I’ve met some fascinating people in college. I’m sure you have too, or if you’re not in college yet, that you eventually will meet people with whom you never anticipated crossing paths.

But I never anticipated meeting Uncle.

In my sophomore year, my first year at BU, I played pick-up basketball at FitRec to stay in shape, to compete and to meet friends. Little did I know that the basketball courts in the gym, between the hours of 4-7 p.m., double as a recruiting center. For this is where I, and many others, met Uncle.

Let me paint a picture of this man, whose real name my friends and I believe is Mark (or Gary). Uncle is a 40-something-year-old man who, at maybe 5-foot-9, probably shouldn’t calculate his Body Mass Index in his head. He sports a shaved head with some gray hair showing, as well as a goatee. On the court, he maintains a low center of gravity to box out anyone looking for rebounds, and he can often be caught cherry-picking on the offensive end of the court. Defenders hate guarding him, as any contact with him makes you feel like you just took a dip in the Charles River.

But the basketball is virtually insignificant. It’s the relationships that you form along the way.

For Uncle, basketball is his way in. He greets a new crop of freshmen every year, offers to buy them alcohol, and boom—he’s in. Next thing you know you see him at college parties, drinking beer, smoking weed (and who knows what else), and having the time of his life.

Except he’s at least 20 years older than anyone else in the room.

Not only do you see him at FitRec and at off-campus parties, but he makes appearances in the dining hall, in dorms, and at hockey games. Rumor has it that he lives in Coolidge Corner and works at a law firm downtown. I’m skeptical.

But I’m highly entertained. One time, while working at my part-time job at Fitrec, I saw Uncle running on a treadmill. Even if I hadn’t seen him first, I surely would have heard him running on the treadmill. Some people like to sing in the shower; others like to belt out the lyrics to “Hey Jude” in the gym. But one of Uncle’s fellow gym rats on the rowing machine apparently didn’t appreciate the baritone bellows, and yelled “Shut Up!”

How often do you think Simon Cowell wishes he could say this? Far and away this was the funniest moment I’ve ever had while working at FitRec.

I told Uncle that I played baseball, and we would talk about the Red Sox from time to time. Since then, I’ve been known as ‘baseball Chris.” He once told me that “spring training is like a blind date; you can’t wait til it gets here, but once it does you can’t wait for it to be over.” This is just a sampling of the witty ways of Uncle, a man I never imagined meeting.