HOME SCHOOLED
C’s Irving learned his ‘bag of tricks’ by playing against ex-BU star father
LOS ANGELES — The move can be so convoluted with its never-before-tried mix of crossovers and hesitations, you might think that sometimes Kyrie Irving forgets how it came together. He smiled at the silliness of this suggestion. “Nah. I remember every minute detail of what it took for my body and concentration to pull off a move. It’s perfected,” he said, sounding as much like a choreographer as an NBA point guard. “And it’s fun. Every move is hand-fully crafted, piece by piece, so when you put it all together it’s something like it’s supposed to be. Literally created off of instincts.” When the sequence is completed — when Irving embarrasses his foe or foes with a simple layup that reduces them to flustered Washington Generals — he runs back on defense, expressionless. “I wouldn’t say I’m ever surprised. Sometimes how effective it is differs for me sometimes,” he said. “If it’s really effective and you get the defender leaning one way and you get a clean shot off, or you take a chance on instincts, it works. It’s not surprise. It’s excitement at how effective it was.” There’s a driveway in West Orange, N.J., at the family home where Irving’s father Drederick still lives, that set the contours for many of these moves. There’s a backboard and rim attached to the garage, with grass on either side of the asphalt. It is here that Dred Irving used to poke at the ball, sometimes playing rough and hand-checking his son onto the grass. This is where young Kyrie learned to dribble and drive in a confined area. The driveway is narrow, not even 12 feet across — the width of the lane on an NCAA basketball court. “It did wonders, man,” Irving said. “From a development standpoint, how to be effective in small spaces came out of that, and him kind of pushing me out of bounds on the grass, kind of roughing me up a little bit, which I needed. He was so good one-on-one, I was just taking things he was doing and using them against him as I got older.” That’s what Scott Spinelli began to notice when he came for a visit with Drederick Irving, his former Boston University teammate and roommate. For all of the uniqueness of these moves Kyrie was developing. Spinelli had seen them before, from when Dred was the king of BU’s Case Gym in the mid-1980s. “Dred had a little of that South Bronx flair about him,” said Spinelli, now a member of Jim Christian’s coaching staff at Boston College. “When he shot free throws, he would tuck the ball behind his back before taking the shot.” Dred created a multitude of ways to score, and lose his opponent, and suddenly his son was using those feints and hesitations — the floaters — on him. Irving was 16 when Spinelli saw the dynamic on that driveway change. Then as assistant coach at Nebraska, Spinelli was standing on the grass, looking at his watch, calling out to Dred to give it up — that they had other things to do. The games were more intense now, and sometimes Spinelli had to “officiate.” Kyrie was now beating his dad, who refused to leave the driveway. “As good as Dred was, he just couldn’t beat him,” Spinelli said. “It got pretty heated, and one thing about Dred is that he doesn’t like to lose. So on this one day, instead of having a visit with Dred, I watched him lose to Kyrie multiple times.” Kyrie Irving makes his fifth NBA All-Star appearance tonight at the Staples Center, and for all of the honors he’s collected — NBA champion,
Olympic gold medalist, NBA Rookie of the Year — that driveway title may have been his first significant triumph.
“That’s the type of relationship me and my dad have,” he said. “I wanted to beat him so bad, and as I got older he wanted to beat me to kind of get back on top, and I’ve kept him there since I was a kid. Once I beat him, I was like, ‘You’re never beating me again.’
“As a natural competitor it was a surprise for him, because he sees so much of himself in me, and I’ve looked up to him since I was a kid. He’s my favorite player. When you beat your favorite player it’s special.”
Far beyond his years
Kyrie Irving recalls developing his work ethic at age 14.
“When I did it consistently? Where my dad didn’t have to do much to get me to go to the gym at all, if any?” he said. “Playing in my back yard when it was warm, when it was cold, going to the park. I loved it so much — I love it so much.
“Finishing, mid-range, long 3’s, and then the biggest thing that gave me the edge was I was playing against older guys all the time. If I could get around a 27-yearold and I’m 14, and he’s a lot bigger and stronger than me, then me playing against my age is . . . pffft,” Irving said with a disinterested shrug. “I’ve played older since I was 14 years old. I was playing 17’s. Those guys were more athletic, a lot quicker, and I had to find a way to still be effective when I was playing with those guys.”
Irving was 4 when his mother Elizabeth died from a sudden illness. Drederick Irving, who had played professionally in Australia, moved the family back to the New York area, took a job on Wall Street, focused on raising Kyrie and his older sister Asia, and began tracing his old basketball roots.
Kyrie Irving came along and shot on the side as his father played in pickup games. When an extra player was needed, Dred called over his son.
“They were in a rec complex in the South Bronx — Ky was going into the seventh grade — and he was off on the side shooting during the game,” Spinelli said. “Dred says, ‘Come on, Ky.’ And he goes in against an older, very good player, and Ky made a couple of his vintage moves. He embarrassed one older guy, who then tried to go back at him.
