No Fear, No Limits
Lessons learned from the night a young Karl-Anthony Towns captivated the City of Boston
Ol’ bestie Cory McCarthy brought up an image yesterday that brought back all the warm, fuzzy memories of a simpler time in my life, running a million miles an hour as a twentysomething high schools editor for ESPNBoston.
Yup. That’s who you think it is. Karl-Anthony Towns, the superstar forward for the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Before Cory was Chief Diversity Officer for Everett Public Schools, he was a certified Baddest Dude On The Planet coaching the basketball teams at Hyde Park’s New Mission High School. He won four state titles in six years on the boys’ side, and another on the girls side before that.1
Like a lot of elite high school coaches, Cory perpetually found a way to win with whatever hand he was dealt. He won with genetic freaks and model citizens. He also won with oddballs and goofballs. Outspoken outlaws. Unapologetic misfits. Kids on their second chance. Kids without an athletic bone in their body, but not an ounce of fear either.
And that last trait is where this story begins. It’s about the time Cory decided to take his gang of intrepid misfits and schedule St. Joseph High School of Metuchen, N.J., and its two future NBA studs, Wade Baldwin and the aforementioned Towns.
New Mission under Cory always put together one of the state’s toughest schedules. Two years prior to this matchup, they took one on the chin from legendary St. Anthony’s of Jersey City, led by Hall of Fame coach Bob Hurley.2 The leading scorer that night, current Memphis Grizzlies star Kyle Anderson, nearly outscored Mission by himself.
Yet this was wild even by Cory’s standards. You know Towns today as the tallest 3-Point Contest champion ever. But back then, he was the No. 1 ranked player in the country, and a mortal lock to be the No. 1 pick in the draft as soon as he was eligible. By all accounts St. Joe’s was supposed to drive up, humiliate the Titans, take a tour of the Freedom Trail and head home.
A couple nights before the game, the Titans did a number on their archrival Charlestown, and afterwards I asked their center Bam Rivers, the guy who was likely going to be defending Towns, what he thought of the matchup. Never mind the fact he gave up a good nine inches and was built like an offensive lineman. Bam thought I had it all wrong — Karl should be scared of him.
Bam was a wonderful kid, who a few weeks later would pull me aside after a game for a kind gesture that I’ll never forget (more on that later). But I didn’t want to put him on the spot, so I took it up with Cory. And when I told him what Bam said, Cory’s reaction was, “Yeah, so? That’s what he should be saying.”
Matter of fact, Cory had the whole team feeling like they were the Goliath, and Karl was the real David:
The last time Mission faced a player as talented as Towns, current UCLA forward Kyle Anderson had his way with the Titans as Jersey City, N.J. juggernaut St. Anthony crushed them, 68-25, to conclude the 2011 Shooting Touch Shootout. But if you know anything about Mission, it’s that they will never waver in their supreme confidence. Mission players got giddy when the subject of St. Joe’s was brought up in post-game.
Rivers, the man who will most likely match up with the 7-foot-1 Towns, acknowledged the talent but said simply, “I don’t care who you are, I’m coming at you my hardest.”
With a boast, Rivers added, “We feel that they need to be ready for us.”
“They’d better be ready,” Murray chimed.
Added Sandiford, “They need to hear about us. We’re focused. We’re ready to stand as a family, stand together. We know they’re a top team, but we’re a top team as well. We’re a family. We’ve got that chemistry. We’re ready for any challenge. We’re the Titans.”
Told of his players’ remarks, McCarthy reinforced that confidence, acknowledging this is a different squad from the one last season that boasted more athleticism – and more talent – but bowed out early in the Division 2 North tournament. Clearly, McCarthy is pleased with the way this team gets after it. When asked about matching up with Towns, he went into rare form.
“He’s good, he’s gonna play for [John] Calipari –- wonderful, you know? Who is Karl Towns?” he said.
Laughing, he continued, “What do you call it, a [quintuple] team? That’s what he’s going to get. And then the guy who gets the ball is going to see five guys too. We’re just going to play ‘Napoleon Basketball’, because even our big guys are gonna be little guys compared to them.”
There’s no Hoosiers ending here. St. Joe’s came in and got a nice 20-point W. But boy, oh boy, did the Titans win some new fans and make it entertaining as hell.
They were, indeed, not scared. Doubling and tripling him all night. Up in his grill at both ends. They even took a lead at one point!
Towns ended up with a triple-double, but he also ended up with blood on his jersey. And a hell of a lot of respect for the Titans:
When Mission coach Cory McCarthy went to scout St. Joe’s the night before, in the Falcons win over Archbishop Wood (Pa.) on the first day of the Shooting Touch Shootout, he noted how many three’s Towns attempted. McCarthy thought his kids “could have been tougher, could have been grimier”, but had a suspicion it was going to be a physical game today.
“Just as I thought, when somebody plays against us, they’re gonna be good, because we play so antagonistic that people get mad and start playing really well,” McCarthy laughed. “So I think we really aggravated him and pissed him off a bit. I don’t mind that. He’s a hell of a player.
