The real-life Ricky Roe: the college basketball career of Matt Nover, Blue Chips’ forgotten blue chip

The second and final installment of Blue Chips Week at The Front Porch looks at former Indiana center Matt Nover, the guy who wasn't Shaq or Penny

This is the second and final installment of Blue Chips Week here at The Front Porch, where we look back at the 1994 film about corruption in college basketball on its 30th anniversary.

You can check out part one here.

At the time that “Blue Chips” was released in theaters in Feb. 1994, the movie was built around two clearly defined stars.

There was Nick Nolte, the award-winning thespian who was one of the most recognizable leading men at the time, and Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA rookie of the year who was the headliner of the three young stars playing the prized recruits Nolte betrays his moral code to lure to his team. The theatrical posters didn’t really try to hide who the film’s two biggest draws were, with the names “NOLTE” and “SHAQ” appearing in all caps.

In the years since, that duo has become a triumvirate. In the time between the movie’s production and its release, Penny Hardaway, already a tall, dynamic guard at what was then known as Memphis State, was the No. 3 overall pick in the NBA Draft and teamed up with O’Neal on the Orlando Magic to form the perhaps the most exciting young duo in the league.

Given all that transpired in the leadup to the movie and in the years since it first hit theaters, there’s a clear outlier among the three players Nolte’s Pete Bell leans on to try to jumpstart his ailing Western University program. While Shaq and Penny are two towering figures in the broader sports world – so much so that only a first name is needed to reference them – Matt Nover exists 30 years later as a still-little-known figure, a player whose relative anonymity is a counterweight to O’Neal and Hardaway’s fame and makes him something of a “that guy.”

Though the gulf between the three co-stars has only grown wider over the past three decades, there was significant distance between them going as far back as when they were cast for the film. O’Neal and Hardaway were bona fide college stars, all-Americans who went on to become top-five draft packs. Nover, meanwhile, was a solid college player on some excellent Indiana teams under Bob Knight in the early 1990s, but he wasn’t much more than that.

His path from that to a star of maybe the most famous college basketball movie ever is something worth examining.

Matt Nover’s college basketball career

Nover’s character in the movie, Ricky Roe, is a top prospect in his class who Bell travels to French Lick, Ind. to try to woo.

Nover, too, is from Indiana, but aside from their obviously identical likeness, that’s about where the similarities between the two end.

While Roe grew up in a shack with a family clearly struggling to make ends meet operating a small farm, Nover grew up on the other end of the state in Chesterton, a city in Indiana’s northwestern corner, about 45 miles from downtown Chicago. The lone boy among four children, Nover’s father was a technical engineer and his mother a manager of the obstetrical unit at a nearby hospital. Unlike the stereotypical basketball-obsessed Indiana kid, Nover didn’t have a hoop in the backyard of his parents’ house, with his father believing that practicing on their slanted driveway could negatively affect his son’s jumper.

Eventually sprouting up to 6-foot-8, Nover became a star at Chesterton High School. As a junior in 1986-87, he averaged 18 points and 10 rebounds per game while helping orchestrate a massive turnaround in which his team improved to 17-8 after finishing just 3-18 the year prior. During his senior campaign, he was an Associated Press all-state honorable mention inclusion – the first team that year included Shawn Kemp and Damon Bailey – and made the state all-star team in 1988.

Earlier that season, he signed to play at Indiana, which made a late push for Nover after it struck out with Kemp (who signed with Kentucky, where he ultimately never played a game.) In contrast to Blue Chips, in which his character demanded a gym bag full of cash and his father received a brand-new tractor, Nover’s recruitment was, in his own words to the Indianapolis Star, “pretty square, pretty straightforward stuff.”

Once under Knight’s watch in Bloomington, Nover redshirted, a plan the Hoosiers’ coaching staff set out for him before what would have been his freshman season even began. That year away from games wasn’t idle time, though, with Nover impressing Knight with his mental toughness as he prepared for a delayed college debut.

“He’s a kid I really enjoy having around because he doesn’t look at himself – I don’t think – as any particular kind of player,” Knight said in Oct. 1989. “I mean, I don’t think he says ‘I’m a scorer’ or ‘I’m a jump-shooter.’ Sometimes, kids get that thought in their mind and it’s hard to convince them that they’ve got to do other things. I think he just wants to play and I think he’s just looking at the game as ‘I’m just going to do everything I can to play. And maybe, in the process, do some things other guys might not do. And that may help me that much more.”

By redshirting, he became a de-facto member of a top-rated 1989 recruiting class for Indiana, one that included future NBA players Calbert Cheaney, Lawrence Funderburke and Greg Graham. Within that larger group, Nover, much like he did in Blue Chips, faded into more of a supporting role, at least for the early part of his college career.