ALL FUN IN GAMES FOR DURANT NOW
Finals MVP cherishes Warriors’ camaraderie, culture
Some 17 years before Kevin Durant finally became an NBA champion — and Finals MVP for this Golden State Warriors team that fulfilled its super-team destiny against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday night — he almost quit the sport.
The thought crossed his mind at times over the span of two years during middle school, when the gangly kid from Seat Pleasant, Md., grew so tired of those grueling training sessions with his godfather, Taras “Stink” Brown, that he wondered if it was all worth it.
He had been sleeping and studying in the corners of Seat Pleasant Recreation Center dur- ing those days, doing all he could to take his game to another level and gain the kind of notice from elite area high school coaches that was missing.
“As a kid, you want to play and have fun and go through things as a regular kid,” he told me in 2012. “But I wasn’t. I was always in the gym, always training. I was running hills, doing 100 laps a day. Basketball was the fun part. I barely touched the ball but had the push-ups and the sit-ups — all of it. I was like, ‘Why do I have to go through this boot camp when I see the other guys not working as hard as me and they’re out there playing well on the AAU circuit?’ They’ve got high schools looking at them, private schools, and it wasn’t like that for me.”
So he told Brown he was done.
“(Brown) said, ‘If you can’t play basketball, then you ought to be a ballet dancer,’ ” Durant
said. “I was like, ‘Nah, man, I can’t do that. I’m just going to quit.’
“He said, ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t come back, unless you want to be a basketball player.’ After a few days, I changed my mind. My mom was on top of me, too, and I got through it.”
Basketball has always been the fun part for Durant. That was true then, and it was true last summer when he kept looking west and noticing the joy that emanated from the world that Bob Myers, Steve Kerr, Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and the rest of the Warriors had created.
There was no my-turn-your- turn approach like he’d had for so many years with the Oklahoma City Thunder. There was a selfless culture in place that was unlike most you’ll find in the NBA. There was a chance to start a new chapter and, if all went according to their grand plan, be part of a dynasty one day. And for a 28year-old who once wondered if he’d ever get to play in college and who always wanted the joy to be a part of this experience, this was the kind of thing he couldn’t pass up.
“I found that at the beginning of the year when we first went to Vancouver in the first preseason game, just the camaraderie, just the togetherness of the whole or- ganization,” said Durant, who averaged 35.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 5.4 assists, 1.6 blocks and 1.0 steal per game in the Finals. “That’s what it was about. I kept building on that from Day One. So that’s what I found when I came here, and I definitely appreciate the type of people we have here from top to bottom. So a championship is just a cherry on top.”
No matter how mad it might make all those fans who branded him a ring-chaser.
“Yeah, I hear all the narratives throughout the season that I was joining, I was hopping on bandwagons, I was letting everybody else do the work,” Durant said. “But then that was far from the truth. I came in and tried to help my team. Like I said, tried to be myself, be aggressive and sacrifice as well.”
Now, just like back then, the work was worth it in the end.
“I remember the first day of camp, and I walk into camp and I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what these guys were like on the court and how they came in and worked,” Durant said.
“I didn’t know anything about the team. I wanted to come in there and just be me. And I did that from Day One, and I just tried to stay with that.
“I had my lows in the season where I was beating myself up, where I was struggling throughout the year, but the great part about it is I’ll get a tap on the head from Steph or a Draymond or — I can remember when we were in Sacramento and we just lost to Memphis, we gave up the lead, we were up 20, Draymond pulled me aside, we were having dinner the next night in Sacramento, and he told me to be myself. Don’t worry about anything, just be you, keep working, everything ’s going to come around.”