Stan Love explains how basketball brought him closer to Brian Wilson:

Stan Love remembers it like it was yesterday, he and his cousin Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, sitting in the stands together watching a basketball game, eyes focused on Love's prodigiously skilled son, Kevin.

"Brian just kept turning to me and saying, 'Wow, he's good, he's really, really good,' " Love recalls, speaking of the 2006 game at Pauley Pavilion, played when Kevin was still in high school. "And I kept saying, 'You know what, Brian, you're right, he is really good.' "

The moment might have been a small one, but to Stan Love it was deeply meaningful. Through basketball, his son was helping close a fissure in a fractured family, a family important in these parts because they've helped define us.

Stan Love and Brian Wilson don't talk much these days, Stan says, but they are cordial. He recalls with pride that moment at Pauley. Brian hadn't seen Kevin in years, but there he sat, eyes glued on his cousin's talented son, astonished at how much he'd grown, at how good he was.