Whenever someone refers to me as a journalist, I cringe. I
know what real journalists have to do; I did it myself for a year in grad
school. It could mean spending six hours on the phone making 43 calls just to
get one quote for an article that turns out to be absolute crap, but you gotta
hand your editor something. It could mean roaming the streets of random
neighborhoods you’ve never been in before looking for man-on-the-street
interviews. That’s real work; that’s “it doesn’t matter how hard you work,
you’re still depending on other people to do your work for you” kinda work;
that’s the toughest kinda work. I don’t do that kinda work right now, nor do I
wanna do that kind of work. Your mind is always on the job; you’re on call 24-7-365.
I have the utmost respect for real journalists; I am not one of them.
More than that, though, journalism is about telling stories.
The first draft of history, as I’m sure a million journalism professors have
said in their opening remarks to a 101 class. When it comes to sports, sure,
journalists are there to cover the game: who won, by how much, who scored the
most points/goals and so on. But more
than that, sports reporters are intrigued by the storylines: How is an ankle
injury affecting the star athlete? Who is the unsung hero? Can David slay
Goliath?
I’m not interested in that. I mean I am, but I care more
about calling games. It’s why I love the D-League Showcase so much – not
because I might be getting a glimpse at the next Jeremy Lin or Danny Green, but
because I have been able to call 10 games in four days in each of the last two
Showcases. I love being able to watch and talk basketball. I love tracking how
a team’s shooting percentage rises and dives throughout the course of a game. I
love calculating a team’s defensive rebounding percentage at the end of
quarters (getting a little Vinnie Paz here with the repetition of the opening
phrase of a sentence). Basketball is my favorite sport; I love the way they
dribble it up and down the court.
Journalists love stories. I love reading stories, but I love
the actual games more. While I enjoy reading players’ backstories when I
prepare for a game, I love the fact that all of that takes a backseat when the
ball is tipped. It’s all about what you’re doing right now in a game,
background be damned. The rock doesn’t discriminate.
All that said (how about that for an extremely long intro-
welcome to Backpack Basketball, baby!), what happened on the night of December
12, 2013, at the Dignity Health Event Center in Bakersfield, Calif., deserves
to be told.
The play-by-play guy in me will tell you that Kiwi Gardner
came off the Santa Cruz Warriors’ bench with his team trailing the Bakersfield
Jam 88-71 with 9:15 remaining in the fourth quarter to score 23 points and lead
the Warriors to a 112-106 victory. The play-by-play guy in me would tell you
that Gardner went 9-10 from the floor and 2-2 from beyond the arc. The
play-by-play guy in me would tell you that the Santa Cruz Warriors improved to
6-2 as a result, winning their second of three games on a five-game road trip.
But Kiwi’s night deserves more than that. This game – and
Kiwi’s performance – was so good and so memorable that I’ve known from the
moment that game ended that I would write a story on it. I’ll do my best.
I’m not going to give you Kiwi’s whole background story-
that’s not my story to tell (but for reference, Sam
Laird’s Mashable piece on Gardner at the beginning of the season – before
this game against Bakersfield happened – is a pretty damn good starting point).
So this is where and how I’ll start it:
I can’t honestly say I thought something like this was going
to happen the first time I saw Kiwi play in person; I didn’t think he was going
to make the Santa Cruz Warriors. Not because I had insider info or anything – I
clearly didn’t – but because my snap judgment of a guy who shrugged his
shoulders after a teammate messed up one of his dimes at a local tryout as he
was playing with dudes he was a million times better than was completely off.
After watching two minutes of this local Santa Cruz tryout on Oct. 6, 2013, I
sent a text to PR director Matt De Nesnera: No
way Kiwi makes the team, IMO. He hasn’t contested one shot (It was either
one or two jump shots in question, far from a realistic sample size. I guess I
was just trying to be Hot Take Kev. Also, De Nesnera did not respond and is not
culpable in any sense). I regret a lot of things I have said and done in my life,
but not so much from a professional standpoint. That text I sent to Matty Q
(our affectionate nickname for De Nesnera), however, is something I definitely wish
I could take back. I wish I could say I was on the Gardner hype train from
minute one, but that would be a lie. If Kiwi ever reads this article, my
response to him would be, “my bad, bruh.” I judged a book by a false cover, and
boy was I wrong.
