembers friends and cousins showing up for an overnight stay, but packing enough clothes to stay for a month.

"I think about it now and I don't know how she did it," Wright marveled a few minutes after scoring 14 points against La Salle last week. "She was a mother and father to all of us -- all those boys raised by a woman, but she taught us all how to be men."

Grigsby, who hosts a family Bible study every week, supplied the humility; a house full of kids provided the toughness. On the backyard hoop, Wright went toe-to-toe with his brothers. Older than him by 10 and 12 years, they dunked on him and posted him up, one time pushing him so hard he fell into fence and knocked into a pole.

But Wright was the ball of fire, the one who would steal the hat Grigsby always wore and run away to antagonize her. The jumping bean who also was a class cutup with a gift for impersonations.

Grigsby and Wright both vividly remember the day Grigsby, a food service supervisor at Wright's school, was called down to the classroom.

Wright was bored when he was supposed to be reading. To amuse himself he started imitating animals, farm animals mostly. A teacher called Grigsby and she came down, standing outside the doorway while Wright, his back to the door, went on with his animal farm repertoire, cackling like a rooster.

"I turned around to talk to my friend, Tony, and I saw this shadow in the doorway," he said. "You know how it is when you're a kid. You know that shadow."

Grigsby crooked her finger and Wright, turning a five-step walk into a 10-minute death march, met her in the hallway. She was about to read him the riot act when the teacher intervened and said Grigsby was called solely for the entertainment of it all.

"I said if you don't want me to discipline him, don't call me down here, because I can still jack him up," Grigsby said with a laugh.

"Never did it again," Wright said.

Eventually all of that energy and jumping combined into the perfect cocktail of a basketball player.

His high-flying dunks already earning accolades, Wright looked at a number of schools, but the Dayton pull was especially strong. In the early 1970s, his mother's brother, J.D., played at Dayton. Uncle and nephew remain extremely close and play a never-ending game, trying to beat one another to the punch and say, "I love you."

Told following the La Salle game that his uncle says, "I love you," Wright smirked. "No, that's cheating."

They used to play against each other but haven't in some time, probably not since J.D. saw Wright hooping it up in the parking lot behind the sporting goods store he once owned.

"I saw him dunking and thought they had the rim too low," said J.D., who is now a minister. "I was stunned. Now every game I go to, that's what I want to see, a dunk."

Wright was good for two throwdowns against La Salle, sneaking behind the baseline for an easy alley-oop in the first half and skying from the wing for a one-handed jam in the second. But he is far more than a one-dimensional dunk machine, evident in the end game against La Salle.

Three times in the final minute, Gregory went to Wright, and though he didn't score the game-winner, his jumper bounced off the rim directly into the hands of Marcus Johnson, who slammed the rebound home for the win.

"We have a lot more options offensively with Chris," Gregory said. "The energy level he brings every day adds to the energy level this team already has."

His mother won't like this sort of attention-grabbing statistic, but the fact is hard to deny: With Wright in the lineup, the Flyers are 35-5 over the last two seasons. They are right there with Saint Joseph's and rival Xavier in the Atlantic 10 standings and are in serious contention for their first NCAA bid since 2004.

That is indeed some powerful energy.

Don't believe it?

Ask Ernestine Grigsby to show you the door upstairs in her house.

Dana O'Neil covers college basketball for ESPN.com and can be reached at espnoneil@live.com.