LAS VEGAS — Anthony Edwards stood silently behind a crescent of reporters as his Olympic teammate Anthony Davis monotoned through a news conference. A high-pitched staccato interrupted.
“Let me get in that, nephew!”
Heads turned, and the crowd parted to let Edwards stroll into the scrum, his 6-foot-4 frame built more like a running back’s than a shooting guard’s. Davis’s tone brightened.
“The real Ant is here!” said Davis, breaking into a smile, dapping up Edwards and handing over the microphone.
“The real Ant!” Edwards echoed.
The U.S. men’s basketball team convened here for training camp a few weeks before the Olympic tournament. Edwards, who will turn 23 in early August, is the team’s youngest player. He’s also the youngest of four siblings, an experienced little brother, perceptive and curious and comfortable scrapping for attention.
He scanned the faces staring back at him. Perched on a stool, he leaned forward, tilting his ear toward the first question, which sputtered. The reporter apologized for his nerves.
“It’s all good,” Edwards said, holding eye contact. “Take your time, man.”
He said it with gentility, unlike his jocular exchange with Davis. Edwards doesn’t code switch, but he senses deeply, displaying empathy that has forged lasting bonds everywhere he goes.
“His emotional intelligence is off the charts,” said Tysor Anderson, his high school coach at Holy Spirit Prep in Atlanta. “It stood out to me far more than his athletic ability.”
Expanding his audience of admirers, Edwards has leaped onto the NBA’s main stage as the league sails through a period of growing cultural relevance and financial success. His oldest Olympic teammates — including 35-year-old Kevin Durant, 36-year-old Stephen Curry and 39-year-old LeBron James — lifted the sport to new heights and now anchor the national program’s push to win its fifth straight Olympic gold medal.
But the path to the podium gets more competitive every year. While the aging U.S. team is again heavily favored to win gold and most NBA players are stillAmerican, the sport’s best young stars in recent years have hailed from elsewhere. An American-born player hasn’t won the NBA’s MVP award since 2018, and the top four vote getters this year were from Serbia, Canada, Slovenia and Greece. The top pick in each of the past two NBA drafts was from France, as were three other top-seven selections.
Edwards, at these Olympics and for years to come, looks poised to carry the next chapter of America’s basketball tradition. He capped off his fourth NBA season this past spring by leading the Minnesota Timberwolves on a deep playoff run that marked his ascent “from being an all-star to superstar,” as Timberwolves veteran point guard Mike Conley put it. Four-time all-star teammate Karl-Anthony Towns has called Edwards the new face of the NBA: a charismatic showstopper with a playful humor pitch-perfect for sneaker commercials and a skill set that blesses fans’ group chats with must-share clips of gravity-defying dunks and blocks.
“He plays with a joy,” said Steve Kerr, coach of the Olympic team and the Golden State Warriors. “He never seems to be under any kind of strain or stress.”
His competitive intensity, silky midrange game and ample trash talk have drawn comparisons to the greatest who have played his position. But those who have witnessed his journey up close are quick to point out where the resemblances to Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan fall short and how Edwards reflects the values of a new generation disillusioned by the emotionally abusive motivational tactics long venerated across the sports world.
“He has that killer instinct, but his reputation with teammates is different from what Kobe and Michael were known for, how they almost struck fear in their teammates,” said Mike Grady, the Timberwolves’ play-by-play announcer. “Everybody loves Ant. He empowers his teammates in a way that is not confrontational. He celebrates his teammates.”
The rising stature comes with heightened scrutiny that Edwards doesn’t duck with cautious aphorisms. Asked how he intends to adjust to sharing a court with fellow Olympic stars, he appeared resolute.
“I’m still the No. 1 option,” he said with a widening smirk that hinted at irony but dared everyone to believe him. “I just go out there and be myself. Shoot my shots. Play defense. And they got to fit in and play around me.”
THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN EDWARDS came off the bench in the opening exhibition game, Team USA was down eight points to Canada, a team considered a threat to halt the Americans’ march to gold. He snatched a rebound on his first play and, over the next few minutes, plunged down the lane for a reverse layup, sliced a pass through a double-team for an easy bucket, then caught a shooting rhythm, draining a pair of jumpers. By the time he subbed out, the team was down just one.
When the United States took its first lead, Edwards was the sole player to rise from the bench, and when Canada called a timeout to slow the momentum, Edwards was the first to greet his teammates. His “youthful exuberance” energizes those around him, said Erik Spoelstra, a U.S. assistant coach and coach of the Miami Heat. “His personality is not going to change just because he’s on a team of this caliber.”
