He always tries to stay upbeat – joyful, even.
He’ll laugh with you and at himself at the same time, and his antics often call for it.
And he does as he’s told, plays his part for the good of those depending on him. In one context, that’s Matt Painter and the rest of the Purdue men’s basketball roster. In another, that’s Purdue Creative and, possibly, his friends back at the North Pole.
He’s Caleb Furst, the basketball player, pre-medical student and part-time Buddy the Elf impersonator – although ask anyone in West Lafayette and he might be their favorite oversized, curly-haired version of the character.
“If anyone was going to be Elf on our team,” Furst’s former teammate Zach Edey once said, “It definitely would be Caleb.”
Painter can settle the debate on whether his power forward is really acting when he hops around, widens his eyes and says through a wide smile such absurdities as “You don’t smell like Purdue Pete,” or about guard Braden Smith, “That’s an angry elf.”
“I know him,” the coach said with a sly grin. To mean, those videos aren’t all that much of a stretch.
“He’s very outgoing, after he gets comfortable with you,” Painter said.
He doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, or think himself above the stunts. That’s not him. It wasn’t when he started his first 12 games as a freshman, as Mr. Basketball, one of Painter’s best in a long line of in-state recruiting pickups. And it wasn’t him when he had to watch his team have a season for the ages with his playing time in the single digits.
“Being a basketball player is not my ultimate calling,” Furst said. That might sound a little crazy from a guy who profiled as one of America’s top prospects as far back as middle school.
But remember, Furst isn’t afraid of acting a little crazy.
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Furst’s coming out party was the 2021 Hall of Fame Tipoff Tournament, where Purdue beat No. 18 North Carolina and No. 5 Villanova in two days. The freshman Furst averaged 23 minutes, 10 points and almost five rebounds in the tournament.
The event was sponsored by cracker brand Cheeze-It, and the tiny orange squares filled the trophy the Boilermakers hoisted at center court after their victory was sealed. Furst can be seen on video sneaking the his lanky index finger and thumb into the trophy cup, plucking a cracker, and exaggeratedly chomping down on it as teammates laugh.
In the championship against Villanova, Purdue couldn’t get its defense straight in a tight second half – a Purdue team, mind you, that featured two bigs with NBA aspirations in Trevion Williams and Edey. Furst was the solution.
“He’s a mature young man,” Painter said at the time.
In the same press conference that Painter praised Furst after the freshman’s fifth game, he issued a prophecy, unknown at the time, for the rest of Furst’s career:
“We’re time-sharing here,” Painter said. “But that’s what a good team is, is sacrifice. Teams that don’t sacrifice end up failing. I think our guys are being pros about some of these things.”
He was talking about Williams and Edey competing for center minutes. That was 2021. By November the next year, no one on Purdue’s roster, or anywhere in the country for that matter, could compete with Edey for minutes. His talent had a special gravity; the Boilermakers orbited around him.
Furst didn’t click with Purdue’s highest-potential lineups as a 6-foot-10 “tweener” whose deep-shooting confidence has progressively faded: He attempted multiple 3s 20 times in his freshman and sophomore years, but hasn’t taken any as a senior.
He and former Boilermaker guard Ethan Morton bonded last season as two players in near-identical situations: high school stars who came to Purdue with high expectations and delivered on them for a time, before others became a better fit. Neither played in the Elite Eight game against Tennessee that broke their school’s four-decade Final Four drought.
“It’s always tough to deal with,” Furst says now. “You go to a school, you obviously want to play.”
Then he echoed his coach from years before.
“The way I looked at it, with being on as good of a team as we’ve been throughout the past three, four years, ever since I’ve been here, that comes with sacrifices. And that was a sacrifice that I was willing to make for the betterment of the team. The team’s greater than any individual person.”
Trey Kaufman-Renn didn’t know Furst in high school – certainly knew of him, though, as the two battled in Indiana All-Star games and for the coveted Mr. Basketball award as part of the same 2021 graduating class. Since then, Kaufman-Renn redshirted before blossoming into a talented offensive threat and combo big man who could be an All-American this season.
He’s seen Furst work hard and come out on the wrong side of playing time decisions up close, and he’s taken away a lesson.
“His attitude when it comes to basketball, I think, is one of the best that I’ve been around,” Kaufman-Renn said.
Furst knows how to separate basketball from the rest of his life. “Basketball is something I do,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s not who I am.”
This will likely be the last in an unbroken chain of basketball seasons Furst has played since he was picking up Dr. Seuss. He plans to enroll in medical school next year.
Still, there’s no pressure, he said, even as his role has increased in his senior season and important minutes come his way again. “I’m just taking it one day at a time and enjoying it to the best of my ability.”
That’s just Caleb. He’s the teammate who repels negative energy, even when there’s plenty to be negative about.
He could have transferred, but stayed to become a fixture at Purdue, morphing into a role model focused on helping freshmen grasp Purdue’s complex schemes.
He signed up to play a character for three years running because it’s funny and gets people to donate canned goods.
“It’s Caleb,” Kaufman-Renn said. “I’m glad the outside world gets a taste of what we deal with on a daily basis.”
