Since everyone has a Caleb Swanigan story nowadays, here's the story I wrote on him for the Basketball Times over him winning their POY award.
---------------------------------------------------------------
It's mid-February, around 10 a.m. one morning, 12 hours or so after Caleb Swanigan grabbed the last of his 17 rebounds in Purdue's rout of Rutgers, then inadvertently missed the post-game press conference because he was off to his StairMaster for some late-night cardio.
At 10 p.m.
After playing a Big Ten basketball game.
In which he grabbed 17 rebounds.
"We seem to have lost Caleb Swanigan," Purdue sports information director Chris Forman joked as he brought two players into that press conference instead of the usual three.
The following morning, though, Forman had Swanigan fully accounted for, in his Mackey Arena office to bang out another series of interviews — three of them in this case — as seemingly everybody has wanted their chance to tell his story, the most recent chapter of which has Swanigan up for every major national honor there is, and the winner of at least one.
Purdue's sophomore big man is Basketball Times' Player-of-the-Year.
On this morning , he's holed up in a vacant office for another of the dozens of interviews he's taken on during this sensational season he's enjoyed, the one in which he led the Big Ten in scoring (18.9) and rebounding in league games, averaged more rebounds (12.6) than any other player the conference has seen since 1977 and led Purdue to 25 regular-season wins and an outright Big Ten title. About 24 hours after scoring 20 points and grabbing 14 rebounds in Purdue's win at upstart and NCAA Tournament-bound Northwestern in the regular-season finale in Evanston, Swanigan was named Big Ten Player-of-the-Year.
Weeks earlier, sitting for this interview after playing a game the night before that through the prism of his own expectations qualified as just OK — 12 and 17 was indeed just OK, to him at least — Swanigan is sleepy.
As he sits there fiddling with one of his dreadlocks, Swanigan yawns, a rare break in the stonewall façade he normally portrays, at least publicly, and an even more rare indication that this player who's worked to unreasonable lengths to transform himself from morbidly obese eighth-grader into one of college basketball's elite players and most finely tuned physical specimens actually does tire.
And, Swanigan might be burned out.
With interviews, that is.
He's done so many of these media obligations this season, from ESPN.com, to Sports Illustrated, to "Ellen," to "SportsCenter," to the "CBS Evening News." His high school's journalism program even called, too, and scored a few minutes of Swanigan's time.
They've come to tell his story, the kind of story they write books about, then turn those books into movies.
Swanigan has been willing to tell it, over and over and over again, about how he was, in effect, rescued from a life of homelessness, directionless-ness, poverty and fear, scarred by the toll his father's battle with addiction, and ultimately his death, took on his family.
It's deeply personal subject matter.
"But if it helps someone in the same situation, then that's what it's all about," Swanigan said. "If someone can read my story and it can motivate them to do something positive, then that's the point of sharing stories like it."
Back in the "before" portion of Swanigan's story, the physical disrepair that came from eating whatever he could whenever he could was, in some ways, the least of his problems, but a problem nonetheless for a kid who the deck was very much stacked against in ways too numerous to even count.
Roosevelt Barnes, Swanigan's well-off adopted father, made this all possible, pulling him off the Salt Lake City streets and bringing him into his Fort Wayne home.
But since then, Swanigan himself has maximized every opportunity that he was never supposed to have.
"It just came from me not wanting to be a product of my environment and wanting to compete at a high level," Swanigan says. "I wanted to change my life."
He's done everything in his power, and then some.
Physically, he changed himself beyond recognition, now a salad-and-fish-eating 6-foot-9, 250-pounder. The bad habits of his youth were shed wholesale. New habits formed, all of them productive. They've complemented a natural drive and relentlessness that didn't really come to light until they crossed paths with opportunity.
Barnes first saw it during a workout years ago, when Swanigan, then closer to 400 pounds than today's 250, nearly collapsed running a sprint. He demanded to finish the drill. Barnes called him off. But he was back at it the very next day.