Edwards swished a three that beat the third-quarter buzzer, snatched a steal that led to a fast-break and punched in a jam that etched him as the team’s leading scorer. He capped off big plays with a fiery scowl, nodding at the roaring crowd, howling affirmations. No less animated at practice, Edwards once complimented the team’s eldest statesman with “Good pass, boy!” before quickly revising to “Good pass, ’Bron!”
“He’s authentically himself,” U.S. teammate Bam Adebayo said. “He’s going to be the same person every day on the court, off the court.”
Growing up in a tightknit family in southwest Atlanta, Edwards inherited these traits from his mother, Yvette, and grandmother Shirley. They attended every football and basketball game, the loudest in the crowd and “always happy,” recalled DeAndre Brown, his teammate from second to 12th grade.
“That’s what they left me here with, being happy all the time,” Edwards said in a news conference before his rookie season. “There’s nothing that can tear me down.”
In 2015, when Edwards was 14, his grandmother and mother both died of cancer, eight months apart. He wears No. 5 because they each died on the fifth day of a month. The trauma burned into him perspective he still carries.
“I’ve been through the worst,” he said in May after the Timberwolves dropped the first three games of the Western Conference finals. “So the sky is never falling on me.”
After their mother’s funeral, he and his older brother Bubba processed their pain on a basketball court, where they shot hoops late into the night. As Edwards finished middle school, he shifted his focus from football, where his exploits as a running back were legendary, to the sport his brother starred in. “Ant wanted to be just like Bubba in basketball,” Brown said.
He attacked the craft with devotion, a tireless perfectionist who studied Durant and Allen Iverson highlights. He kept any signs of his grief within the confines of his family. All his teammates saw was the resilience of his charisma.
“Every day, Ant comes into the gym with a smile on his face,” Brown said. “You would never even know what he went through.”
On their Atlanta Xpress travel team, Edwards was the ceremonial leader of their road-trip bonding tradition. Brown was in charge of filming as Edwards filled a trash bin with water and ice, tiptoed into a hotel room, then dumped the cold surprise on a sleeping teammate to a chorus of teenage giggles that soon erupted into rib-busting howls. When other teammates executed the prank, Brown said, they would lay the blame on Edwards, on the theory that it was impossible for anybody to be mad at him.
From afar, Edwards exuded brashness that could intimidate. Buka Peikrishvili was nervous before meeting Edwards in ninth grade, when Edwards was a promising guard and Bubba was a senior captain at their public high school. Peikrishvili was a sharpshooting forward at Holy Spirit Prep, a private academy. He and Anderson, the Holy Spirit coach, came to watch Edwards play and convince him to enroll at their school across town.
Peikrishvili had arrived in Atlanta from the country Georgia less than a year earlier, after visa troubles blocked his efforts to sign with a professional basketball team in Italy. He was still learning English.
Edwards put him at ease. He told him he loved his accent, laughed at his jokes and asked whether he could teach him some Georgian words.
“He said, ‘You’re the funniest person I’ve ever met,’” Peikrishvili recalled. “You need one of those people in your life.”
Edwards transferred to Holy Spirit the following fall. Financial aid covered his tuition. His first two years on campus, he helped the team win back-to-back state titles.
Peikrishvili and Edwards became close, bonded by the challenge of navigating an upper-crust campus that felt far from the worlds they had grown up in. The Atlanta apartment Edwards shared with his siblings was an hour’s drive from Holy Spirit’s suburban campus nestled beside mansions and golf courses. His sister, Antoinette, was his legal guardian but only 20 herself and stretched thin from taking care of her younger siblings.
Edwards didn’t own a car, so he got rides from a constellation of adults who contributed to his support system.
“Everyone loves him, so he just naturally attracts people to support him,” said Rachel Little, his guidance counselor at Holy Spirit Prep. “His siblings were dealing with a lot, so we all just tried to fill the gap.”
Peikrishvili and two other European-born teammates lived with Little, who offered to host them through their high school years. Edwards often joined them after practice for spaghetti dinners and late-night Fortnite sessions. Soon he was spending the night so regularly that he began leaving a spare school uniform there. When Peikrishvili FaceTimed his parents, he would pass the phone to Edwards, who was eager to show off the Georgian he had learned. When Peikrishvili spiraled into homesickness, Edwards pulled him out of it.
“He just brings you all the positive energy,” Peikrishvili said. “He’s going to uplift you.”
It was one part of a long trail of goodwill that Edwards left as a teenager. Another, Little recalls, was the friendship he developed with a classmate in study hall who struggled with social anxiety.
“Not all of her peers were super nice to her and willing to interact with her,” Little said. “She learned a lot from him just practicing those casual conversations.”
As a longtime high school and college coach, Anderson has seen resentment fester on teams when a singular player rises above the rest. That wasn’t the case with Edwards, he said, “because of how easy it was to love Ant.”
