I wish I didn’t have to use this comparison, but it’s the only one that works. Our Wellington team was the Golden State Warriors of New Zealand basketball. Our team was stacked, and everyone knew it.
Every year there are tournaments for each age group, under 13, under 15, under 17, right up to under 23. At the start of winter there are four regional tournaments. The top four finishers from each region qualify for the National Championships, which are held a few months later over one week. The idea is that the semi-finals at Nationals would be made up of regional tournament winners. That’s the idea anyway.
We were in region three, which is basically just the wider Wellington region and a few extras like Hawke’s Bay, New Plymouth, and Palmerston North. We knew going in that Hawke’s Bay would be our biggest regional rivals, but we had the same defensive approach to them as to every other team—let them shoot and crash the boards. It’s rare for a young team to have a high overall field goal percentage so we knew that as long as we got all the rebounds and ran our offense, we’d be fine.
What we didn’t count on was for every Hawke’s Bay player to shoot the lights out in our game. Their main weapon was a tall white guy who was playing as a four man but who could shoot threes all day. I mention he’s white because in New Zealand there aren’t a whole lot of standout white players. National tournaments, especially the girls’ ones, are overwhelmingly made up of Māori or Pacific Islanders, and the Hawke’s Bay team was no different. But this one guy must have shot 80 percent from the perimeter and we couldn’t do anything to stop him. It was a much-needed wake-up call.
Losing at Regionals is a sign that you will struggle to make the top four at Nationals. We were planning to take out the whole championship but couldn’t even win the first game at our local tournament. After the loss, Kenny sat us down for a team debrief and we realized that even stacked teams can lose when they come up against a team that gels on the night. On one hand, there’s not a lot you can do when a guy is hot and can’t seem to miss, but we knew we needed to pay Hawke’s Bay more respect next time around. Victor, the guy I had blocked at my very first training camp and who was now a small forward, called out Joseph and a couple of other guys for not hustling enough. “Every loose ball should be ours,” he said, “but you guys aren’t scrambling.” It must have got into Joseph’s head because the next game he was diving all over the floor like someone was dropping money.
We met Hawke’s Bay again in the final at the end of the week. This time we went in with a chip on our shoulder and ended up winning comfortably.
A few months later at Nationals we progressed steadily through pool play and into the finals without any real challenges. After a tense final (are they ever not tense?) we were the Under 17 National Champions. It was the perfect reward for every early-morning and late-night scrimmage we’d gone through. I was named Most Valuable Player at the tournament, which was a genuine surprise because I’d always thought MVP went to a standout player on a team. I considered myself purely a role player in our team, but I guess when you’re 6′9″, you have to be pretty useless to not have a good-looking stat sheet by the end of a weeklong tournament.
What mattered more to me about winning the championship and being MVP was that it validated all the work I was putting in. I hope that if we’d come in ninth at that tournament and I didn’t play that well I would have still pursued a life in basketball, but I can’t say for sure. I’m just lucky I never had to find out. My first full year of training with Kenny and I was a national champion and tournament MVP. It was about as much proof of progress as I could have hoped for, and it told me that I was on the right track and surrounded by the right people.
After Nationals the rest of the guys took a break from training together to concentrate on their various school teams, as the season was still ongoing. I had no time to rest. If anything, I came back from Nationals wanting to work even harder so that by the next year I could blow everyone out of the water.
Everyone else in the team went to public schools and played in the top basketball grade, while I was two grades down playing against some quite shambolic teams because I was at a private school that just didn’t have the same pool of basketball talent. It was good for me, though, because it forced me to develop some leadership skills. Instead of being able to just work on my own game and let everyone else around me work on theirs, I suddenly had so-called expertise that my Scots teammates lacked. Having to teach a drill or technique to someone else is honestly the best way to fully understand it yourself. Playing for a not so great school team was a blessing in disguise because it broke up my season and offered some variety in the style of play I was facing.
For everyone in that Wellington team, though, winning Nationals every year was the number-one priority, no exceptions. Because of how the age groups are set up—under 15, under 17, under 19, and under 21—every second year it’s common to have a different team. Most of us were born in the same year so we got to stay together in the same rep team for four years. After winning Nationals in 2009, we knew we had to win every tournament now. And that’s exactly what we did.
From 2009 to 2012, we lost only one game, against Hawke’s Bay in that first regional tournament. From there on we were undefeated and ended up with four national titles, plus I walked away with four MVP trophies. The bond that we had as a team was the strongest I’ve had with any team, including the Thunder.
Half of us came from families without money, which meant we fundraised a lot to pay for travel costs and tournament fees. Debbie soon had a list of go-to businesses who would effectively hire the whole team to work an event. She started working with Bernice, another team mum, and together they became the ultimate managing duo. We marshaled cycling events, ran stalls on the weekends, and held car washes and auctions right throughout the year so that once the tournaments came around we had no costs. It was work, but it never felt like it because we were hanging out with our mates off the court. It didn’t matter if you could afford to pay the fees without fundraising; every single player worked those weekends to bring the costs down for their teammates who had less. No matter how good a team is on the court, if they can’t work together and get along off the court, there’s going to be problems.
Only now when I stop to think about it do I realize that there were probably times when our fundraising didn’t cover all the costs of a tournament, particularly if it required a flight to get there. But even though I had no money, I never felt as if I was in danger of not being able to go. The only explanation for this is that if there were any extra expenses, Kenny, Blossom, Bernice, or the Webbs looked after them without telling me. I was a big part of the team so it makes sense they would want me at the tournaments, but at the same time, quietly paying for someone else’s kid to play basketball is just one of the many things that people did to help me get to the NBA. I’ve never brought it up with Debbie or Bernice, because I know they would either deny it or avoid the question. It was just something people did and didn’t need to have discussed. I may have had nothing to my name, but I was always provided for by others, and then some.
The tournaments were always the highlights of the year. If you’re reading this and you have kids, please sign them up to play at least one team sport. Spending a week living with friends who shared a common passion and goal was crucial to my development, both as a player and as an empathetic person.
Traveling to tournaments in New Zealand meant squashing into vans and driving up to 12 hours to get to the host city. Once there, accommodation was either a motel or a holiday park and campground. Some teams would stay on marae to save money, which meant everyone slept in sleeping bags on rows of mattresses on the floor. It was virtually impossible to have time alone, but no one really wanted it, because why would you wander off by yourself during a weeklong sleepover with your friends?
Our team went through our awkward teenage years together, which meant there was a lot of dick swinging and dick measuring (literally), but it was also the first time I had close friends to talk to about things I was too scared or embarrassed to ask the adults in my life. When you’re a kid and you have nothing, your only assets are your relationships. Through Wellington basketball I was made rich with friends who will always be my brothers, even though we don’t see much of each other these days. We had each other’s backs on and off the court.
The best example of this was when we were out of town for a tournament and a group of us walked by a house where some Mongrel Mob gang members were having a party. They yelled something at us that I couldn’t hear but which Victor could. Victor yelled back at them and next thing I knew they were marching onto the street looking like they were going to smash all of us. When they got closer I think they realized how big Chris and I were so they stopped, spat at us, and went back to their drinking. If they’d wanted to fight they would have nailed the lot of us, and I would have been the first to go down. I stood there, scared, but knowing that none of the boys would run away, because you never leave your teammate, whether you’re on the court or off. That stays with me, as strong as ever, to this day.
More than titles, more than money, what really counts is the confidence you have in your teammates, and that they have in you.