Brotherly love built up OU's Reaves
NORMAN — Austin Reaves wasn't very interested in basketball when he was in seventh grade.
He was playing on the freshman team with his older brother, Spencer, but Spencer still had to drag Austin to the gym to workout. Spencer wanted the team to be better, wanted his little brother to be better and wanted a practice buddy.
Eventually, Austin saw the importance of putting in extra work and saw where basketball might take him.
But Spencer had seen it first. “You could just tell that he always had it,” Spencer said. “And of course when he was playing his age group, you could see how much better he was than most of those kids at his age and you could just see
him keep developing.”
Austin is now OU's secondleading scorer, averaging 15.1 points per game. The redshirt junior guard has been key in many of Sooner wins this season, but he's hit a scoring slump in recent games. Same for the Sooners.
When Oklahoma plays TCU on Saturday and tries to break out of a two-game losing streak, getting more points out of Austin will be important.
But he says he wouldn't be in this position if it wasn't for his big brother.
“He saw something in me that I didn't even see at that time,” Austin said of those developmental years. “So that's one reason that I can look back and just appreciate him because I wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for him.
“If I didn't have an older brother then I might not be here, might not even be playing basketball.”
With all those trips to the gym in their hometown of Newark, Arkansas, the brothers played a lot of one-on-one games growing up. And Spencer, being the older brother, won every time. Austin didn't beat his brother until he was a junior in high school and Spencer was already off to college at Central Missouri.
But Spencer thinks all the losses were good for Austin. He had to learn about overcoming adversity and figuring out ways to beat an opponent who was bigger and better. Playing Spencer gave Austin something to strive for and someone to teach him how to get there at the same time.
“(He was) someone to look up to, and he just did everything the right way,” Austin said. “So, he set a good example for me.”
Growing up, everything was a competition between Austin and Spencer — not just basketball. Golf. Tennis. Board games.
That kind of thing can happen when your parents both played college basketball.
Austin and Spencer used to play football in the front yard and their dad, Brian Reaves, would be the quarterback. It didn't matter who caught the pass — the other brother would always claim he got cheated and they had to replay the down. It would go on like that for hours.
“I guess the best way to describe it is two brothers that were super competitive and didn't want the other one to win,” said Brian, who played at Arkansas State in the early 1990s. “So, a lot of times whatever sport they were doing would end up in some kind of a scuffle.”
Brian tried to be the peacekeeper between his two boys, but he always appreciated their competitive spirit. It made Austin and Spencer push each other to get better.
As they grew up and Spencer went to college at Central Missouri, that competitiveness and arguing started to go away and their relationship became more about supporting each other.
“That's my best friend,” Austin said of his brother.
Now, Spencer is halfway around the world in Spain and playing for Juaristi ISB. The brothers talk a couple of times a week, and they follow each other's basketball closely. Austin rattles off Spencer's stats, knows his team's standing and watches as many games as he can.
Spencer watches all of Austin's games — no matter what time they're on. When OU played Kansas at 8 p.m. Tuesday, it was 3 a.m. in Spain.
Spencer will get a bit of a break Saturday. A 1 p.m. game for the Sooners means it will only be 8 p.m. in Spain.
For Spencer, watching Austin play is about more than just being a proud older brother. It's about watching everything he saw in Austin come to fruition. So, Spencer will keep staying up late to watch his little brother play and support Austin wherever basketball takes him.
“Wherever he' s goi ng,” Spencer said, “I'm following.”