When esteemed college coaches visited Holy Spirit to woo Edwards, he would introduce them to his teammates. When the University of Georgia invited Edwards on a recruiting trip in December of his senior year, he asked Coach Tom Crean whether he could bring one of his European teammates who wasn’t able to fly back home for the holidays. “He wanted to share that with them,” Anderson said.
TWO WEEKS INTO THE NBA PLAYOFFS, Mike Conley Jr. had a revelation.
Over a six-game stretch, the Timberwolves’ 36-year-old point guard watched Edwardsscorch a path of iconic performances that shook the basketball universe, leading a sweep of Durant’s Phoenix Suns and snatching two games against the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets and league MVP Nikola Jokic. Pausing to reflect after a May practice, Conley savored the thought that cautiously bloomed in his mind.
“Am I playing with a guy who is going to be mentioned with these guys in the future and before his time is done he will be that guy and I’ve actually had the chance to be his teammate?” Conley said. “You start thinking about all the moments.”
Over his single season with Edwards, Conley counted several moments that recalibrated his understanding of what his teammate might be capable of. In the final seconds against the Indiana Pacers, playing through a hurt ankle, Edwards jumped so high to block a potential game-tying layup that he hit the back of his head on the rim — a play voted NBA block of the year in a poll of fans.
Against the Utah Jazz, Edwards soared for a tomahawk posterization so ferocious that he dislocated a finger on the defender’s face — a play voted NBA dunk of the year.
While the arena buzzed, Edwards ran to the locker room to pop the finger back into place, then led the team to a comeback victory with 25 second-half points. “I’ll be telling my kids about that when they get older,” Conley said.
In the fierce and fickle NBA universe, ascents are ephemeral. Just two years ago, Ja Morant was the must-see predecessor to Edwards before he drifted into a series of off-court issues. Through it all, Morant projected defiance.
Edwards hasn’t avoided stumbling into trouble. On a September 2022 Instagram story he filmed while riding in a car, he described a group of shirtless men on the sidewalk as “queer,” then added, “Look what the world done came to.” Shortly thereafter, he apologized. “What I said was immature, hurtful, and disrespectful, and I’m incredibly sorry,” he wrote in a social media post, adding: “I was raised better than that!”
In December 2023, a woman posted screenshots of text messages showing Edwards encouraging her to terminate her pregnancy, offering to pay for it, and asking her to send him a video of her taking the abortion pills. In response, Edwards released a statement disavowing his actions. “All women should be supported and empowered to make their own decisions about their bodies and what is best for them,” he stated.
The Timberwolves signed Conley before the start of last season in part to mentor Edwards. The veteran point guard was familiar with Edwards’s cameo as a sharp-tongued antagonist in the movie “Hustle” and caught glimpses of his silly side in viral news conference clips. But meeting Edwards for the first time as a teammate, “I didn’t know what to expect,” Conley said.
His first impression was of a youngster who “just talks a lot, nonstop talking, funny, cracks jokes on everybody,” Conley said. “He makes fun of my haircut sometimes. He makes fun of my beard. Makes fun of your features. He’s constantly pointing out different things.”
Observant of his teammates on the court, too, Edwards encourages those on a cold streak to keep shooting. He organizes off-the-clock group workout sessions. He diverted from news conference questions about himself to highlight other performances. “He always wants to see you succeed,” Timberwolves teammate Jaden McDaniels said. When Towns received the league’s social justice award before a playoff game, Edwards was the first player to pause his warmup and start clapping, spurring other teammates to join the applause.
“After getting to know him, you realize how much he cares about how the other guys are feeling,” Conley said. “You don’t find that too much in guys that early in their career.”
THREE DOZEN FANS WAITED FOR EDWARDS outside the Las Vegas gym.
Many had been here for more than four hours, hoping to snap photos, plead for autographs or just catch a brief glimpse of the hoop heroes.
On the first day of camp, with the temperature at 117 degrees, one person in the crowd fainted. The second day reached 118. By the third day, many fans brought coolers filled with bottled water and placed towels over the scorching steel barricades to keep their forearms from burning.
By the time practice ended around 2, the sun had swallowed every sliver of shade, shut down phones and drained the fans of noise, movement, anything that might waste the energy they had saved for the moment they had waited for. And when the towering figures finally burst through the doors, the fans howled the names coiled at the tips of their tongues.
The crowd tracked the players boarding the bus, which departed and left behind two players inside the gym, putting up shots on separate hoops.
One was Curry. Stepping out of the gym in front of Curry a few minutes before 4, his longtime bodyguard announced to the crowd, “Ladies and gentleman, we are going to sign as much as we can until people get unruly.” Curry made his way down the line, eyes shaded beneath a bucket hat, rarely looking up, signing jerseys, balls and trading cards with a mechanical precision as rhythmic and dependable as his jumper.
