First, Dani Wohl heard what he wasn’t.

He wasn’t tall enough.

Wasn’t quick enough.

Wasn’t good enough for college basketball.

Once he did play college basketball, he heard what he couldn’t do.

Couldn’t play in the Big Ten.

Couldn’t play for Michigan.

Couldn’t start for Michigan.

Good thing Dani Wohl never really listened.

 

The 5-foot-11 senior ended his Michigan basketball career at Crisler Arena on Saturday against Iowa. He never scored more than four points in a single game. But the more important total, one the stat sheets will never measure, is the number of people he inspires to make the impossible possible.

People like Danny Komendera, a short 11-year-old who wants to be just like Dani. The autograph Dani signed for him on Saturday may sit on his desk or on the wall above his bed. Komendera will look at it for inspiration. He, too, has already been told he’s too short to play point guard for his fifth-grade St. Regis basketball team.

When they tell Komendera he isn’t quick enough, he won’t listen. Because of Dani.

 

Wohl’s journey from high school in West Bloomfield to his court of dreams in Ann Arbor was filled with more pot holes than the 37 miles of road that separate the nearby cities. And never once did Dani pull over. Never once did he tap the brake.

“I’ve always been a dreamer,” Wohl said. “Wished that I could play here — believed I could play here.”

Wohl may have been the only one.

“I’m going to play at Michigan,” he told his father, Milt.

“Nah,” his dad replied.

“I’m going to play,” Dani replied.

Milt thinks back to that conversation now and says, “I don’t even know if people in his family believed him.”

Wohl committed to play basketball at Binghamton, a small college in Vestal, N.Y. in 2001 after he was named All-State honorable mention as a senior at West Bloomfield High School. But he said Binghamton wasn’t for him. He was too far away from his family and friends. It just didn’t feel right. Binghamton coach Al Walker dialed Michigan assistant coach Chuck Swenson on Wohl’s behalf. Dani wanted to come home.

Now at Michigan, Wohl had to beat out 250 to 300 other dreamers fighting for two open roster spots on the basketball team.

Over fall break that year, Wohl was at home when the telephone rang.

It was Swenson.

“We have practice in 45 minutes,” Swenson said. And he then hung up.

Wohl said he doesn’t remember the ride over. No pot holes.

After sitting out a year due to NCAA transfer rules, Wohl achieved what everybody told him was impossible.

“Just making the Michigan team was his dream — even if it was just getting on the floor in the last two minutes of the game,” Milt said.

Dani played a total of 13 minutes last year, his first season with the team.

Milt said he would come to the games an hour early to watch Dani during shoot-around. To Milt, that was Dani’s game time.

 

Senior year — Dani’s last.

Disaster strikes the team. Tri-captain and team-leader Lester Abram learns his season is over just three games into the year because of a shoulder injury. Then, the levy of health crumbled — shoulders, knees, ankles, elbows, noses all pained different Wolverines.

But for Wohl, like an ancient Chinese proverb says, crisis is opportunity. And Dani had been prepared.

With Abram out and guard Daniel Horton sidelined with a knee injury, Wohl played a career-high 30 minutes against High Point.

The practice after Wohl played the “game of his life,” he tore a ligament in his elbow. Team doctors told Wohl his season was over.

Good thing Dani didn’t listen.

Four weeks later, he was back. The doctors were stunned.

Five games after Dani returned from injury, two days after Michigan coach Tommy Amaker suspended Horton for legal troubles, Wohl was named a starter.

The game: Michigan State. Breslin Center. ESPN.

And you think Dani is a survivor?