The Backbone

Midway into his fifth season in Toronto, All-Star PG KYLE LOWRY is the most comfortable he’s ever been in his NBA career. And he’s the ever-competitive, emotional leader of a Raptors team that has designs on avenging last year’s conference finals loss.

- Chris O’leary

Almost 12 years later, Kyle Lowry still cracks a smile when the softball game comes up.

Long before he was an All-Star, a Gold-medal winning Olympian and one half of the NBA’s greatest modern-day bromance with DeMar DeRozan, Lowry was a stocky point guard at Villanova who thrived on a steady diet of pancakes (he’s since changed his ways) and winning.

His coach, Jay Wright, pulled him aside before the basketball team’s annual softball game against coaches and faculty. He told him that part of the tradition is that the players let the coaches win.

You can guess what happened next.

“Oh, we beat their ass,” Lowry says, his smile turning into a laugh. “You weren’t supposed to, but we beat their ass. We. Beat. Their. Ass. I remember that.”

Dressed head to toe in black— sweats and a pair of adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2s—Lowry is comfortably seated on a caramel-colored leather couch at The Fitting Room, a barbershop with a classic feel in the Dundas West neighborhood of Toronto. The area is woven with Portuguese bakeries, tattoo parlors, corner stores that feel like year throwbacks and hipster bars. On Raptors game nights at one of the bars not too far from here, the ’90s and ’00s hip-hop goes silent and gives way to Lowry and his team lighting up every screen in the place, the volume of the broadcast blasting through speakers—a routinely warm atmosphere on routinely cold winter nights.

Five years in, Toronto feels like home for Lowry. He and his wife, Ayahna Cornish-Lowry, and their two young sons, Karter and Kameron, have built a life here while Kyle has established himself as one of the top PGs in the League.

And yet, he remembers being displeased with the July 2012 deal that sent him from Houston to Toronto.