The Perfect Storm

Standing 7-feet tall, the Timberwolves’ Karl Anthony Towns can bang in the post, shoot from deep, run the floor and defend inside and out. He’s got one of the best personalities in the League, too. What more could you possibly ask for?

- Adam Figman

The year is 2008, and Karl Towns Sr, a varsity basketball coach at Piscataway Vocational Technical School in New Jersey, brings his daughter to Piscataway’s Day Park to work on her game. Karl-Anthony, Towns’ son, tags along, too. While Towns Sr and his daughter get shots up and run through drills, Karl-Anthony walks over to the court where the high school boys are playing and tries to get in a game.

Karl-Anthony was always tall—as a seventh grader he was already hovering around 6-5, requiring a special desk to sit at while the other students in school sat at a table as a group— but that didn’t help him get picked to play. In fact, it was the opposite. “The older kids considered him awkward and uncoordinated,” Towns Sr says. “They said, ‘He’s only in seventh grade.’ He was big and people would say, ‘Look at him—he can’t be coordinated. He’s got big shoes, big feet.’ He was always picked last.”

That was unwise. Because ever since his son was barely old enough to walk on his own, Towns Sr had him in the gym every day, be it to teach his son the game or to have him hang on the sidelines while Pops coached high schoolers.

KAT was indeed gangly, all arms and legs, and he did have massive feet—but the kid could hoop. His range extended out beyond the three-point line and he could handle the ball as well as the older kids at the park, regardless of height. “By the time games were over, everyone would be like, ‘Who picked this kid last?’” Towns Sr says. “They didn’t know that he was in the gym every day with me practicing—and practicing with high school kids every day. Nobody ever thought that.”

“I took [getting picked last] as a challenge to be better,” Karl-Anthony says. “I took that as motivation to keep striving.”