My Life, My Fight Page 9

  Nick must’ve seen I was struggling because he offered to take me to dinner at his mum’s restaurant in town. It was heaven. I ate more that night than I had ever eaten before. After that, Nick took me there for a feed most weekends, and we’d chat about school and life and what I planned to do once I left that hellhole. I’ve eaten better food at better restaurants since then, but nothing has ever tasted as good as those steaks and pasta did after a week of gray burger patties.

  While my life off the court was an ongoing series of disappointments, I made up for it by playing my arse off on the court. We won most of our games, but when you’re playing with guys for only a few months there isn’t the same team bond that you have with your local high school team or, for me, the Wellington rep team. Instead, everyone was just trying to play well so that they could be included in the discussions around who might be potential draft picks in the next few years.

  Playing for Notre Dame was the first time I ever matched up against Nerlens Noel, who, even back then, was being touted as a top-five draft prospect while playing for Tilton, a prep school in New Hampshire. Once again, I went in as a massive underdog and once again I came out of it equal, if not better. A lot of basketball commentators considered that to be my first real test against the top American players and I’m sure they expected me to choke. Just as I believe a lot of New Zealanders were expecting to be disappointed in my performance.

  I went into the game knowing that if I was ever going to stamp my name on the collective basketball consciousness, it would be by outplaying Nerlens Noel.

  Of course he was good. It took me a few minutes to adjust to his speed, but once I’d sussed out his moves I knew we’d be an even match. We spent the game blocking everyone else on each other’s teams but not being able to do much against each other on defense. We basically just showed that we were better than each other’s teammates.

  Late in the third quarter, Tilton got a steal and they were in transition. I was sprinting back and got to halfway before I saw Nerlens standing under the hoop, waiting for the pass. I knew I couldn’t let him get an easy dunk like that so I boosted and got there for the block—my only one on him all game and maybe the one play that edged me in front of him in that contest.

  After that game, I knew I had a very real shot at the NBA. If I could match up against a potential number-one draft pick, there was no reason for me not to get drafted too.

  When my one semester at Notre Dame was completed, I was allowed to go home for the summer—winter back in New Zealand—before reporting to Pitt in September. I’ve never been so glad to go home to more cold weather. Being overseas for that long made me miss everyone in Wellington a lot, though not as much as I missed Rotorua and my siblings there. But before I could head to Mohi’s farm to live the good life, I had some business to take care of with my Wellington rep team.

  They had been messaging me asking if I could play in the under 21 national tournament in May. I wanted to, but I didn’t know if I would be back in time or whether under NCAA rules I was even allowed to play. They put my name down on the team roster but expected to play without me for the first time in four years. I got back just in time for the tournament and it was probably just as well. We won the final against North Harbor in overtime.

  That night, as we were all drinking out of the trophy and celebrating four consecutive national titles, I got a bit emotional. For three years I had taken for granted that everyone in a basketball team would get along and put the team first. It took leaving New Zealand for me to realize that I probably wouldn’t have such a strong bond with my teammates ever again. I’ll blame my soppiness on the beers because that was the first time I’d gotten drunk in a while, and I’d only been drunk a handful of times in my life, including the time I got wasted at a cousin’s wedding in Rotorua when I was 12.

  Playing in that tournament reminded me why I love playing basketball. When you play with your friends it’s not work or hard, it’s fun. It’s obviously more enjoyable when you win every game, so that definitely helped. It was the perfect environment to return to before I showed up at Mohi’s farm, where I felt like I was 12 years old all over again.

  There was no way of knowing at the time, but that winter at Mohi’s farm was the last proper break I would have. I had no responsibilities and nothing at all on my mind except eating, wrestling my brothers, and catching up with my family. It lasted only a couple of weeks, but it was enough to get rid of all the stress that had been building up while I was at Notre Dame. It was hard to worry about the future when my older siblings were treating me like the baby brother I was and taking care of me. After the winter of 2012, that became rarer and rarer.

  After my rest and recovery in Rotorua, I was back in Wellington and back in the gym with Kenny. We’d been working on my mid-range shot before I left for Notre Dame and it had served me well over there, so we carried on extending my range. Kenny had seen how big men were becoming perimeter shooters and knew that it was something I’d have to develop eventually, so we decided to start early. A big man who can only dunk isn’t hard to guard. I needed an option straight off the pass and a mid-range floater was exactly that. We spent hours shooting from all around the key until it was as comfortable for me as a layup.

  The gray burgers and gray mood of Notre Dame meant that as I made my way to Pitt I’d set my expectations low. I was wrong. As soon as I arrived I saw it was awesome. The facilities were better than anything I’d ever experienced, and it felt like a professional organization. Most athletes stay in the freshman dorms, which can get pretty rowdy, but I asked to have my own room. Either everyone was a quiet student where I lived or they had put me with all the nerds. Either way, I liked the quiet.

  I’d heard that at colleges known for their sports, the athletic guys get treated like celebrities and go to lots of crazy parties. The dorm I was in didn’t have any big parties and the one I did go to when I first arrived was so lame it put me off ever going to another. I’m sure there were cool parties somewhere on campus, but I never saw them. If that’s what college party life was like, I was fine being a loser who stayed home every night with my guitar.

