This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Just in case Kyle Korver was wondering about the impact he was having as a professional athlete and minister's son in Philadelphia, the shrimp told him everything he needed to know.
They were grilled, buttered, basted, sauteed and overflowing in pots, unlike anything ever seen by the eight or so children Korver and some friends were shepherding, considering they had never been in a genuine grocery store.
"Oh, man, they got shrimp!" they exclaimed in wonder, scooping them up by the handfuls and taking them to Korver's suburban home for a poolside feast.
NBA-sponsored humanitarian efforts have taken the Jazz's newest player to China, South Africa and Brazil in recent summers. Yet nothing resonates within him like his experiences with those inner-city kids in Philly, where he lived and played for 4 1/2 seasons before being traded to Utah two weeks ago.
Korver misses them - "grieving" is the word his father uses. He hopes his relocation will not end those relationships or his efforts to provide recreational opportunities in a neighborhood where he and his friends met them while throwing a football around before their weekly Bible study at a mission house.
"Hopefully, those things will still happen, because I do still care about Philly and those kids," Korver said.
How could he not care? Concern for others is as ingrained in Korver as a love of basketball, the dual influences that shaped him in a family featuring ministers of the Reformed Church in America and college athletes. They are people who have, in his words, "a servant's mentality."
Korver blossomed athletically and spiritually in the small, south central Iowa town of Pella, where immigrants from Holland came in search of religious freedom in 1847 and created a home where the high school's teams are called the Dutch, the Tulip Time festival is celebrated every May and some 2,000 members attend one of three Sunday services at the Third Reformed Church, served by senior pastor Kevin Korver.
To say that Kyle Korver had no choices other than developing both a sweet shooting stroke and a deep faith would be oversimplifying things, except that he said, "I didn't have a choice."
That comes with a clarification: Nothing was forced on Kyle or his three younger brothers. Making that point clear, Kevin Korver says that not all of his sons have embraced the church, while he hopes they will someday.
They all are basketball players, for sure. Klayton is a senior at Drake University in Des Moines, 50 miles from Pella. Kaleb is a freshman at Creighton, where Kyle was a two-time Missouri Valley Conference MVP, just across the Nebraska border in Omaha. Kirk is a Dutch senior and a college prospect.
"We never really pushed them into basketball," Kevin Korver said, "but it was a tool by which we taught our children about life, relationships, hard work and treating people with respect."
Kevin Korver and his wife, Laine, played basketball at Central College in Pella, a Division III school sponsored by the Reformed Church. Four of his brothers played college basketball; the other played college football. Three sons followed their father into the ministry; another is the basketball coach at Northwestern College, another church-affiliated school in Iowa.
Obviously, it's a Korver thing: the Bible and basketball, hoops and the harvest, as branded in most of them as the "KEK" initials - that's Kyle Elliot Korver, for all those daydreaming girls designing wedding invitations during eighth-grade English - he shares with a bunch of relatives with names such as Kurtis, Kari and Klarc.
"When you come to dinner at our house or the family gets together, the conversation is one of the two," Kyle Korver said.
Kyle and his brothers were born in California, where their father attended seminary and became a pastor for 12 years before moving the family to Pella some 15 years ago. In the east Los Angeles town of Paramount, Kyle witnessed the effect church members could have. They accepted a challenge to clean up the blighted community, planting hundreds of trees and painting hundreds of homes and graffiti-laced walls over two years, earning a White House commendation.
"We'd paint over them, they'd graffiti them again, we'd paint over them again, and eventually they'd get tired of it," remembered Kyle, who was 10 or 11 at the time.
That experience - the genuine impact, the "immediate gratification," as he describes it - stuck with him.
"That's where Kyle got some of his ideas," his brother Klayton said. "My dad is extremely giving; it just rubs off on you."
It helps explain how Korver became dedicated to Basketball Without Borders, involving selected NBA players (including the Jazz's Andrei Kirilenko, in Europe) in basketball, education and health programs in impoverished areas internationally. His mother helped him establish a charitable foundation, designed to help children in Iowa, Nebraska and Philadelphia, where he became attached to those African-American kids who evoked shocked expressions from suburban housewives when they walked into that grocery store in search of fixings for hamburgers and discovered all those shrimp.
In interviews, Korver tends to speak softly. Yet as he stands in the hallway of EnergySolutions Arena after a game-day shootaround, he's animatedly telling the shrimp story, mimicking the voices of the kids he's eager to see again next summer.
A few days earlier, he was relating how he and his friends arranged for those children to sponsor a girl in Colombia by selling candy, and how they were surprised to learn they could do so much good with little effort.
"It's pretty cool," Korver said, "when they actually get it."
That's every bit as true when it comes to NBA players. Maybe even more so.