"The first thing I noticed about him," Barnes has said, "was that he didn't quit."
That was the beginning of the process that's brought Swanigan to where he is today.
At Purdue, Swanigan's obsessed over his diet and work regimens alike, a creature of uncommon habit, as evidenced by the late-night StairMaster runs, the pre-practice training that's so often left him drenched before he even changes into his practice gear and the exhausting post-practice shooting circuits.
If you counted up all the jumpers Swanigan's taken on his own time in his time at Purdue, they'd number in the tens of thousands, most likely.
Swanigan's work ethic at Purdue has become stuff of legend.
He's done so much running that his sports performance coach, Josh Bonhotal, once said that Swanigan's cool-down workout is the same as the most grueling of another man's conditioning work.
And yet still, he's found balance enough to earn Academic All-America honors this year, putting him on pace to graduate from Purdue with relative ease, whether he remains in school or leaves for the NBA, which appears more likely.
On the court and off, Swanigan's been driven by will, the defining characteristic that's been the impetus behind his total transformation. As Purdue coach Matt Painter puts it when looking back to the day he first began recruiting Swanigan about a half dozen years ago now, "He's morphed into like three different people since then."
Last fall, when Painter welcomed arguably the most decorated recruit in the history of a school that counts Rick Mount and Glenn Robinson as basketball alums, the coach witnessed the power of Swanigan's will first-hand.
At that time, the former McDonald's All-American and Indiana Mr. Basketball had just led Homestead High School in Fort Wayne to a state title, then won his second gold medal in as many summers with USA Basketball.
For his development, Painter figured then, it might have been worthwhile for Swanigan to experience failure, to have to struggle, as counterintuitive as that might seem given the player's personal history.
That summer, shortly after he enrolled, it took Swanigan six minutes and eight seconds to run a mile in off-season conditioning.
Hoping to deal Swanigan a dose of adversity at a time when basketball was coming pretty easy to him, Painter set a target time that he didn't think Swanigan could meet: Five minutes and 45 seconds.
He'd need to shave 23 seconds off his prior time to meet that goal. That's an eternity as mile times go for those of a certain body type.
Word leaked to Swanigan that his coaches didn't think he could do it, the sort of doubt that's never sat well with him.
At one point, he all but swore off Purdue as an option for him, because he perceived it as a slight that the first school to recruit him didn't offer before everyone else. To him, it came off as a lack of faith in him, even if at that time, he looked much more like an offensive tackle than he did a power forward.
(And he'd likely have been an elite offensive tackle, too, had he not given up football as a sophomore at Homestead to focus on the hardwood.)
Here was Swanigan, feeling doubted again, as his coaches figured they were setting him up to fail.
He trained accordingly.
Then, he ran a 5:41, foiling his coaches' best laid plans.
That was Swanigan's will shining through, as it does in most every basketball game he plays.
It's come through in the form of his worth-the-price-of-admission rebounding, his constant pursuit of them no matter who stands between him and that ball, no matter what jersey they're wearing. Swanigan is a violent and stubborn rebounder with a special knack for emerging from crowds with the ball, one way or another.
How college basketball's most menacing rebounder has gotten through the season without injuring anyone, opponent or otherwise, might be a minor miracle.
"There are no teammates in rebounding," Swanigan has said. "Just go get the ball."
There can't be a home crowd more engaged with a player's rebounding than there were in Mackey Arena this season, as fans knew the moment Swanigan grabbed his ninth board, then slid figuratively to the edges of their seats waiting for No. 10, or on three occasions this season, No. 20. Swanigan's 26 double-doubles this season were a source of pride for him, Purdue and its fans alike.
Swanigan's consistency never wavered this season, nor did his effort.
It was all encapsulated in one particular play.
At Ohio State, Swanigan attacked Buckeye center Trevor Thompson, backing him down, then going up with his right hand before Thompson recovered and blocked his shot. Swanigan responded by bouncing back off the floor without hesitation — "instinct," he called it — to paw at the ball and tip it back up, and in, with his left hand, as if it were his plan all along.
