PRINCE OF THE CITY
Noah back where he belongs, blocks from teenage home
THE CHANGES are striking — towers of glass and steel climbing from once-ignored blocks, intent on touching the sky. The changes are subtle — new, dimly lit restaurants trying to be trendy enough to survive the next round of rising rents.
Disfigurements and improvements dot Manhattan’s West Side, where tourists keep trickling out from an elevated rail line turned popular park, where a new 11th Avenue subway stop helped chisel away at decades of isolation.
Changes keep coming, but certain monuments still exist. To Joakim Noah’s delight, Happy Joy Chinese restaurant is still standing. After spending his formative living years in Hell’s Kitchen, the new Knicks center’s beloved Central Park is just a leisurely Citi Bike ride away from his new home in Chelsea.
The streets remain busy. The chaos remains comforting.
“Just being able to be at home, for some reason, as crazy as it sounds, the city gives me peace,” Noah said. “I love just cruising in the streets. It’s my happy place. This is where I’m most comfortable.
“I’m from a lot of different places and this is really the only place in the world that I feel normal.”
WITH a father, Yannick, who won the French Open, became a music star and was considered the most popular person in France, normal was never really an option. His mother, Cecila Rodhe, was Miss Sweden and then an artist. His grandfather, Zacharie, was a soccer star from Cameroon.
A life set up to be overshadowed started in Manhattan, but Noah grew up in one of Paris’ wealthiest suburbs, splitting time between his divorced parents. When he was 12, he moved to New York, living with his mother — who had moved to New York as a teenager — and younger sister, Yelena, near the corner of 51st Street and 10th Avenue.
In Hell’s Kitchen, he was no longer the child of France’s favorite son.
“I think it was great for me just being able to be a normal kid and not the life of a celebrity kid,” Noah said. “My father’s one of the most recognizable people in the country. It was obviously really different when I lived in Paris. It was tough at first and it was definitely an adjustment.
“I spoke English, but with an accent, so you can imagine just growing up and going to play in all the street tournaments. I got it pretty bad, but I think it made me tougher.”
Now, Noah exudes as much toughness as anyone in the NBA. Back then, he was “Stickman” or “Sticks” or “Stickity,” a gangly kid with distinctive hair and a penchant for playing on the perimeter. He couldn’t intimidate like Charles Oakley, Patrick Ewing or Anthony Mason, the players Noah watched perform less than two miles from his bedroom, where posters of Knicks decorated his walls.
As a newborn, Noah received a small basketball as a gift from Ewing, a friend of Yannick’s. As a young teenager, Noah was attending Knicks summer basketball camps.
“It’s really surreal in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways it really just feels normal,” Noah’s high school coach Bill McNally said. “It’s like this is the way it should’ve always been.”
THE UNITED Nations International School was a natural destination for a worldly, welltraveled, multi-cultured student, and quickly, his peers learned of a personality as diverse as Noah’s genes.
He was gregarious and introspective, as likely to joke or dance as he was to voice an unpopular
“I’M FROM A LOT OF DIFFERENT PLACES AND THIS IS REALLY THE ONLY PLACE IN THE WORLD THAT I FEEL NORMAL.” — JOAKIM NOAH ON NEW YORK
opinion or engage with strangers on the street.
“He didn’t invent swag, but he was at the forefront,” UNIS coach David Gartrelle said.
By becoming anonymous, Noah finally could stand out.
“I had never seen anyone like him before. I was so intrigued,” said Alex Perris, one of Noah’s best friends since UNIS. “The first thing that popped out was just his generosity. He invited me to his house and his mom cooked for me and he gave me cologne. He was just a different kind of cat. He was just a real eclectic guy with a lot of things going on.”
Living in New York came naturally. Adolescence was more difficult.
Noah was regularly skipping class and hanging out with the “wrong” crowd. As a sophomore, he was kicked out of school and would have to repeat the grade.
“I didn’t go to jail. Let’s leave it at that,” Noah said. “The truth is I was messing up in school and I wasn’t taking school seriously. I wasn’t taking anything seriously. I was just getting caught up in the wrong things in school and after school, but getting in trouble at UNIS was the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a second chance to refocus and have a better perspective of what’s important.”
UD COX was in awe, shocked to see a tennis legend walk into his office. Yet his teenage son left an even greater impression.
