Goals to go
Whitmore overcomes injuries to achieve aim of making NBA; he’s driven to do much more
When Cam Whitmore was in fifth grade, his teacher had every member of the class take a photo with a sign saying what they hoped to be when they grew up. Other children held aloft career aspirations such as firefighter, nurse, policeman, doctor and astronaut.
Then little Cam, lips pulled into a closedmouth smile, stood in front of the white cinderblock wall and displayed his dream.
“Cameron has, ‘NBA player,’ ” recalled his father, Myron Whitmore. “I’m looking like, c’mon Cameron, you’ve got to have a Plan B. What else is there? He’ll literally tell you there’s never been a Plan B. He thought that him having a Plan B would take away his focus on Plan A, which was going to the NBA.”
Whitmore’s parents tried over the years to find him a Plan B. He learned how to play the baritone saxophone. His favorite subject in school was math. But nothing commanded his attention the way basketball did.
Whitmore’s Plan A came to fruition when the 18-year-old forward was selected by the Rockets with the 20th pick in this year’s NBA draft. For the Rockets, it is another brick to lay in the franchise’s rebuild. For Whitmore, it is another opportunity to prove he is on the path he was meant to be on.
He got his start as an 8year-old, dribbling incessantly in a Maryland warehouse with concrete floors. He joined Carmelo Anthony’s acclaimed AAU program but lost out on valuable exposure and playing time because of injuries, only to come back even stronger. For high school, he chose to take on the task of turning a once-mighty program back into a state title competitor and did. An
other surgery delayed the start of his first college season, but at the end of it, he was crowned his conference’s best freshman player.
“The path is just pretty much the same path that I’ve been taking for I don’t even know how long, so I know this is nothing new,” Whitmore said Monday, shortly before receiving his new No. 7 Rockets jersey. “Just have the same goal. And the same goes the other way: Take away the distractions, keep focus, keep your head down. Just keep working.”
It all began 10 years ago, when Whitmore’s father took the recommendation of another parent and signed his son up for a development program run by coach Darryl Adams at Rhythm Dribble, near the Whitmores’ hometown of Odenton, Md., between Baltimore and Washington D.C.
Myron and Cam arrived at a bare-bones warehouse with no air conditioning, no heat, and no seating. There weren’t even court lines drawn on the floor, just two pairs of portable basketball goals set up at either end of the building.
The 50 kids were divided into three groups: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Cam was in the beginner group and in his first session spent one hour standing still, dribbling in place with his nondominant right hand. Adams used a metronome to help the kids keep a consistent pace with their dribbles.
It was repetitive, tedious work. And Cam loved it. He couldn’t wait to go back and told his dad his goal was to get into the advanced group. He accomplished that within three months.
“You see Cameron’s best when he’s challenged,” Adams said. “He’s a calmdemeanor kid, but there’s a fire burning in there that you see when there’s a challenge when he’s asked to do something at a high level.”
Whitmore was an athletic kid and competed in swimming, football and soccer from age 5. His mom said she has a photo of him at barely a year old, lying on the floor with a basketball under each arm. Another photo taken at 15 months shows his first dunk on a toy hoop.
By the time Whitmore was in elementary school, he decided on his own that he wanted to focus only on basketball. In high school, he woke up at 5 a.m. to go work out before school, then practiced with his team after school.
“It was more difficult for me to pry him away to make sure he had a balanced life,” his father said. “Basketball was literally his identity. If you took basketball away from him, I’ve always said that it was life and death with him.”
Never did that feel more true than when Whitmore fractured the tibia bone below his left knee during the last preseason scrimmage before his freshman season at Archbishop Spalding High School. His mother, Colleen Whitmore, heard him scream and saw the bone poking through her son’s skin.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Colleen told him, “Godspeed. In God’s time, things will work out.”
Cam took that to heart. Later, after he recovered from having screws surgically inserted into his leg, he got a tattoo down the side of that same leg: “GOD SPEED.” He would need the reminder later on.
‘Not your normal human being’
Whitmore missed his entire freshman season recovering from the tibia surgery and finally returned to the court in a summer grassroots showcase, only to suffer a hairline fracture in the same bone. This injury didn’t require surgery, but it kept Whitmore sidelined for the entire summer and prevented him from gaining ground in the fastpaced world of recruiting and prospect rankings.