Swanigan's will showed up when players' will is so often put to the test most: On the road.
Purdue's path to its first Big Ten title since 2010 and first outright crown since '96 was paved with key road victories.
The Boilermakers won in three of the Big Ten's most daunting environments at Michigan State, Maryland and Indiana, then won at Northwestern in the regular season finale in one of the biggest games in that school's history.
Swanigan's numbers in those games: 21.8 points per game, on 52.5-percent shooting, and 13.8 rebounds.
Of those performances, Michigan State stands out.
As the college basketball world knows full well, Swanigan was briefly committed to the Spartans the spring following his senior year before opting instead for Purdue, which presented him the chance to play power forward primarily.
In the first, and probably only, trip to East Lansing's Breslin Center of his college career, Swanigan was not received kindly, obviously. Big Ten student sections tend to not be particularly welcoming to players who spurn their schools, then star for rivals.
Amidst the animosity, though, it seemed to bring a certain calm out of Swanigan.
He opened the game raining three-pointers. After shooting too many as a freshman, sometimes in less-than-ideal moments, the downside of the supreme confidence that has made him what he is, Swanigan shot 45 percent from three-point range this season, up from 29 last season.
He made all his free throws, going 6-for-6, despite the omnipresent Izzone's taunts. A 70-percent foul shooter in Big Ten play as a freshman, Swanigan shot nearly 82 this season.
When it came time to extinguish Michigan State's final surge in the game's closing minutes, Swanigan took a post feed from entry man Vincent Edwards, then hit the diving Edwards on a picturesque give-and-go for a layup that more or less sealed Purdue's 84-73 win that night.
It highlighted Swanigan's sometimes savant-like passing out of the post. He's one of the best passing big men in college basketball, though it's the element of his game that draws the least fanfare because it's trumped by so many others.
Swanigan finished at Michigan State with 25 points and 17 rebounds. Yes, he committed seven turnovers — that remains one of his vulnerabilities — but otherwise he was 8-of-13 from the floor, 3-of-4 from three-point territory and perfect at the line, all in front of a crowd doing everything in its power to get in his head.
One of the most imaginative, yet least effective, taunts Swanigan has faced on the road has involved cheesecake, a nod to his admission that the dessert was one of the more difficult foods for him to give up as he's transformed his body.
They yelled "Cheesecake!" at Michigan State.
The Maryland students went so far as to bring a cardboard cutout, which they waved during his 26-and-10 performance at the Xfinity Center.
"Yelling things about cheesecake at him is the least likely thing that'll faze him," teammate P.J. Thompson said. "He has been through serious problems growing up, so getting booed and getting made fun of are the least of his worries. He just wants to win and play well."
This year, Swanigan has done both to a high level.
Last spring, he very nearly entered the NBA draft, even though many projections pegged him to go undrafted altogether had he made the jump.
During the pre-draft process, scouts told him it would be in his best interests to improve his shooting, mobility and conditioning, of which he's done all three.
But during that process it also resonated with Swanigan that it was most important he win, whether he was explicitly told as much or not.
His aim coming into this season was to be a better teammate, he said, understanding more than ever that team success and personal success are one in the same.
It's not that he was a bad teammate before. It's just that he got to campus late due to his USA Basketball obligations, and came to Purdue with a natural, albeit unintended, divide with teammates he'd not been around much. It was very much a situation last season where it was Biggie — as Swanigan is universally known — and everybody else.
His trust level with his coaches, who he'd also not been around to extensive lengths during recruiting or in the summer prior to his freshman season, didn't come overnight.
"Last summer was really important," said assistant coach Brandon Brantley, who coaches Purdue's big men, "because we got to know him better and he got more time to spend with his teammates. I think that's really paid off."
For coaches and teammates alike.
Last year, Swanigan's fierce competitiveness sometimes affected the way he interacted with those teammates.