“I thought we did a good job on him. He got some dunks, but he played like a man, and he had to play like a man to beat us. I felt like we were in the game most of the game, and our kids never gave up.
Said Towns of the physicality, “For me, this was a very good game, and I was happy that I was able to be a little bit more physical than I have been in the last few games.”
Towns not only stuck around afterwards to sign autographs for every kid in the building, shake their hands and thank them for coming to see him. He also gave me some one-on-one time to chat about the game and then thanked me — yes, Karl-Anthony Towns, the future No. 1 pick and NBA All-Star, with absolutely no reason to even give me the time of day, thanking me — for coming to see him play.
Matter of fact, the full quote was: “Thank you for taking the time to come see me play and interview me, hope to see you again some day as a member of the Celtics.”
I know, I know, there’s this video circulating of Karl sliding his way into the Celtics legends shoot at All-Star Weekend and now you’re wondering if there’s some dots to connect. I didn’t think much of it at the time, to be honest with you. I thought the kid was just polite and trying to be conversational with the home crowd.
But that wasn’t even the point of me telling that little nugget. I’ve done some cool stuff in my career, and yet all these years later, I’m still blown away by that exchange. Seventeen years old, and the kid was already mature well beyond his years — and knew how to make everybody around him feel like a million bucks.
I’m retelling this story now because Cory’s tweet reminded me of some valuable lessons that I still hold dear to me today:
No Fear = No Limits!
New Mission went on to win the MIAA Division 2 state championship that season. I mean, how could they not have gone all the way? When you go up against the No. 1 player in the country and win him over with your toughness, that big bad school from the suburbs ought to be a piece of cake.
No matter how much you think the deck is stacked against you, when you remove an assumption from your problem, you usually find a way to make things interesting. In this case, the assumption was very direct — St. Joe’s is going to come into the building and embarrass New Mission — and Cory just straight up removed that axiom from the equation. There would be no fear in this dojo.
When you play with no fear, you play like you’ve got nothing to lose. And when you play like you’ve got nothing to lose, you don’t think much of bloodying up the most heavily-hyped big man out of the Garden State since Andrew Bynum. And look at all the good that did Cory and his motley crew.
There’s definitely a lesson about impostor syndrome here to take with you into the real world. Remove fear from your life and see where it takes you. I guarantee you’ll get a W somewhere.
Simple gestures mean the world (Part 1)
It cost Karl-Anthony Towns absolutely nothing to be kind to people that night, and I’m sure he thought nothing of it. But every single kid in that building who met him that night is going to have a story to tell their grandkids 60 years from now.
Hey, maybe one day Towns ends up on the Celtics, I’m standing at his locker reminding him of the time he predicted this all would happen, and he’s politely laughing as he asks himself, “Crap, did I really say that?”. Either way, long after his playing days are over, I’ll still have a story to tell the world about what a great kid he was back in the day.
My old protege Mike Uva a few years ago told me a story of covering Zion Williamson’s last high school game as a TV reporter in South Carolina, and how Zion went out of his way to individually thank every reporter for coming to the game, and asking to take a selfie with him so he could remember the moment.
Sound familiar? No. 1 player in the country, most heavily-hyped prep prospect since LeBron, asking the media if they’d be willing to take selfies with him!
When you’re in the public eye as much as some of these superstars, the attention can wear you down and make you grumpy. But don’t ever forget, the littlest thing you do to somebody can give them a story to tell people for the rest of their lives. Always appreciate that no matter where you are in life — and for God’s sake, have fun with it the way Karl and Zion did once upon a time.
Simple gestures mean the world (Part 2)
A few days after that St. Joe’s game, I lost my grandfather to a decade-long fight with leukemia.
I don’t even remember who won, or the score, the next time I covered New Mission that season. But I fondly remember Bam going out of his way to find me after the game just to let me know he’d heard about my grandfather’s death, that he was terribly sorry, and to let me know if there was anything he could do for me. It was a wonderful gesture that I won’t soon forget.
This is what you remember as the years go by. The little things add up to mean a whole lot.
The story of that girls’ squad that won the 2007 MIAA Division 4 state championship was like an urban version of Hoosiers. They dressed just six players for the championship game. Their jerseys had taped-on numbers. They took public transit to away games. The gymnasium in their cramped school building was only half-court. The star of that state final had turned around her life after getting expelled from another school. Jackie MacMullan wrote an incredible column encapsulating it all for The Boston Globe that still blows me away to this day. Worth the 5-minute read.
And I mean THE Hall of Fame. Bob is one of three high school coaches inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. The other two are Morgan Wooten from Maryland’s DeMatha Catholic, and Steve Smith of the legendary Oak Hill Academy that produced Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant and Rajon Rondo among dozens of other NBA freaks.
Great story. And a big YES to the kind of young MAN that Bam Rivers IS.