When Whitmore started his sophomore season at Archbishop Spalding, coach Josh Pratt had just taken over the program. Pratt purposefully limited Whitmore’s minutes at first, wanting to make sure he was healthy. When he finally turned Whitmore loose toward the end of the season, Whitmore put up 34 points and 12 rebounds against the No. 1 seed in the league.
Pratt, who coached current NBA player Rudy Gay as well as former NBA players Malcolm Delaney, Donte Greene and Jarrett Jack, knew he had another athlete of that caliber in Whitmore.
“I tried to push him to make him better, and I do think he accepted the challenges,” Pratt said. “In practice, he would just dominate, and kids would just look and be like, ‘Coach, I can’t do anything.’ It was like, what are you gonna do?”
As athletically gifted as Whitmore was, he also put in the time necessary to improve his shooting and, despite his low-key personality, stepped up as a leader.
“Any time we had a oneon-one convo, we’d sit down and watch film, or I’d take clips and send, and he was always receptive,” Pratt said. “Especially going into his senior year, he started pulling kids aside and talking to the players. I think he’s that type of leader. He’s all about relationships.”
In three seasons at Spalding, Whitmore started all 72 games he played, scored 1,252 points and grabbed 633 rebounds while helping the team to the state semifinals in each of those seasons.
Darrell Corbett, who coached Whitmore on Team Melo, said Whitmore was always a good perimeter player and a solid rebounder but, post surgery, reached another level as far as his explosiveness in attacking the basket.
“Oh, the return was just pure domination,” Corbett said. “Just all that energy bottled up ready to explode. Flying through the air, dunking left and right. Just tearing it up. Full of happiness and joy just to go out there and play, get up and down that court, realizing that he’s back and he’s gonna be all right.”
A phenomenal summer on the EYBL circuit with Team Melo between his junior and senior seasons solidified Whitmore as a top Division I prospect, and he wound up committing to play for Villanova, only to encounter another obstacle.
Surgery on his right thumb caused Whitmore to miss the first seven weeks of Villanova’s season. He was disappointed, but Colleen Whitmore said she saw him handle the injury with more maturity than he had when he got hurt in high school. Instead of becoming withdrawn, he remained emotionally connected to the team.
Whitmore made his season debut for the Wildcats in December, averaged 27.5
minutes and 12.5 points per game in 25 appearances, and was a unanimous selection to the Big East AllFreshman team.
“He’s had some tough injuries where he bounced back and he looks more athletic than before. He’s not your normal human being,” said Villanova assistant coach Dwayne Anderson II. “He came here, and he pushed himself to come back soon again. I think he just loves basketball. He just wants to be out there and wants to play. I feel like that’s what he was put on this earth to do, and he embraces that.”
Watch that first step
Seated at a long table inside the Barclays Center, Whitmore heard name after name summoned to the stage to accept caps from their new NBA teams. He wasn’t among them. When Myron Whitmore realized his son was not going to be a lottery pick, as projected, he leaned over to offer words of encouragement.
“I said, ‘Guess what? This is another story and another testimony for the path, your basketball story’ ” Myron Whitmore said. “And so your story is going to be incredible when you really go back from the very beginning. The things that you’ve overcome and the things that you’ve achieved, the one word is resilient.”
Cam Whitmore echoed that sentiment shortly after the Rockets selected him with the 20th pick.
“Different feeling, but then again, it’s the same feeling,” he said. “I’ve been overlooked a lot of times in my life, so it didn’t really faze me. I’m just really happy to be in the NBA.”
Overlooked might seem at first like an ill-fitting word given Whitmore’s accolades: McDonald’s All-American, two-time Baltimore Catholic League Player of the Year, winner of a gold medal with USA Basketball at the 2022 FIBA Americas U18 Championship tournament, Big East Freshman of the Year at Villanova.
But he was one of the last players to be picked for the McDonald’s team. On Team USA, he came off the bench before eventually winning MVP of the tournament. His father and Corbett both said Whit
more’s underdog mentality began in sixth grade, when he was cast aside by an AAU team he briefly played with prior to joining Team Melo.
Whitmore gradually rebuilt his confidence and along the way learned tricks to make sure he can always renew it. Adams, who kept coaching Whitmore in high school, was putting him through a shooting drill when he was about 14 or 15. Whitmore was struggling, and Adams wanted to give him a mantra that he could relate to in tough moments.
“I asked him to always be a professional and said I think of him no different than I think of LeBron,” Adams said. “That one statement, if I said it to him, he understands it. That means you have to access and dig deeper for the professional in that moment.”
