Tatum making mark on Celtics, city
MINNEAPOLIS — Last Monday in Hyde Park, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper visited a pep rally at New Mission High School with a special guest.
The students had no idea about the guest, who arranged the visit on his own. There was no obligation from his employer.
Wu spoke to the seated students in the basketball gym, and in strolled Celtics forward Jayson Tatum. Arms raised, rocking a hoodie, smiling brightly as the middle school and high school students surrounded and hugged him as if he was the heavyweight champion of Boston.
In a way, Tatum is. He has become the most recognizable athlete in this star-studded city. Tom Brady and David Ortiz have retired. The Patriots and Red Sox are rebuilding. It’s a Celtics town. They are competing for the NBA championship, and the 25-year-old Tatum is their franchise player. He is old enough to be a role model, and young enough to remember being a skinny kid in St. Louis dreaming of stardom and idolizing sports heroes such as Kevin Durant and Kobe Bryant.
Tatum became the youngest Celtic to reach 10,000 points Saturday night in Brooklyn, and it was his first opportunity to speak about that special day, when he told those kids at New Mission High, many from underrepresented communities, to keep dreaming. He was touched by the impact he had, digesting his standing in a city he has fully embraced.
“It means a lot,” he said. “I did an interview this summer where I’ve said, where I said over the last year and a half, two years I’ve really felt that connection with the city of Boston. When I said that, I meant the people. The people I know. The people I don’t know. The people I see at the gas station, and doing more things [in the community], going to the children’s hospital, surprising the kids at a high school. Seeing those genuine reactions, the excitement on their faces when I walked in. That brought me joy. I was happy to be there.
“I understand the value in that, going in there to speak to them and there something they might remember forever. Doing more things like that and enjoying my time here, appreciating the people in the city of Boston. It’s just a great place.”
Tatum has been here for nearly seven years, developing from a lanky swingman into one of the league’s top five players. It required just 444 games to reach 10,000 points and we still haven’t seen him at his absolute best. He is taking steps toward franchise immortality every year, and how much he has developed is not lost on him. He recalls being in the Barclays Center, the building in which he scored his 10,000th point, in June 2017, sporting a peach fuzz mustache and short haircut, excited but uncertain about his future.
“First of all, I didn’t even want to come [to the Celtics] because I didn’t think I was going to play,” Tatum acknowledged. “They had Gordon [Hayward] and JB [Jaylen Brown] and Isaiah Thomas and [Marcus] Smart and I didn’t think I was good enough to be on that team. I was more concerned about being in the game. It’s been a long process. I’ve had to learn from the ups and downs, through my mistakes.”
Embracing Boston has been a process. Tatum is a proud St. Louis native. Like many visitors or transplants, he was unsure what Boston had to offer, whether he would be comfortable, whether it would become a second home.
“It’s a weird transition, you get drafted, right? They pick you to come here,” he said. “It’s different. I picked what high school I wanted to go to. I picked whether I wanted to go to Duke. I’ve always kind of been a St. Louis kid, that’s where I grew up. That’s just where I felt comfortable. So being 19, it was an adjustment. But you realize my son was born in Boston, I bought my first house, my car; my mom lives in Boston. I’ve spent almost a third of my life [here]. You really start to think about all those things and the relationships that I’ve built in the organization and people in the city. You really start to feel like you’re a part of something.”
It’s difficult for many elite athletes to digest their accomplishments in the midst of their journeys. Tatum has yet to win a championship or MVP award. There are still doubts to erase about whether he can carry a team to the promised land. There is so much more left for him to achieve.
“Time has gone by fast,” he said. “Just trying to stay present, stay in the moment and enjoy it. Ten thousand [points] sounds crazy to just think about. I always think about when I was a kid growing up with my mom and saying I wanted to be in the NBA and while I may have thought I would be one of the best players, to actually do it is a surreal feeling.”
Tatum is eligible to sign a five-year contract extension in the neighborhood of $338 million next summer; the Celtics would sign him to that deal — today. The Celtics want Tatum to stay in Boston for the rest of his career. He appears very open to that possibility.