Levon Kendall gets a little feature piece in USA Today. As is usual with any Kendall story, the focus was on his off-court stuff.

For Kendall, it was as ordinary as getting a laptop computer for school. It didn’t have to be grand; a secondhand piano fit the old, rundown house his parents bought at a tax sale a few years ago. Kendall initially wanted the piano for occasional visits by his father, Simon Kendall, a well-known keyboardist in Canada.

The elder Kendall has been a fixture in varied genres, from the psychedelic 1960s to modern blues. It’s no surprise his son, a 6-foot-10 starting forward for Pitt’s third-ranked basketball team, taught himself to play in the last few years.

“I started taking up the piano and realized I was pretty inspired by my dad,” says Levon Kendall, who grew up in Vancouver and was named for American rock musician Levon Helm. “It’s hard to let the talent go to waste. I must have some of that musician gene in me somewhere. I couldn’t have a better resource or teacher available.

For the youngsters in the readership, Levon Helm was the drummer for The Band.

Kendall was spotted at the Louisville-Pitt football game. He was wearing a white warm-up jacket with “CUBA” across the front. It was surmised that he probably traded for it during international competition. His hair, as usual, was perfectly immobilized