High school athletes who made
questioning me, like, ‘ Hey, what’re you doing here?
“So I pull the basketball roster out of my pocket, and I say, ‘ I’m Dion Waiters. I just transferred.’ The guard says, ‘ Never heard of you.’ So I say, ‘ Man, I’m committed to [ play college basketball at] Syracuse!’ The other guard starts cracking up. He goes, ‘ Son, you’re not committed to Syracuse.’
“They’re looking me up and down, like, Nah, you ain’t sh**. So I say, ‘ For real! Google me!’ Now they’re laughing their asses off, right? The one guard goes, ‘ Ain’t that some sh**? Google me! I am gonna Google this kid, too.’ So they take me down to the office, and they Google me.
“Maxpreps. com. Dion Waiters. Committed to Syracuse. The guard goes, ‘ Man, you weren’t lying!’ I’m looking at him like, uh- huh. From that day on, every time I saw that guard in the hallway, he’d yell out, ‘ What’s up, Google Me?’”
That was an appropriate nickname, given Waiters would rise to the NBA and become something of an internet star, beloved on social media for appearing to have far more faith in his own abilities than a player of his talent has any right to possess.
“I’m not a big internet guy, but I see things,” he wrote. “I see what people say about me. They say, ‘ He never seen a shot he don’t like’, ‘ He’s got irrational confidence’, ‘ He thinks he’s the best player in the NBA’.
“Hell yeah I do. I have to. Picture yourself walking into a South Philly playground at 12 years old, with grownass men, bleachers packed with people, trying to get a run in.
“You think you can survive in Philly without irrational confidence? You will never in your life hear the words, ‘ I can’t’ come out of Dion Waiters’ mouth. I can. I will. I already did.” If coming out of the mean streets of Philadelphia was hard, it’s nothing compared with the journey just completed by the delightfully- named Gift Ngoepe.
The Pittsburgh Pirates infielder this week became the first African- born player to appear in Major League Baseball and, in his very first at- bat, became the first African to get a hit in an MLB game.
Ngoepe grew up in South Africa, a country not exactly known for its baseball pedigree, and fell in love with the sport the way many of us have all around the world: by watching the Yankees play the Red Sox.
“Me and my best friend at the time, he liked the Yankees for some reason and I knew there were huge rivalries with Boston so I took the Boston team, so me and him had a little bit of a battle going on,” Ngoepe told Deadspin. “Baseball would come on Sunday night and he would record it on his TV, when I guess the recording devices started coming out, so on Monday after school, we would go watch the game.
“That’s how we watched baseball. And then if we were trying to watch the World Series, we’d have to stay up late, especially on weekends, that’s the only time we could watch.”
As a teenager, Ngoepe headed to Europe to attend a three- week MLB training camp, where he was discovered by the Pirates. But his journey was only just beginning, spending nine years in the lower levels of the organisation before finally reaching the big leagues.
So now the scorecard reads: MLB players born in South Africa, one. MLB players born in New Zealand, zero. Landing on the cover of Sport Illustrated is a big deal in the United States, an unequivocal sign that an athlete or team has ascended to true national prominence. But every so often, SI will instead pluck a previous unknown athlete and thrust them into the spotlight. Thirteen times in the magazine’s history, a high schooler has graced its prestigious cover, with SI essentially predicting stardom before it begins. Seventeen- year- old baseballer Hunter Greene was this week the latest to be afforded that honour, touted as throwing tripledigits, hitting tape- measure home runs and being “the star baseball needs”. Sometimes, most famously with LeBron James, SI’s proclamations are soon proven by the athlete in question. Other times, not so much. Presented now are three who fit somewhere in between. . .
If Greene manages to make the majors and exhibit half of Harper’s talent, SI would have made a pretty solid prediction. Called in 2009 the “most exciting prodigy since LeBron”, Harper has been an All Star in four of his five seasons and two years ago won the MVP. Like Greene, Harper was advertised as a two- way player, eventually choosing to favour his prodigious bat.
In 1986, Phillips became the first female high school athlete to feature on the SI cover, aged only 14. Called the “new Mary Lou”, Phillips didn’t attain the levels of Retton, being derailed by that scourge of all young gymnasts: growth. She did, however, land a cheerleading scholarship to college.
McMillen was in the middle of a trio of white guys who made the SI cover by dominating a bygone era of high school basketball before finding things a bit trickier in the pros. “The best high school player in America” reached the NBA but impressed more off the court, becoming a Rhodes Scholar and US Congressman.