Because the first thing you learned about Kiwi Gardner in
the locker room is that he’s one helluva teammate. From the first preseason
game, he was the first one off the bench to side-bump Seth Curry after one of
his three-pointers or high-five Cameron Jones after nailing a pull-up jumper
from 18 feet. The second thing you learned about Kiwi Gardner is that he plays
his ass off on defense. If you have
the ball, he’ll crowd you so hard that Catholic school teachers would tell him
to make room for Jesus. Some guys might not be happy that they’re in the
D-League, thinking that they should be in the NBA; Kiwi was THRILLED to be on
the Santa Cruz Warriors, like nobody I had seen before.
And, although he hadn’t seen the court a whole lot in the
first couple of weeks of the season, Kiwi had shown signs in the limited
minutes he had been out there that he could produce at the D-League level.
Kiwi’s first-ever field goal in a regular season D-League game came when he
successfully challenged the Reno Bighorns’ DeQuan Jones – a guy with 63 games
of NBA experience with the Orlando Magic in 2012-13 – at the rim and finished
over him for an and-1 layup. Yes, it was garbage time and the bucket was
meaningless, but it was still an impressive display of athleticism that let people
know Kiwi could do exceptional things athletically beyond the high school
level.
More meaningful minutes for Kiwi came in Santa Cruz’s next
game against Reno – in Nevada on the first game of that five-game road trip
that would later take the Sea Dubs to Bakersfield. The Bighorns could not miss
in their home-opener, exploding for 48 points in the second quarter and 76 in
the first half. Down large late in the fourth quarter, Santa Cruz head coach
Casey Hill inserted Kiwi into the lineup. The Sea Dubs didn’t really come close
to winning, but Kiwi scored eight points and dished out two assists in five
minutes off the bench and Santa Cruz ended up only losing by seven points in a
game that the ‘Horns thoroughly dominated. While Santa Cruz lost, the Warriors
outscored Reno 20-9 over the final three minutes while Kiwi was on the floor. Hey,
this Kiwi Gardner kid could be a real firestarter off the bench.
As the team was getting ready to head to Bakersfield a
couple of days later, word got out that the Memphis Grizzlies wanted to work
out Seth Curry. While this could mean more playing time for Kiwi as the No. 3
point guard option behind Curry and the veteran Moe Baker, the Oakland kid
appeared a little uneasy. As we all trudged out of the Lakers’ practice
facility (the team decided to stay a night in the LA area before driving to
Bakersfield), the team found out about the news.
“Hey man, Kiwi’s shook!” then-Santa Cruz big man Dewayne
Dedmon joked to Curry. “You gotta give him a pump-up speech or something!”
(this quotation, along with the following ones, is not 100 percent accurate,
but it went something like this).
“Yeah man, give me some words of encouragement!” Kiwi said
to Steph’s younger brother, I think only half-kidding.
“You’re good man, just do you,” Seth said and smiled before
heading into a different van to be taken to LAX.
That little vignette aside, any questions that may have
lingered about Kiwi’s confidence and readiness to step into a bigger role (Seth
ended up returning before the next game, so it didn’t matter a whole lot at the
moment anyways) were quickly answered the next day at practice in Bakersfield
when he brazenly challenged Cameron Jones, one of the best shooters on the
team, to a three-point shooting contest.
Apparently he had enough of his
teammates’ playful ribbing that his outside jumper wasn’t a strength of his, so
it was time to prove the guys wrong.
It was a pretty simple contest: Take five threes from the
right wing. Whoever makes more wins 50 bucks. Kiwi was first to bat.
He hit all five. Guys were going crazy with each ensuing
triple that Kiwi drilled.
Cam hit his first two shots before missing the third. Kiwi
subsequently ripped off his practice jersey and aimlessly ran full speed around
the Dignity Health Event Center in pure joy, shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Y’all thought I couldn’t shoot! What now?!” was more or
less the rallying cry from Camp Gardner.
Dedmon was egging him on all the whole time, as he had
become known to do in those days before he earned his spot in the NBA. “Yeah,
do you Kiwi!”
The rest of the team was doubled over in laughter, watching
Kiwi bounce around the place talking trash to nobody in particular. Hilton
Armstrong could hardly breathe he was laughing so hard before finally saying, “Man
I love having Kiwi on this team!”