"I think he is more patient with others and himself now," Painter said. "At times when people are passionate and competitive, things come out. It's not wrong. It's just how people are. Now, hopefully that rubs off on other people that you have to know how to be competitive, but also know how to talk to each guy."
Experience has made Swanigan more tactful and thus a more effective leader.
That was his intent prior to the season when he proactively approached Painter seeking a captain's title, a role he seems to have taken seriously this season, beyond it just being a line on his robust résumé.
Swanigan came to Purdue as a freshman wanting it all as quickly as he could get it, as players of his caliber are so often conditioned to nowadays.
That was both Swanigan's blessing and his curse at Purdue during his freshman year, an outstanding one by most any standard, but one that left him and Purdue wanting more
But Swanigan's standards have always been sky-high and his rookie year at Purdue was not without flaw. The drive that has made him great at every level to this point came with an over-eagerness that manifested itself in bulk turnovers at times and ill-advised shots in key moments at others. His transition from playing center in high school to playing as a big forward brought with it a daunting defensive transition that didn't go smoothly, to put it mildly.
But coming into this season, Swanigan seems to have found patience where he previously might have lacked it.
In the off-season, he "unpacked," as one Purdue coach put it, freed from the pressure to be a one-and-done once he elected to return for his sophomore year.
He settled in and calmed down, without losing any of the edge that's always defined him. He won't soon concede a rebound to anyone, and the defenders dealt the losing hand of having to guard him in the post are going to feel it more than ever.
It's just that now, more of Swanigan's efforts are pointed in the most productive directions.
He's been a dominant player for Purdue. He's probably been the most consistent player in the country and quite possibly the most taxing to play against, a label he might relish as much as any, given his nature.
Swanigan's story has been surreal, almost too unrealistic to be real.
Like silly taunts from opposing crowds, though, the sheer improbability of his story doesn't so much as faze Swanigan.
"I've put in the work," he says, again fiddling with a dreadlock. "It's all about working hard, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. I just know everything I've done to get to this point.
"It surprises me when I don’t play well since I have put in so much energy for it."
That being said, Swanigan hasn't been surprised very often this season.
---------------------------------------------------------------
It's mid-February, around 10 a.m. one morning, 12 hours or so after Caleb Swanigan grabbed the last of his 17 rebounds in Purdue's rout of Rutgers, then inadvertently missed the post-game press conference because he was off to his StairMaster for some late-night cardio.
At 10 p.m.
After playing a Big Ten basketball game.
In which he grabbed 17 rebounds.
"We seem to have lost Caleb Swanigan," Purdue sports information director Chris Forman joked as he brought two players into that press conference instead of the usual three.
The following morning, though, Forman had Swanigan fully accounted for, in his Mackey Arena office to bang out another series of interviews — three of them in this case — as seemingly everybody has wanted their chance to tell his story, the most recent chapter of which has Swanigan up for every major national honor there is, and the winner of at least one.
Purdue's sophomore big man is Basketball Times' Player-of-the-Year.
On this morning , he's holed up in a vacant office for another of the dozens of interviews he's taken on during this sensational season he's enjoyed, the one in which he led the Big Ten in scoring (18.9) and rebounding in league games, averaged more rebounds (12.6) than any other player the conference has seen since 1977 and led Purdue to 25 regular-season wins and an outright Big Ten title. About 24 hours after scoring 20 points and grabbing 14 rebounds in Purdue's win at upstart and NCAA Tournament-bound Northwestern in the regular-season finale in Evanston, Swanigan was named Big Ten Player-of-the-Year.
Weeks earlier, sitting for this interview after playing a game the night before that through the prism of his own expectations qualified as just OK — 12 and 17 was indeed just OK, to him at least — Swanigan is sleepy.
As he sits there fiddling with one of his dreadlocks, Swanigan yawns, a rare break in the stonewall façade he normally portrays, at least publicly, and an even more rare indication that this player who's worked to unreasonable lengths to transform himself from morbidly obese eighth-grader into one of college basketball's elite players and most finely tuned physical specimens actually does tire.
