Superstar baller Patty Mills tells you why tapping into your roots will strengthen your resolve when the pressure's on.

BOOMERS LEGEND PATTY MILLS HAS GONE FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO STARRING ON THE WORLD’S BIGGEST STAGES. AHEAD OF THE TOKYO OLYMPICS, HE EXPLAINS WHY BEING COMFORTABLE IN YOUR OWN SKIN IS THE KEY TO MAKING YOUR MARK

- BEN JHOTY

Patty Mills is reclining on a king-sized bed in a room at the Four Seasons hotel in Denver watching Shark Tank. It’s a frigid minus 8° outside, an early morning blizzard blanketing the mile-high city in snow.

Mills, who’s just arrived from Sacramento, is in the middle of a brutal road trip that will see his San Antonio Spurs play six games in nine days ahead of the All-Star break. With another ‘back-to-back’ starting the following day, the Spurs point guard is just happy to get off his feet.

“Take the deal, Lori,” he shouts at the screen. Mills loves Shark Tank. It’s one of the shows he regularly catches in his downtime on the road. Something else he likes to do when he’s got spare time to kill? Dance. “I could do traditional dancing before I could play basketball,” he tells me later on. “The first songs I learned on my guitar were traditional ones.” Music and dance are aspects of his culture he can take anywhere, Mills explains. A way to remember home and even to remind him, if he needed it, exactly where he came from.

The arc of that journey is worth retracing, mainly because of its sheer unlikeliness – it is, after all, a long way from Canberra or indeed, Thursday Island, where Mills’ grandfather made a homemade ring for him when he was just two years old, to a fancy hotel room in Colorado. The son of an Aboriginal mother who was part of the Stolen Generations and a Torres Strait Islander father, Mills is the second Indigenous Australian ever to play in the NBA. The first was the journeyman power forward Nathan Jawai, who was drafted in 2008. Mills followed him a year later in 2009. You can call him a trailblazer. It also makes him something of a cultural ambassador.