A few days before Charlotte Hornets rookie Kon Knueppel returned to his hometown of Milwaukee to play an NBA game this month, his mother sent him a text.
She had noticed the Hornets would be in town on a day off before the Nov. 14 matchup. Would Kon, a 6-foot-7 guard, have time to stop by home to have dinner with his parents and four younger brothers?
“Invite whoever you want,” she said.
“He texted back a couple hours later and said, ‘I think I’m gonna invite the whole team,’” Chari Nordgaard Knueppel told NBC News’ Sam Brock.
Neighbors stood in their driveways, snapping pictures, as a busload of Hornets players parked nearby. Unable to get a hard headcount of attendees from their son, Knueppel’s parents, Chari and Kon Sr., had prepared 15 pounds of chicken fajitas, the menu item that had become the family's go-to when it hosts Super Bowl parties.
But seeing a dozen players, several more than 7 feet tall, step out of the bus, they started preparing 10 additional pounds of fajitas.
“We’ve done it before,” Nordgaard Knueppel said. “It’s having five sons, making three meals a day. That’s lots of practice.”
What was intended as a small gathering of family, then teammates, became the picture seen around the NBA after a snap of the occasion spread on social media.
Knueppel's four younger brothers — who are in eighth, ninth, 10th and 11th grade and also play basketball at a high level — "did a good job of ... not freaking out," he said, while conceding that one of his brothers had tried to dunk on star guard LaMelo Ball on a miniature hoop inside the home.
Road trips are handled differently throughout the NBA. Some teams prefer to reserve back rooms in fine-dining restaurants for any players and staff members who want to attend; others leave the logistics to the players, who scatter throughout cities in small groups for meals.
But going over to a player's childhood home for a shared meal was something Knueppel's teammates said they had never done. It had inspired some of his other teammates to consider doing the same, Kon said.
“As NBA players, we’re traveling around all the time, and we’re in hotels — that’s where we get a lot of our meals — and we’re going out to eat,” Kon said. “It’s rare that you get a home-cooked meal. And it’s not really about the food; it’s just about being in the comfort of somebody’s house.”
The team stayed for more than an hour and a half, enough time to take a tour of Kon's childhood bedroom and the low-ceilinged basement, nicknamed the "man cave," where state championship rings, jerseys and the family’s deep ties to basketball are displayed. Nordgaard Knueppel is the women's basketball program's all-time leading scorer at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and a member of its Athletic Hall of Fame. Kon Sr.'s decorated career landed him in his own college's athletics hall of fame, too.
“I’m surprised if Mason Plumlee doesn’t get arthritis from bending over so far in our 7-foot-5 ceilings in the basement," Nordgaard Knueppel said of the Hornets' 7-foot center.
The next night, against the Bucks, Knueppel looked at home as he scored a career-high 32 points in front of several thousand family members and friends in a Hornets loss. Nearly a month into his first season, he leads all rookies in scoring average at nearly 18 points per game.
"We’re obviously Charlotte Hornets fans, but meeting all these guys and how nice they were and how grateful they were to come over makes it, makes it want to cheer for them even more," Kon Knueppel Sr. said.
Said Chari: "They took the little boys under their wing and talked to them and included them. And that just really endears me to all of them."