  I’ve never been a big drinker, at least not a binge drinker like most of my friends. At Scots there would be parties every weekend and although I had the best intentions of going, when the day of the party came around I’d be too exhausted to go anywhere. One of the only times I got properly drunk, I went to training the next morning and caught a pass with my face. After that I knew drinking wasn’t going to do me any favors. I decided to leave it to my friends who weren’t trying to make it to the NBA.

  Living with the non-athletic students in part got me amped up for the academic side of my scholarship. I’d decided that I still loved farming, so I wanted to study courses that were in that field and maybe even major in agriculture or something similar. But when I went to sign up for classes I found I’d already been put in some of the easiest elective courses. It’s a weird situation because I think the athletic department assumed that all the basketball players wanted to do the least schoolwork possible and worked out their timetables for them. I’d seen some science and math courses that I was quite keen to study, but I ended up taking a bunch of social science electives because apparently they are the easiest to pass.

  The one thing I learned at Pitt was how good the New Zealand education system is. I’d developed good study and learning habits at Scots and when I got to Pitt I found I didn’t even need them. Most of the assignments I had to do were opinionated answers or self-reflection for which you didn’t need to do any research. I basically didn’t go to school. I’d just go to the exam, write an essay on what I thought about a topic, and get really good grades.

  I eventually got drawn into studying music because that was at least an interest of mine, but I found it difficult. I can play any song on the guitar by just listening to it a few times, but studying music meant learning how to read and write the notes. That was like learning a new language and I struggl
ed. It was the same as me struggling to write down my ideas. I know how to do it, I just find it hard to get things down on paper.

  By the end of my second semester at Pitt I was awarded a prize for academic achievement by a student athlete. It’s a nice-looking award and it sits on a shelf at home where everyone who visits is impressed by it. But I feel I can’t really claim it because I know I barely did any schoolwork. If I was able to get an award for academic achievement after doing hardly any work, I hate to think what sort of learning every other student athlete was doing. Ironically, that award serves as a daily reminder of why getting an education should be at the top of every young athlete’s priorities.

  What little work all the basketball players were doing in the classroom was made up for by the workload in the gym. I knew that college conditioning would be a step up from my Wellington training, but the preseason training period at Pitt was the hardest I’ve ever worked out in my life. I called it “meathead training” because it felt like they were trying to make us all huge in the gym, and I didn’t see the point of it. I liked the competition, though. Put a bunch of athletes in a weight room and they’ll turn into beasts trying to outlift each other.

  Once we had finished in the weight room, we would do our conditioning tests. It always started out simple enough, a few sprints and slides to warm up. Then the torture started with 21 suicides.

  Everyone who has ever played basketball in a proper team knows what a suicide is. I’m sure someone has come up with a more PC name for it now, but it will always be a suicide to me. It’s a simple but effective sprint workout that’s usually brought out as a punishment if a team is training badly or has played poorly in a game. Players line up on the baseline and when the whistle blows everyone sprints to the free-throw line, touches the ground with a hand, then sprints back to the baseline. Then they do the same to the halfway line and back to the baseline, to the far free-throw line and back to the baseline, to the far baseline and back. That counts as one suicide. It’s monotonous and the worst.

  This conditioning test comprised one suicide every minute for 21 minutes. The faster we ran them, the more rest we got before the minute was up. Bigs are never expected to do as well as guards in these drills, but the competitive beast in me made sure that I was always either leading or near the front in every drill, including the 21 suicides.

  Straight after that we did sixers, which involves sprinting six lengths of the court, then sprinting backwards for two lengths and then sprinting six lengths again. You had to do that under a certain time limit after the 21 suicides, which not everyone made. I was one of the faster bigs, but some of them didn’t get there. It absolutely destroyed us. If you consider yourself to be pretty fit, go run 21 suicides in 21 minutes. It’ll make you question every decision you ever made. It definitely made me wonder why I ever wanted to be a professional basketball player.

  In those first few months at Pitt I thought seriously about chucking it all in, quitting America and going home to New Zealand where I was more comfortable. Anything to avoid agony every day from conditioning. I knew that I was ahead of the pack, at least for the bigs, but that didn’t make it any less of a nightmare. I felt I wasn’t at the level I was supposed to be at, which bugged me, but at the same time I could see that if I wasn’t then no one else was either.

  I would say that at least half of what I was feeling was in fact homesickness and nothing to do with the basketball. More and more Kiwi kids are getting scholarships to good colleges in America, but some of them return to New Zealand within the first 100 days, which I totally understand. It’s not easy being completely alone in a new school as well as a new country. The usual advice to make friends and create a family didn’t work for me. I got through it with sheer determination and the knowledge that it wasn’t forever. If it would get me to a career in basketball, I was willing to put up with some lonely, painful years.

