Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
The Oakland Golden Grizzlies learned Thursday night what Wright State has known for more than a month now:
You can’t keep Malachi Smith down.
He’s a basketball version of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
But instead of ending up in a Broadway musical and popular 1960s movie as she did, the back-up freshman guard has seen his playing time triple over the past seven games, he had an 11-point, three-steal performance in the Raiders’ rousing 76-62 come-from-behind victory Thursday at the Nutter Center and he continues to get some good-natured razzing from some older teammates.
Even when things weren’t going well for him early this season — when he played only one minute against Indiana State, just two at both Murray State and Kent State and three against Toledo; when he had seven games where he didn’t score a point — Smith kept a positive attitude.
Some teammates said he was overly sunny.
“He’s all the way up here,” 6-foot-9 center Loudon Love said with a chuckle as he reached his hand high above his head.
Junior forward Bill Wampler agreed: “He’s happy all the time.”
While Love admitted senior guard Alan Vest “has a lot of energy all the time, so he’s up there, too,” he attributed some of that to “all the coffee he drinks.”
He said Smith is “a great character off the court, just a funny kid.”
“He’s pretty goofy sometimes,” Wampler added.
Love nodded: “We joke all the time. ‘Someone’s gonna have to ruin his day.’”
Later, a grinning Smith confirmed that: “Oh yeah, they’ll try. They try to be funny and say stuff like I’m just a little kid and I shouldn’t be out there. They tell me to ‘stop talking,’ to ‘just be quiet because no one is listening.’
“But it doesn’t work. I try to tell ‘em they can’t ruin my day. Nothing is going to ruin it.”