“He used that hesitation, went through his legs, around his back, did a hard crossover. Then he pulled up for a jumper. When the game was over we went out to dinner. I told Dred that the best player on that floor was Ky. Things are going to happen quickly for him.”
And, they all had to admit, Irving was getting there at least partially with his father’s moves.
“I took some moves from him — definitely took some moves from him,” Irving said of his father. “Hesitation, my combinations, and after it got to the point where I figured I was a little quicker than my dad, my upper body strength was a little more and my jump shot was a lot different, probably around 16. That’s when I took it to another level and started developing things on my own that I thought would benefit me on the next level.”
‘Amazing teammate’
Sandy Pyonin would get into bank-shot contests with Kyrie Irving. As with the other players who have passed through the coach’s New Jersey Roadrunners AAU program, he tested the youngster head-to-head, up and down the floor, just as he had with Al Harrington, Randy Foye, Bobby Hurley and 34 other Roadrunners alumni who have moved on to the NBA.
Dred had asked Pyonin to coach this burgeoning prodigy, and Pyonin soon learned about Kyrie’s quiet but supreme confidence. And, oh, yeah, there was that handle.
“He already had the Euro step,” Pyonin said. “His ability to go to his left is amazing. Teardrops. I’ve always said that he has a bag of tricks he hasn’t even brought out yet.”
Pyonin discovered that Kyrie’s favorite snack was beef jerky, and that he liked to go on offense at one particular end of the YMCA floor, because the basket was a touch lower and thus easier to dunk on.
“The only time I ever saw him get mad was when we were at a tournament in Florida, and we took everyone’s cell phones away,” said Pyonin, who also learned a lot about Irving’s sense of responsibility to the team.
One summer Kyrie’s high school team, St. Patrick, was scheduled to play in the same showcase tournament in Orlando as the Roadrunners. He wanted to play for both, was distressed by the realization that it wasn’t possible, and relieved when Pyonin said it was OK to just play for his high school team.
“So he joined us for our game anyway, stayed on the bench, and got water for everyone the whole game,” Pyonin said. “An amazing teammate.”
The father’s sacrifice
Those who know both father and son understood almost immediately where Kyrie derived his strength of character.
“His father is a friend of mine — I didn’t coach him, but we became fairly close after I became coach at BU,” said Dennis Wolff, now the director of operations for the men’s basketball team at Old Dominion. “For three or four years, Drederick brought Kyrie up every summer for our basketball camp.”
Wolff couldn’t resist. After watching Kyrie, then a fifth grader, dominate against yet another older group, the BU coach told Drederick Irving he was willing to offer a scholarship. He already knew the gesture was a pipe dream.
“My family used to kid me — ‘You wouldn’t have been fired if you had got some of these kids who came to your camp to actually join the team,’ ” Wolff said. “Maybe Kyrie came in the fifth, sixth and seventh grades, and then the next time I saw him he was a high school sophomore in a tournament in Providence. That’s when I told Dred, ‘Things are definitely going to change for you.’ ”
And thinking back, Dred’s presence, every step of the way, is what strikes Wolff now about Kyrie’s rise.
“They’re just good people,” Wolff said.
Spinelli, an assistant coach at Texas A&M when Irving was attending that school’s elite camp as a ninth grader, was next to make a scholarship offer. Dred, his son’s interests purely at heart, politely said no to his friend.
His son was going to make his own choices. Despite the possibility that his own playing career could have gone further, Drederick wasn’t going to play it out through Kyrie.
“He gave up his own personal love — pro basketball — to be with his children,” Spinelli said of Drederick Irving. “For those of us who played with him, we believed he had NBA potential, but he didn’t get the exposure. But he was a special player, with the heart of a lion and a passion for basketball.
“How hard is it for any parent to give something like that up? The ultimate sacrifice is bringing up children. Dred spent a lot of time with his son. I look at Kyrie differently than a lot of people. I see a young man who reflects his dad in every way — he’s a good person, a person with a good heart.”
Kyrie Irving is grateful not only for his father’s devotion, but for what he didn’t do. He wasn’t a stage father — a man bent on living through his children.
“I’m thankful for that. I didn’t need that,” Kyrie said. “I needed the guidance from a mental perspective, but talent and work, I’ve always had it and I’ve known I’ve always had it because of the affinity I have for the game. I loved it so much that my dad didn’t have to do much in terms of getting me to go outside and play basketball. That was something I’ve had since I was a kid.”
As a sign of his desire to let Kyrie live his own life, Drederick Irving has chosen to let his son speak for himself.
“That doesn’t surprise me either,” Wolff said. “Some fathers try to live through their kids, but he had a career of his own that he’s obviously comfortable with.”