My Life, My Fight by Steven Adams

Author:Steven Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

On draft day it felt like the whole of New York was talking about it. It was like when the All Blacks were in the Rugby World Cup final in New Zealand and you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing people discuss the game. Because I’m so tall, a lot of random people guessed that I was in town for the draft and wished me luck.

As we were putting on our suits for the ceremony, I suddenly missed Viv again. She would have been fussing over us and telling us to scrub our toes again. Instead it was just us boys in the hotel room trying to figure out how to tie our ties.

At Barclays Center we walked onto the green room floor, the first New Zealanders to ever do so, and sat down to wait for a feed that never came. People kept thinking Mohi was my dad, which was correct in a sense but also a massive burn on him since he’s not that much older than me. As players started getting drafted, we just sat there and fidgeted. Mohi was in heaven and soaking up the atmosphere. Sid and I were too nervous and hungry to do anything but wait impatiently for the next pick.

It took an hour to get to the twelfth pick—the second-longest hour of my life after the hour of suicide tests at Pitt—then five minutes for Oklahoma City to decide and a split second for me to go from being unemployed to being a millionaire NBA player.

Adrenaline carried me through the next three hours and then stripped me of my memory; I now can’t recall anything I said to the dozens of reporters I spoke to that night. When we eventually got back to our hotel rooms, Mohi, Sid, and I just sat there grinning at each other. We didn’t know what to say because we were living a reality that was so far from what we grew up in we almost couldn’t comprehend it. I know Mohi was buzzing out that I’d be on the same team as Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. I was buzzing out that I was actually going to be in the NBA at all.

That night I saw Andre Roberson, who had also been drafted by OKC in the first round. We hadn’t seen each other in workouts because he was a small forward and I was a big, but he seemed chill. “It’s just Dre,” he said when he introduced himself. I didn’t have a cool nickname so I said nothing. The next day on the plane, his family met mine and I knew if the two of us could stick around we’d be good mates in no time.

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