From that point on, all Adams needed to do to inspire Whitmore was whisper some version of that mantra in his ear. Now, Whitmore is actually a professional.
Many NBA mock drafts had Whitmore pegged as a top-five pick before his surprising slide on draft night. He, his dad, and the Rockets all say concerns about his health and injury history are overblown. And his father said it’s possible that in interviews, teams mistook Whitmore’s quiet nature for disinterest or timidity.
“I’ve heard people talk about his quiet interviews, but you know, he’s not going to be the one to initiate the conversation,” Myron Whitmore said. “I don’t know what the interviews were like, what they’re talking about. I don’t know. But I could just say that initially, you’re not going to get a lot out of him. He’s big on establishing relationships, and once he trusts you, you will get anything. He is very loyal. And so those things take time for him.”
In the Rockets, Whitmore has found an organization where he can build those relationships. It helps that one of his agents is based in Houston, and Whitmore spent the month and a half leading up to the draft here, training with local development coach Aaron Miller.
When he returned to Houston two days after the draft, Whitmore had dinner while watching film of his new team. And the next morning, one day before his official introduction with the Rockets at Toyota Center, Whitmore was already back in the gym working out with Miller and his strength and conditioning coach.
“I’m coming in with a free mind, just embracing every moment,” Whitmore said. “I mean, I don’t get the 24 hours back from yesterday, so I’m just trying to be in the moment still. I’m very, very grateful I got drafted.”
Whitmore’s fellow Rockets rookie, No. 4 overall pick Amen Thompson, offered a scouting report of Whitmore’s game.
“Super athletic, a great shooter,” Thompson said. “He can really break somebody down off the dribble. I say he’s like a freight train, to be honest. Like, even if you could stay in front of him, he puts you in the paint, dunks on you. Great second jump. I mean, he was at the top of my board.”
Standing at 6-foot-6 and 235 pounds, Whitmore is a powerfully built wing who can provide transition burst and shooting to a young Rockets team equipped to play at a fast pace. Although he writes with his left hand, he shoots and throws with his right hand and can finish at the rim with either.
Ask someone to describe a favorite play of Whitmore’s, and they’ll probably start by saying, “Well, he was on the fast break …”
Pratt said he often had to will himself not to react on the sidelines when Whitmore made a jawdropping play. He doesn’t tape Spalding’s practices but once combed through gym security footage to find video of Whitmore completing a putback dunk so ferocious that it halted practice.
Anderson compared Whitmore’s abilities to those of former Villanova greats Josh Hart, Eric Paschall and Kyle Lowry.
“His first step is so underrated,” Anderson said. “Once he gets past you, there’s no defense. He can finish over top of you or through you. He’s a manchild. That’s one thing that kid does not lack — he does not lack confidence. He’s had some SportsCenter top 10 plays, and I can’t wait to see what he does at the next level.”
Whitmore will say he learned his resilience from his parents: Colleen, a nursing administrator, and Myron, a retired member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve.
His mother, though, thinks his resilience is somewhat innate. Whitmore craves stability and structure. And once he makes up his mind about something, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to dissuade him.
“He’s so focused, so determined and doesn’t back down from a challenge,” Colleen Whitmore said. “People say he’s so serious, so quiet, but he has tunnel vision on the court.”
Because of Whitmore’s stoic, often expressionless demeanor around basketball, when he breaks character off the court, it can catch even those who know him well off-guard.
On the morning of the NBA draft in New York City, Anderson was walking into the commissioner’s luncheon when Whitmore spotted him and suddenly stopped in his tracks.
“He’s staring at me, I’m staring back, and he goes, ‘Today’s the day,’ ” Anderson said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, today’s your day.’ He was like, ‘No, no. Today’s your birthday. Today’s your day! ’ He was just so happy. So then our whole group started clapping, and I was embarrassed because I didn’t want anyone to know because that was his day. And for him to show that emotion on my birthday and to go, ‘Aw, man. I took you away from your sons on your birthday? ’ It’s just so rare, man.’
On the biggest day of his life, Whitmore was concerned about someone else. But he’ll never forget the dream that jump-started his journey.
Myron kept a copy of the black-and-white photo from his son’s fifth-grade declaration. He plans to get it framed alongside a photo of Cam and NBA commissioner Adam Silver, taken at the draft when the dream was realized.
“He never wavered from it all. Never,” Myron said. “So that’s the awesome piece where kids talk about it and wish and hope, but he was not that one to just talk about it. He went after it.”