In Heidelberg, Germany, in the early 1980s, Christian Ralph Ast was a kid with a field hockey stick. His father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Heidelberg. His mother worked at a university publishing company. He grew tall fast — he would top out at 6'8" — and the German field hockey grip is a low one, a hunched-over grip that taxes a tall man's spine. When he was 15, he was already over six feet, and he was, by his own later account to a Washington Post reporter, sick of bending down. He picked up a basketball.
In 1988, at 17, Christian Ast came to the United States as part of a foreign exchange program. The exchange placed him in Maryland. He enrolled at High Point High School in Beltsville, the same Prince George's County high school whose basketball coach was a man named Ernie Welsh and whose program was a fixture of Maryland 4A basketball. Coach Welsh would later tell the Washington Post that the 17-year-old who arrived in his gym was big and could jump but wasn't yet a player. Within two years he was a first-team All-Met selection averaging 25.6 points a game for a High Point team that reached the Maryland 4A finals. He had been playing basketball for four years.
The pivot to Duke came in a scrimmage against DeMatha Catholic, the District of Columbia parochial powerhouse that has produced more Division I players than most state high school systems combined. One of the DeMatha coaches saw the 6'8" German exchange student play and made the phone call that mattered. The number he dialed belonged to a Duke assistant. On March 5, 1990, Christian Ast committed to play basketball for Mike Krzyzewski. He spoke fluent German, fluent English, and fluent French; his college applications might have looked unusual to Duke's admissions office, but the basketball part of the recommendation was simple. Coach Welsh had a tall kid from Heidelberg who could jump, who could shoot, and who, two years earlier, had been a field hockey player.