Wildcard's Book Corner: Steven Adams – My Life, My Fight
Steven Adams is pretty much the perfect representation of how New Zealand likes to see itself on the world’s stage. You chuck a microphone in his face and out come those little self-deprecating witticisms, mixed with an extremely perceptive basketball brain, a sort of ‘nerdy charm’ as I saw it described recently. Think Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi, Lorde… they’ve all got that same thing about them. A down to earth humility crossed with genuine excellence in their chosen fields.
Then you get this dude on a basketball court and he combines it with that other thing that kiwis like to be known for, that uncompromising, tough, rugged, do-your-job stoicism which has come to define our rugby team but really it goes way deeper than that, filtering out over farms and offices alike from Cape Reinga to the Bluff. It’s also the source of our deep-set Tall Poppy Syndrome but forget about that for a second.
Things is, no representation is ever going to be wholly encapsulating. What I mean by that is there’s a person behind the public figure. A real person who grew up poor in Rotorua, who moved to Wellington to pursue basketball and earned a scholarship to attend Scots College, who got up at 5.30am every morning to train with Kenny McFadden before school. A real person who also lost his father at a young age.
Usually I’m sceptical about sports autobiographies when they’re written mid-career. Like, how is that ever going to tell the full story when the story is only halfway through? Wayne Rooney put out an autobiography when he was 20 years old which basically consisted of playing down some press scandals and being great at football his whole life. About as inessential as inessential gets. Steven Adams is different though. He didn’t grow up a stone’s throw from a Premier League club being the best player in his team every year until he transferred to an even bigger club. Nah, Steven Adams simply making it to the NBA at all was the realisation of an incredible journey. It felt like the beginning when Commissioner David Stern read out his name (“absolutely butchering the pronunciation of my hometown, Rotorua”), and of course it was, but what it took just to be sitting there in that draft room was a stunning yarn in itself.
His new book, co-authored with Madeleine Chapman, begins at that draft table. It begins at the intersection of his life, the culmination of his every bit of dedication that had come before it and his ritualistic initiation into exclusive world of NBA basketball which was to follow. With it comes a rare example of bean-spilling too with a tale about a fellow draftee so convinced he was heading for the Cleveland Cavaliers at number one that he had their logo stitched into the inside of his jacket. You may recall that the Cavs instead shocked everyone by taking Anthony Bennett (a man who is no longer in the league) while this unnamed draftee conspicuously kept his jacket closed on that side when picked up later on.
Now, I’m a curious fellow. I understand that Steven Adams wasn’t about to name-drop in a situation like that but I’ve done the research and my best guess is Ben McLemore, sorry Benny. Though Nerlens Noel is also very high in those odds.
But the real point of that story was to highlight the difference between a guy who had that Wayne Rooney trajectory and a guy who had never played serious basketball before his early teens, who used to spend his holidays working on his brother’s farm, who began as the worst player in his team but kept at it and kept at it until he was far and away the best. I happen to absolutely hate those bootstraps tales about how a winning attitude and a whole lot of hard work can take you anywhere you want to go. Those are the stories that dickheads tell about themselves so they can convince themselves that they truly are ‘self-made billionaires’ or whatever, casually ignoring daddy’s seven-figure loan and the off-shore child labour that enabled them. Thankfully, and unsurprisingly, this is not that tale.
There’s been a bit said about Adams’ comments on NZ Basketball and the Tall Blacks in this book. Personally, I have no issues with whether he never plays for the Tall Blacks as long as he continues to represent Aotearoa in the NBA, paving paths for future kiwis to follow him. However I also reckon that people are missing the point of what he said.
“It takes a village to raise a child, apparently. And it takes a village to fundraise for one too. New Zealand does best when everyone is invested. I had my own little community of helpers who pushed me towards my passion…”
Talent is nice. You don’t get anywhere without that baseline of talent. You then need to refine that talent by getting in your 10,000 hours. There’s also a fair bit of luck involved too. Steven Adams had and did all of those things but only because of the help of some generous and incredible people. Kenny McFadden, obviously. Also his trainer and mentor Blossom. His many brothers and sisters and extended family. The Wellington basketball community, his teammates, their parents. So many helping hands that raised him to where he is today. And this book acknowledges that with immense gratitude (and he goes into his thoughts about paying it forward near the end).
If it was left to him alone then who knows what might’ve happened? You gather from these pages that the seminal event of his childhood was the passing of his father. The indomitable Sid Adams, who came to New Zealand with the Royal Navy and never went back. This a man who spotted his dream house in Rotorua and, instead of buying it, he built an exact replica down the street. A good old fashioned hard man who never let on when he was hurt. There’s absolute adoration in the way Steven talks about him and it was that dark period after Sid’s passing when he seems to have come to a crossroads, where basketball helped him out of a rudderless period and gave him a routine to live by and something to dedicate himself towards.
That “fight”, as he calls it (fight as in drive and motivation, not fight as in scrapping). And that window into his mentality is what makes the book such a gripping read. Sure, it captures his particular way with words, his yeah-nah way of conversation, and there are plenty of cracking lines scattered through these pages, but it also captures the human being behind that in a way that, to be honest, I’ve not really seen before. Which is pretty much the whole point of autobiographies so, yeah, job done in that regard.
Once My Life, My Fight gets into the NBA it’s a different kind of story. The chapter where his father passes away was genuinely moving to read. Further along it’s not so emotionally taxing but that comes as a trade for an insight into the wild world of the NBA from a casual kiwi perspective, obviously a unique viewpoint there.
And, man, it doesn’t disappoint. From his imaginary dalliances with Gregg Popovich to a bit of shade on Reggie Jackson. An in-depth focus on the most important two weeks of his career with the series against Golden State in the Western Conference finals a couple years back – yes, thoroughly addressing the nut-kicking – and heaps of chat about his teammates and his own development. The stuff about how unhappy he was with his role while at Pitt in college was a new one for me too. Puts the whole scouting process into new light when you think about how those judgements about his rawness coming out of college were massively skewed by him having to play this restrictive style there.
Steven Adams just has this way of seeing the game of basketball, something plenty of those OKC beat writers have picked up on. He’s a man who asks questions, always striving to understand. Leads the league in polite enquiries with refs. When he explains the game, he does it in a way that’s easy to understand – that’s him, it’s not just his kiwi nature, he’s an instinctively perceptive and curious guy.
My main complaint is that the NBA stuff could’ve been a hundred pages longer and I wouldn’t have even flinched. More Steve & Enes Stache Bro adventures, please. Or maybe that’s being saved for the next book, because I’d read the hell out of that one too, mate.