And, Swanigan might be burned out.
With interviews, that is.
He's done so many of these media obligations this season, from ESPN.com, to Sports Illustrated, to "Ellen," to "SportsCenter," to the "CBS Evening News." His high school's journalism program even called, too, and scored a few minutes of Swanigan's time.
They've come to tell his story, the kind of story they write books about, then turn those books into movies.
Swanigan has been willing to tell it, over and over and over again, about how he was, in effect, rescued from a life of homelessness, directionless-ness, poverty and fear, scarred by the toll his father's battle with addiction, and ultimately his death, took on his family.
It's deeply personal subject matter.
"But if it helps someone in the same situation, then that's what it's all about," Swanigan said. "If someone can read my story and it can motivate them to do something positive, then that's the point of sharing stories like it."
Back in the "before" portion of Swanigan's story, the physical disrepair that came from eating whatever he could whenever he could was, in some ways, the least of his problems, but a problem nonetheless for a kid who the deck was very much stacked against in ways too numerous to even count.
Roosevelt Barnes, Swanigan's well-off adopted father, made this all possible, pulling him off the Salt Lake City streets and bringing him into his Fort Wayne home.
But since then, Swanigan himself has maximized every opportunity that he was never supposed to have.
"It just came from me not wanting to be a product of my environment and wanting to compete at a high level," Swanigan says. "I wanted to change my life."
He's done everything in his power, and then some.
Physically, he changed himself beyond recognition, now a salad-and-fish-eating 6-foot-9, 250-pounder. The bad habits of his youth were shed wholesale. New habits formed, all of them productive. They've complemented a natural drive and relentlessness that didn't really come to light until they crossed paths with opportunity.
Barnes first saw it during a workout years ago, when Swanigan, then closer to 400 pounds than today's 250, nearly collapsed running a sprint. He demanded to finish the drill. Barnes called him off. But he was back at it the very next day.
"The first thing I noticed about him," Barnes has said, "was that he didn't quit."
That was the beginning of the process that's brought Swanigan to where he is today.
At Purdue, Swanigan's obsessed over his diet and work regimens alike, a creature of uncommon habit, as evidenced by the late-night StairMaster runs, the pre-practice training that's so often left him drenched before he even changes into his practice gear and the exhausting post-practice shooting circuits.
If you counted up all the jumpers Swanigan's taken on his own time in his time at Purdue, they'd number in the tens of thousands, most likely.
Swanigan's work ethic at Purdue has become stuff of legend.
He's done so much running that his sports performance coach, Josh Bonhotal, once said that Swanigan's cool-down workout is the same as the most grueling of another man's conditioning work.
And yet still, he's found balance enough to earn Academic All-America honors this year, putting him on pace to graduate from Purdue with relative ease, whether he remains in school or leaves for the NBA, which appears more likely.
On the court and off, Swanigan's been driven by will, the defining characteristic that's been the impetus behind his total transformation. As Purdue coach Matt Painter puts it when looking back to the day he first began recruiting Swanigan about a half dozen years ago now, "He's morphed into like three different people since then."
Last fall, when Painter welcomed arguably the most decorated recruit in the history of a school that counts Rick Mount and Glenn Robinson as basketball alums, the coach witnessed the power of Swanigan's will first-hand.
At that time, the former McDonald's All-American and Indiana Mr. Basketball had just led Homestead High School in Fort Wayne to a state title, then won his second gold medal in as many summers with USA Basketball.
For his development, Painter figured then, it might have been worthwhile for Swanigan to experience failure, to have to struggle, as counterintuitive as that might seem given the player's personal history.
That summer, shortly after he enrolled, it took Swanigan six minutes and eight seconds to run a mile in off-season conditioning.
Hoping to deal Swanigan a dose of adversity at a time when basketball was coming pretty easy to him, Painter set a target time that he didn't think Swanigan could meet: Five minutes and 45 seconds.
He'd need to shave 23 seconds off his prior time to meet that goal. That's an eternity as mile times go for those of a certain body type.