  In October, before the season officially began, Pitt held a Midnight Madness event. It is basically a huge rally to kick off the season with a bit of dumb stuff thrown in. New Zealanders don’t support amateur sports the way Americans do so I had never seen anything like the thousands of people who showed up to watch a bunch of teenagers perform some silly skits. Coach Dixon dressed up as Will Ferrell’s character Jackie Moon in Semi-Pro and roasted us. The team held a dunk contest, which I didn’t enter because my dunks back then were quite lame. The closest I got to the glory was being jumped over by the winner during an encore dunk.

  Pitt was one of the top colleges in the country, but even then we were predicted to come in only sixth in our Big East Conference. Things started well for us—almost too well. We won our first four games convincingly, though none were Big East rivals. By the time we played our first major rival in Cincinnati on New Year’s Eve, we had gotten used to winning comfortably. So of course we lost, 70–61. Against Rutgers University from New Jersey a few days later, we lost again. This time we had 26 three-point attempts and only made eight of them. Coach Dixon was playing a small game, but in that match-up, the small game failed miserably.

  Soon I was already not enjoying basketball and it only got worse from there. After years of working on expanding my shooting game, I was told not to shoot. To Coach Dixon, I was a big man for rebounds and dunks and nothing else. Kenny had spent countless hours drilling into me that no matter what position you play, you should have a full skillset. But pretty quickly I found my skillset diminishing as the bigs only worked on “big” stuff and had no time for shooting or ball handling. If I shot a mid-range floater—my new favorite shot—during a game, I’d be told off and benched. If you watch my short highlights video from my time playing for Pitt, every single basket is either a dunk or a putback right by the rim. That wasn’t the game I wanted to play; it was the game I was forced to play. It’s no wonder I led the team in field goal percentage.

  I also frequently led games in rebounds because what else was I going to do? In three games I got 14 rebounds and in one I pulled in 15. After one of those games, Coach Dixon spoke again about how I needed to improve further. I agreed with him on that at least, but I knew he wanted me to improve on my own somehow when I’ve always needed a mentor to push me. That’s what playing for the Saints did back in Wellington.

  For our last game in January 2013 we traveled to Kentucky to play the University of Louisville, the number-one ranked team in the Big East Conference. We knew they would be a force, but we also knew we had all the tools to beat them. More than 22,000 local fans turned out, which is more than you’ll find at most NBA playoff games. I couldn’t believe that many people wanted to see a bunch of teenagers play basketball. It was a close game, which we lost right at the end, 64–61.

  I had a quiet game, but what made that game special was playing against Peyton Siva. I didn’t mark him, as he was a point guard, and I barely spoke to him, but I had seen his last name and recognized it as being Samoan. In the U.S., it’s not often two young Pacific Islanders play basketball against each other in front of 22,000 people and have it aired on national television.

  We finished off the regular season with good wins over Syracuse University and University of Cincinnati, who were both ranked above us, before traveling to Madison Square Garden, New York City, to play our first round of the Big East Tournament, the championship tournament of the Big East Conference, against Syracuse (again). We couldn’t deliver on the day and lost 62–59. We were out.

  For the NCAA Division I tournament, or March Madness as it’s more commonly known, we were seeded eighth. With 64 teams involved and every round being a knockout, I can see why March Madness draws such massive viewing numbers every year. At eighth seed in our regional bracket of 16 teams—there are four brackets and the winner of each proceeds to the final four—we were pegged to be one of the closer games. The first seed has the advantage of playing the sixteenth seed first up, the second seed plays the fifteenth seed, and so on. We were scheduled to play Wichita State University, who were ninth seed, in our firs
t match. Technically, we were the favorites, but they weren’t in our conference so we had no idea how tough they would be. What we did know is that there are upsets every year at March Madness so no game can be taken for granted.

  All season, one of just two seniors in our team, Tray Woodall, had been our standout player. He often led the scoring and was always the playmaker for us. Against Wichita State he shot one from 12 and ended up with two points. We lost 73–55. I don’t know what happened for Tray that night, but I felt for the guy. It ended up being his last game playing for Pitt and, as he said himself, the worst game he’d ever played.

  I suddenly found myself with more ball than I’d had the whole season. I did what I’d been doing all season and ended up being the leading point scorer for our team with 13 points and 11 rebounds. I wasn’t all that surprised that I was able to step up. I find that when I’m forced to play above what I’m used to, I can adapt to the situation and not make a fool of myself. The thing was, up until that night, I’d never been given enough responsibility to force me to level up. In fact, the opposite had happened.

  In reality, my freshman college season was pretty good. I put up decent numbers and didn’t show any major weaknesses. But because I hadn’t enjoyed it, I finished our final game just relieved to be getting a break.

  I had complained to Kenny a lot during that season, and he promised he would start looking for other college options after I told him there was no way I could play for four years being so restricted. Since then I’ve heard that some top coaches will restrict a potential draft pick in their freshman year because it forces them to return to the school the following year. So much NBA scouting is done at college games that if a top freshman looks like they are underperforming, they are less likely to declare early for the draft. I hope it wasn’t true in my case, but I definitely felt I hadn’t reached my full potential that first season.