Daily 30: Fri 11.14.2014
"Last year around this time I was fighting to make the team. Now I'm fighting to make the team better," Gardner said in a phone interview this week.
How did we get here? You can read the original piece for the full story, but the broad strokes are as follows.
In high school, Gardner's flashy game, stunning talent and small stature helped make him one of basketball's first YouTube phenoms after a 20-something Bay Area man name Travis Farris began filming his games, editing together the best highlights, adding hip-hop beats and posting the resulting mixtapes to YouTube.
Gardner's videos racked up millions of views from around the world while he was still in his teens. Fans recognized him at Starbucks and the mall. His future looked bright. He committed to play college ball at Providence College in the fearsome Big East Conference.
But the next couple years brought only disappointment.
Gardner was declared academically ineligible at Providence and had to sit out his freshman season. Before his second year, the team's coach told him he'd been recruited over and essentially cut him loose. Gardner landed at a junior college in Texas, but left that team mid-year after clashing with a coach who would later be arrested under strange circumstances. Then came the D-League tryout circuit, his last hope at making a post-high school basketball career befitting his YouTube legend.
Against all odds, Gardner was a final-round draft pick of the Santa Cruz Warriors and made the squad. He excelled in a reserve role, became a fan favorite in Santa Cruz. In one game last season, Gardner poured in 23 fourth-quarter points to power a stunning Warriors comeback.
"It's not in me to see him as just another player," coach Casey Hill, referencing Gardner's unique backstory, said after the season.
Now here we are, one year removed from Gardner's moment of truth. As amazing as last season was, the time between its end and the beginning of this season was perhaps just as spectacular.
"It's a pretty good feeling," Gardner said this week.
Gardner's main goal after last season goal was to make the NBA Summer League roster of the Golden State Warriors, Santa Cruz's big-league affiliate located in his hometown of Oakland. When Santa Cruz general manager Kirk Lacob told Gardner he'd made the Golden State summer league roster, Gardner's overjoyed reaction — nearly tackling Lacob in a bear hug — was secretly recorded, posted to the D-League team's Instagram account and picked up by sites around the web.
Gardner admits it was a fun moment, but also plays down the scoring outburst.
"I don't think it was that big of a deal," he told Mashable. "It was just me doing what I do, playing ball — another day at the office, as I like to say."
After summer league ended, Gardner was invited to join a couple barnstorming tours overseas. First he went to China, and played with a group of Americans against Chinese teams. He came back to California briefly, then joined another American team for a similar tour in Japan.
Those two trips were the kid from hardscrabble East Oakland's first times traveling outside the United States — what he calls "amazing" experiences.
"I've always wanted to get outside the country, to see other places, but hadn't had the opportunity," he said. "I got to check a couple things off the lifetime bucket list. And it was all on the dime of basketball, so that was really cool."
He posted this photo of himself touring local sights from the back of a motorcycle taxi in Guangzhou, China, with the caption, "seeing the world through the game of basketball."
Now Gardner's back with the Santa Cruz Warriors. The team had a pre-season game on Tuesday, and its first regular season game is Friday. Unlike this time last year, he's not sitting on pins and needles staring into an uncertain future. His spot on the team is solid, though he'll continue in a reserve role this season.
Gardner's big goal remains making it to the NBA, or perhaps trying a career overseas — where foreign teams pay better than the D-League does. But, after Santa Cruz lost in the D-League finals last season, Gardner says he only has one goal for this year and it's not an individual one.
"All I want to do is get back to the championship and win it this time," he said this week. "Last season left a bitter taste in my mouth. To play that long, and go that far with my brothers, I just want to get back there and finish the deal. For my brothers that aren't back with the team this year, I think they deserve that."
Spoken like a true professional — and that's, a year after his hoop dream was all but dead, exactly what Kiwi Gardner is.