In the summer of 2001, Cox, the Upper School Head at Poly Prep Country Day, was scheduled to meet with a student interested in transferring to the Brooklyn school. Yannick entered first, followed by his son, whose 1-on-1 interview doubled as a lengthy, casual chat.
“He had such positive energy and he was so thoughtful and confident,” said Cox, who hosted Noah for dinner at his Red Hook apartment this spring. “He was really easy to talk to. He had no problem talking about what he’d struggled with academically or socially or telling me what his goals were. He never blamed anyone for anything.
“He makes mistakes, but he learns from mistakes.”
Under McNally, Noah’s game grew along with his body, helping the team to two league titles as he transitioned from a 3-point shooter to an inside presence and the team’s top defender.
“At first I thought maybe he could play in the MAAC, but within like 18 months I thought he could be a pro,” McNally said. “Like his father, he has the drive of an individual athlete, yet he was a great teammate. He would be 100 percent into the smallest drill and he was such a blank slate. Because of his mom, he also had that artist side of things and that sometimes made for a bumpy ride because he took everything to heart. Everything he does is genuine. If we lost a game, it was the end of the world.”
Maybe that’s why Noah never wanted anyone else to feel the same.
“I remember times when coach was pissed at us, but [Noah] would always be able to do something to make him crack a smile,” former teammate Charlie Parker said. “He just made everything easier. He could always pick you up to get you out of a funk.”
N HIS postgrad year, Noah led Lawrenceville School to a New Jersey state title. At Florida, he was part of the most recent back-to-back NCAA champions, named a Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. He twice was an All-Star and was named the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year. And it all connects to a couch. When Noah moved to New York, his mom just wanted to find a place for her basketball-loving son to play. From the yellow pages, Rodhe was pointed towards a youth basketball director, Tyrone Green, who invited her son to come to the local PAL gym.
Impressed by the skinny kid’s determination more than his ability, Green stressed that summer would be the most important time in his development. That is when the best tournaments were held all over the city. That is also when Noah’s mother and sister traveled to Europe.
Noah chose to spend the next five summers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, with Green’s family.
He bounced around the boroughs, taking the 1 train to Dyckman and the 7 train to Corona. He was continually reminded he wasn’t special, never starting for his mentor’s teams and relegated to the second-tier AAU squad.
In Green’s neighborhood, he was exposed to rougher surroundings than he ever had seen in his largely sheltered existence and promised he would try and create change in the future. While with the Bulls, he started Noah’s Arc Foundation, with his mother, and heavily campaigned to help reduce gun violence.
“He taught me the importance of giving back to the community. If it wasn’t for Mr. Green’s couch and Mr. Green’s teachings, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Noah said. “Those summers, those are the sacrifices I’m most proud of.’
Green, who died in 2014, also worked security at the famed ABCD Camp, allowing Noah to sleep on the hotel room floor.
During games, Noah did everything but play. He was a ballboy who handed out towels and helped with concessions, mopping the court for playersayers like LeBron James, ChChrisi BBoshh andd ddozens of players who never reached the pros.
“My wife, Cookie, loved Jo, and she would always say, ‘ Why don’t you let him play?’ ” Green told Chicago Magazine in 2010. “I told her, ‘I’m not going to put him in and let him embarrass himself and embarrass me.’ ”
Noah believed he was ready long before he first appeared in 2003, but he was forced to wait. When his chance arrived, a flood of scholarship offers followed the star of the showcase.
“A lot of the kids there were younger than him and he didn’t want to be working the camps his senior year of high school,” said Matt Rosenberg, another best friend from high school, who works with Noah’s agency. “It pissed him off that he was held out, but it turned out to be the best move ever.”
T CENTER, 6-11, from
Hell’s Kitchen… was Noah’s introduction during the preseason at the Garden. It’s how he will be introduced before Saturday night’s home-opener, and all season. It’s how he introduced himself — “Hell’s Kitchen, stand up!” — to NBA fans when he was drafted at the adjoining MSG Theatre in 2007.
The Garden is again a walk away from Noah’s house on Manhattan’s West Side. Home has never changed.
“We talked about how dirty New York is compared to Chicago, and he’s like, ‘That’s why I belong here,’ ” Perris said. “The more craziness surrounding him, the better he performs on the court and the better he is as a person. When there’s less going on, he’s not as sharp and not as good at what he does.
“He’s a guy that thrives in madness.”