Belmont, Massachusetts, is a leafy Boston suburb three miles inland from Cambridge. The Christensens lived there. Clayton, the father, was a Mormon convert raised in Salt Lake City who'd played basketball at BYU, then become a Rhodes Scholar, then earned an MBA and a doctorate at Harvard Business School, then become a Harvard Business School professor whose 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma would coin the term "disruptive innovation" and become arguably the most-quoted business strategy book of the next two decades. Christine, the mother, ran the household alongside him. They raised five children. Their eldest son, Matt, was nearly seven feet tall by his teens.
Matt was a basketball player and an LDS kid in roughly equal measure. He played for Coach Paul Lyons at Belmont High School, where his teams went 88-11 across his four years. As a sophomore his team won the Massachusetts state title. As a senior he averaged 21 points, 11 rebounds, and 4.7 blocks per game while shooting a school-record 75.6% from the field. He was MVP of the Middlesex League, a two-time all-state selection, named to the Boston Globe and Boston Herald Super Teams. He also lettered in soccer, track, and cross country — the kind of multi-sport prep résumé that was already vanishing in the late nineties.
And throughout all of it, he knew he was going to take two years off in the middle of his college basketball career to serve a mission. Mormon young men are encouraged (though not required) to spend two years as missionaries when they're around college age, and Matt — the son of a man who had served his own mission as a young man, and who had often described the way that experience reshaped him — wanted to do it. He told every recruiter who showed up at his house from seventh grade onward. He was direct about it: "If that is a problem for you, then don't recruit me." Some recruiters walked. Some argued he was shaving years off his NBA career. One recruiter said it to his face, with Clayton sitting in the same room: Matt didn't really want to go on a mission, he was just saying that to make his parents happy.
Matt narrowed it to three schools by his senior year: Duke, BYU, and Stanford. Duke felt right for two reasons. First, the Durham campus reminded the Christensens of Oxford — Clayton's Rhodes Scholar years had been there, and the family carried Oxford in its bones. Second, Coach K's staff had no problem with the mission; they'd done their LDS homework and committed to two letters a week while he was away. Matt signed with Duke. He arrived in Durham in the fall of 1995 as a 17-year-old freshman. His sister Ann would later attend Duke too. His cousin was former NBA center Greg Kite, a two-time NBA champion with the Boston Celtics in the 1980s who'd preceded Matt at BYU.