“We appreciate you, Steph!” a fan shouted as Curry made his way into a waiting Escalade. “That’s what legends do right there!”
When the vehicle departed, another filled its place on the curb, driver at the wheel, engine running, air conditioner blasting. The crowd stayed put. Each time the gym doors opened, the crowd rustled to attention, only to be met with the disappointing sight of a USA Basketball staffer rolling out some equipment. Behind those doors, Edwards kept shooting.
“He has an indomitable spirit,” said Kareem Maddox, a player development associate for the Timberwolves. “An unshakable self-confidence that’s backed up by how hard he works, and people just can’t help but gravitate to that.”
Edwards has described his Olympic experience as an opportunity to learn from accomplished colleagues. He polishes pivot moves with Davis, warms up with James, talks tactics with Jrue Holiday and sits beside Spoelstra for a meandering post-practice conversation while his phone charges in an outlet by the baseline.
“He’s around so much talent,” Davis said, “and he’s looking at us like, ‘How can I get better?’”
A year ago, Edwards said, he wasn’t sure he would earn a spot on the 2024 Olympic team. Last summer, he was the leading scorer for Team USA in the FIBA World Cup. With few other all-stars on that roster of up-and-comers, Edwards controlled the ball so frequently that after losing to Lithuania in their fifth game, some of his teammates asked him to pass more. The United States finished fourth.
For better and worse, Edwards has embodied the prototypical track of the American youth basketball system. Adapting to a rotating set of teammates across AAU tournaments and two high schools, he honed a thrilling skill set well suited to shine at summer camps and on social media.
In high school, he would train with his personal coach before 6 a.m. practice, then again after practice in the evening, often returning home close to midnight, when he would take care of whatever homework he hadn’t completed in study hall. His name surged up recruiting rankings after an impressive showing at an Under Armour basketball camp for elite prospects.
The next checkpoint on Edwards’s rise to the top of his peer group was to be named a McDonald’s all-American for his senior year of high school. The problem, Edwards learned, was that he wasn’t eligible for selection because he switched from the graduating class of 2019 to 2020 upon transferring to Holy Spirit to give him an extra year to catch up on the school’s mandatory credits. An all-American selection required that he graduate with his original class. So in fall 2018, seeking to graduate the following spring, he loaded his schedule with 10 classes.
“It was a ridiculous amount of classes for a 17-year-old,” Little said. “On top of recruiting, on top of camps, on top of everything.”
On the days he was most exhausted, he spent his lunch break in Little’s office.
“He’d not say a word, put his backpack on the floor, put his arms inside his hoodie and sleep for an hour,” she said. “Toward the end, it was not fun. He was just like, ‘I just want to be done.’”
Entering the NBA in 2020 after a year at Georgia, Edwards embodied the style of play that has become America’s basketball trademark: an athletic slasher with defensive tenacity and a deep bag of offensive tricks to create space for a shot.
After getting past Durant and Jokic in this year’s playoffs, Edwards faced off against Luka Doncic, the Slovenian star who signed with Real Madrid when he was 13 and competed for years against and alongside older players who restricted his dominance, challenging him to expand his repertoire and create shots for teammates. Defenses that double him pay the price as he rifles the ball through open passing lanes. Doncic dominated the series, while Edwards struggled to catch a rhythm against a blitzing defense.
Following the Timberwolves’ elimination, Edwards reflected that he was working hard to improve his ability to defeat defenses with guile rather than force.
“Just being able to read the floor,” he said. “Not get as mad when teams double me and put two on me ’cause I know my guys out there are going to knock it down.”
In the delicate space between expectations raised and fulfilled, Edwards offers his supporters the possibility of a rare joy: cheering on greatness as it soars toward its apex. It’s a possibility that compels parents and children to push through the heat for a glittering memory of Edwards leaving the gym long after the rest of his teammates.
He exited the Las Vegas gym around 4:30, Atlanta Braves cap tilted upward, towel around his neck, skin glistening with sweat, phone in one hand, backpack on his shoulders, only to encounter the devoted crowd, calling his name, waving jerseys for him to sign.
But his exhaustion was obvious from the way he dragged his legs. Plus, he had an appointment to rush to, part of a schedule that has gotten busier in recent months.
Edwards flashed a peace sign, pushed out a smile, then waved his hand apologetically to indicate he could not pause for autographs. He climbed into the Escalade, and the fans watched him ride off into the desert horizon.
Ben Golliver contributed to this report.
Source link : https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/07/27/anthony-edwards-olympics-basketball/
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Publish date : 2024-07-27 11:58:07
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