Word leaked to Swanigan that his coaches didn't think he could do it, the sort of doubt that's never sat well with him.
At one point, he all but swore off Purdue as an option for him, because he perceived it as a slight that the first school to recruit him didn't offer before everyone else. To him, it came off as a lack of faith in him, even if at that time, he looked much more like an offensive tackle than he did a power forward.
(And he'd likely have been an elite offensive tackle, too, had he not given up football as a sophomore at Homestead to focus on the hardwood.)
Here was Swanigan, feeling doubted again, as his coaches figured they were setting him up to fail.
He trained accordingly.
Then, he ran a 5:41, foiling his coaches' best laid plans.
That was Swanigan's will shining through, as it does in most every basketball game he plays.
It's come through in the form of his worth-the-price-of-admission rebounding, his constant pursuit of them no matter who stands between him and that ball, no matter what jersey they're wearing. Swanigan is a violent and stubborn rebounder with a special knack for emerging from crowds with the ball, one way or another.
How college basketball's most menacing rebounder has gotten through the season without injuring anyone, opponent or otherwise, might be a minor miracle.
"There are no teammates in rebounding," Swanigan has said. "Just go get the ball."
There can't be a home crowd more engaged with a player's rebounding than there were in Mackey Arena this season, as fans knew the moment Swanigan grabbed his ninth board, then slid figuratively to the edges of their seats waiting for No. 10, or on three occasions this season, No. 20. Swanigan's 26 double-doubles this season were a source of pride for him, Purdue and its fans alike.
Swanigan's consistency never wavered this season, nor did his effort.
It was all encapsulated in one particular play.
At Ohio State, Swanigan attacked Buckeye center Trevor Thompson, backing him down, then going up with his right hand before Thompson recovered and blocked his shot. Swanigan responded by bouncing back off the floor without hesitation — "instinct," he called it — to paw at the ball and tip it back up, and in, with his left hand, as if it were his plan all along.
Swanigan's will showed up when players' will is so often put to the test most: On the road.
Purdue's path to its first Big Ten title since 2010 and first outright crown since '96 was paved with key road victories.
The Boilermakers won in three of the Big Ten's most daunting environments at Michigan State, Maryland and Indiana, then won at Northwestern in the regular season finale in one of the biggest games in that school's history.
Swanigan's numbers in those games: 21.8 points per game, on 52.5-percent shooting, and 13.8 rebounds.
Of those performances, Michigan State stands out.
As the college basketball world knows full well, Swanigan was briefly committed to the Spartans the spring following his senior year before opting instead for Purdue, which presented him the chance to play power forward primarily.
In the first, and probably only, trip to East Lansing's Breslin Center of his college career, Swanigan was not received kindly, obviously. Big Ten student sections tend to not be particularly welcoming to players who spurn their schools, then star for rivals.
Amidst the animosity, though, it seemed to bring a certain calm out of Swanigan.
He opened the game raining three-pointers. After shooting too many as a freshman, sometimes in less-than-ideal moments, the downside of the supreme confidence that has made him what he is, Swanigan shot 45 percent from three-point range this season, up from 29 last season.
He made all his free throws, going 6-for-6, despite the omnipresent Izzone's taunts. A 70-percent foul shooter in Big Ten play as a freshman, Swanigan shot nearly 82 this season.
When it came time to extinguish Michigan State's final surge in the game's closing minutes, Swanigan took a post feed from entry man Vincent Edwards, then hit the diving Edwards on a picturesque give-and-go for a layup that more or less sealed Purdue's 84-73 win that night.
It highlighted Swanigan's sometimes savant-like passing out of the post. He's one of the best passing big men in college basketball, though it's the element of his game that draws the least fanfare because it's trumped by so many others.
Swanigan finished at Michigan State with 25 points and 17 rebounds. Yes, he committed seven turnovers — that remains one of his vulnerabilities — but otherwise he was 8-of-13 from the floor, 3-of-4 from three-point territory and perfect at the line, all in front of a crowd doing everything in its power to get in his head.
