Former Minnesota Timberwolves NBA player Kevin Garnett says he learned a great lesson from his grandmother during his college recruitment days.
By now, Garnett fans know that the 45-year-old was such an outstanding player that he skipped college because he was drafted into the NBA as soon as he left high school. However, before being drafted, he went through the same process most players from high school go through, which is to meet up with college recruiters. Years later, Garnett took a trip down memory lane to discuss his experience with college recruitment — when he made a guest appearance on Friday, June 4, on “The Dan Patrick Show.”
During the conversation, he told an interesting story about the time his grandmother pulled out a shotgun on a recruiter. He said, “There was a situation where I was staying with my grandmother at the time because recruiting was getting to the point where it was just obese, and my mother thought it would be a better idea for me to change addresses.”
“Life was running so fast at this time,” the Hall-of-Famer continued, “but I had a certain recruiter come see me, and he offered me some cash in front of my grandma, and she went and got a shotgun and told me to ‘always set the tone with people that you could never be bought. If you can be bought once, you can be bought always.’ And that stuck with me forever.”
Patrick cut in, wanting to know what the recruiter’s reaction was after having a gun drawn on him. Garnett answered, “I had to tell him he had to get his bag and get the hell up out of here, or him and his bag wasn’t going to make it out of here.” He said the recruiter wanted to talk, but that “the quicker [grandma] put the shotgun together, the quicker we ended the conversation.”
Garnett added that the recruiter is “still around. Whenever I see him I like to wink and be like ‘How you doing.’ ”
Last year, Garnett was ranked as number 20 in the list of top 74 NBA Players of All Time. The 15-time NBA All-Star was even given the nickname “The Big Ticket” in his days of playing for the Minnesota Timberwolves because fans would fill out the seats in the arena to specifically come to see him play.
