Steven Adams’ rise and thrall
Recently, my spouse was walking along a Palmerston North street when she locked eyes with a biblical face peering out from a car with sponsors’ markings. He smiled and waved and on her return she said she thought she had seen that basketball guy.
It would, of course, have been Steven Adams, all $140 million of him, driving himself to open a new community basketball court in Awapuni. Either that or he was going to buy up Awapuni, all of it.
His genial response echoed perfectly how I have come to know him well, by leafing through his recently published autobiography, My Life, My Fight. It’s up there with my best recent sports biographies, alongside Maria Sharapova’s
because she too had to defy almost everything as a kid.
Because Adams had to wrench himself off the couch and the streets of Rotorua, I would have named his book, From Nowhere to Somewhere.
Most of us know him as the star beast for the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA from his clips on the TV news.
It has been one heck of a journey for Adams from Rotorua. There’s no bitterness emanating from his pages. The youngest of 18 kids, he adds noone quite knows how many kids his tall English father sired.
In the NBA, his interviews are so quirky he is eagerly sought after by the bemused American media.
For example, when asked recently if he had written a book: ‘‘I didn’t write it. I can barely read, mate.’’
More: ‘‘I’m comfortable shooting them [threepointers]. The tough part is making them.’’
Madeleine Chapman wrote his book. They met on court at one of Kenny Mcfadden’s cold basketball training sessions in Wellington in 2009. We knew Mcfadden from the national league heyday when his Saints were the rivals of Ubix Palmerston North and the equally electric guard, Tyrone Brown.
Adams’ brother Warren played for Saints and had he not uplifted Steven from Rotorua to Mcfadden, who would lug him off to training at 5.30am every day, it might have been social welfare at best.
Maybe Adams would have ended up as a farm worker. He found farm work with his brother Mohi the most fulfilling work he has ever done, even if at age 12 he couldn’t find size 16 gumboots.
At primary school he was scrawny and was picked on. When he was a 10-year-old he was a sixfooter and was put in the school’s B basketball team ‘‘with the other useless kids’’. He tried rugby and was a lock, but gave up on his All Black ambitions because he always dropped the ball.
When he got to Wellington, basketball people had to give him feed and board and a personal trainer, Blossom Cameron, got him into Scots College, a privileged world away from Rotorua, where he wagged school and played video games after his father died when he was 13. He started playing basketball properly only when he was 14.
Obviously in the Adams genomes there is a single-track determination, as with his half-sister Valerie, the shot putter, nine years his elder. It also helped that Steven had seven feet (2.13 metres) of tallness genes, but at Scots he had to do a crash course in reading and writing to catch up from his truancy in Rotorua.
Adams appears far from star struck, devoid of ego and said he never had NBA ambitions. While he couldn’t afford the pay-for-play New Zealand basketball teams, that doesn’t appear the reason he shuns the Tall Blacks.
As he describes it, he is the third-highest paid player at Oklahoma and they expect him back in one piece.
You don’t see Brendon Hartley or Scott Dixon back in the off-season skidding around Manfeild ı´n the NZ Grand Prix do you.
Now Adams pays for poor Kiwi kids to wear the black singlet.
A Thorney one
Former All Black Grahame Thorne sent this retort in response to my rant about the All Blacks being derelict about taking drop goals. ‘‘Yes, it’s not NZ’S forte.’’
The best story is Canterbury defending the Ranfurly Shield in 1975 and they were down 6-3 with a minute to go. Five-metre scrum with a dropkick on.
‘‘Doug Bruce and Wayne Cottrell both didn’t want to take a drop goal, so Fergie Mccormick said, as only Fungus could: ‘Give us the barking ball’, and proceeded to kick it over. That sums Fergie up.’’
Justice at last
At last a rugby referee used common sense. At Dunedin on Saturday, Otago flanker Slade Mcdowall kept provocatively ruffling the hair of Canterbury’s Billy Guyton after he made an error.
When Mcdowall didn’t stop, All Black Luke Romano gave him a mighty shunt, which started the usual ruckus.
Referee Nick Briant instantly penalised Mcdowall for instigating it when most refs would ping the retaliator.