One of the most imaginative, yet least effective, taunts Swanigan has faced on the road has involved cheesecake, a nod to his admission that the dessert was one of the more difficult foods for him to give up as he's transformed his body.
They yelled "Cheesecake!" at Michigan State.
The Maryland students went so far as to bring a cardboard cutout, which they waved during his 26-and-10 performance at the Xfinity Center.
"Yelling things about cheesecake at him is the least likely thing that'll faze him," teammate P.J. Thompson said. "He has been through serious problems growing up, so getting booed and getting made fun of are the least of his worries. He just wants to win and play well."
This year, Swanigan has done both to a high level.
Last spring, he very nearly entered the NBA draft, even though many projections pegged him to go undrafted altogether had he made the jump.
During the pre-draft process, scouts told him it would be in his best interests to improve his shooting, mobility and conditioning, of which he's done all three.
But during that process it also resonated with Swanigan that it was most important he win, whether he was explicitly told as much or not.
His aim coming into this season was to be a better teammate, he said, understanding more than ever that team success and personal success are one in the same.
It's not that he was a bad teammate before. It's just that he got to campus late due to his USA Basketball obligations, and came to Purdue with a natural, albeit unintended, divide with teammates he'd not been around much. It was very much a situation last season where it was Biggie — as Swanigan is universally known — and everybody else.
His trust level with his coaches, who he'd also not been around to extensive lengths during recruiting or in the summer prior to his freshman season, didn't come overnight.
"Last summer was really important," said assistant coach Brandon Brantley, who coaches Purdue's big men, "because we got to know him better and he got more time to spend with his teammates. I think that's really paid off."
For coaches and teammates alike.
Last year, Swanigan's fierce competitiveness sometimes affected the way he interacted with those teammates.
"I think he is more patient with others and himself now," Painter said. "At times when people are passionate and competitive, things come out. It's not wrong. It's just how people are. Now, hopefully that rubs off on other people that you have to know how to be competitive, but also know how to talk to each guy."
Experience has made Swanigan more tactful and thus a more effective leader.
That was his intent prior to the season when he proactively approached Painter seeking a captain's title, a role he seems to have taken seriously this season, beyond it just being a line on his robust résumé.
Swanigan came to Purdue as a freshman wanting it all as quickly as he could get it, as players of his caliber are so often conditioned to nowadays.
That was both Swanigan's blessing and his curse at Purdue during his freshman year, an outstanding one by most any standard, but one that left him and Purdue wanting more
But Swanigan's standards have always been sky-high and his rookie year at Purdue was not without flaw. The drive that has made him great at every level to this point came with an over-eagerness that manifested itself in bulk turnovers at times and ill-advised shots in key moments at others. His transition from playing center in high school to playing as a big forward brought with it a daunting defensive transition that didn't go smoothly, to put it mildly.
But coming into this season, Swanigan seems to have found patience where he previously might have lacked it.
In the off-season, he "unpacked," as one Purdue coach put it, freed from the pressure to be a one-and-done once he elected to return for his sophomore year.
He settled in and calmed down, without losing any of the edge that's always defined him. He won't soon concede a rebound to anyone, and the defenders dealt the losing hand of having to guard him in the post are going to feel it more than ever.
It's just that now, more of Swanigan's efforts are pointed in the most productive directions.
He's been a dominant player for Purdue. He's probably been the most consistent player in the country and quite possibly the most taxing to play against, a label he might relish as much as any, given his nature.
Swanigan's story has been surreal, almost too unrealistic to be real.
Like silly taunts from opposing crowds, though, the sheer improbability of his story doesn't so much as faze Swanigan.
"I've put in the work," he says, again fiddling with a dreadlock. "It's all about working hard, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. I just know everything I've done to get to this point.
"It surprises me when I don’t play well since I have put in so much energy for it."
That being said, Swanigan hasn't been surprised very often this season.
