sooner518
1/24/2009, 10:34 AM
I hadn't seen this posted yet. I think it appears in the newest SI
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1150929/1/index.htm
Post Impressionist
Oklahoma forward Blake Griffin is a skilled mimic and practical joker off the court, but on it the sophomore double-double machine does a pretty good player-of-the-year impersonation
BLAKE GRIFFIN is hearing voices. At least he's trying to. As a December wind howls outside, the sophomore power forward sits in a folding chair at the edge of Oklahoma's practice floor, squinting in concentration, trying to conjure villainy. After a moment, his voice changes from his usual low conversational murmur, and he is suddenly the Joker in the movie The Dark Knight. "Do you want to know how I got my scars?" he asks menacingly. "My father was a drinker, and a fiend." You can practically see the smeared red-and-white clown makeup on the late Heath Ledger's face, and the knife glinting in his hand.
The next moment it's summer in Beijing, and as Griffin does Michael Phelps marveling over his new-found popularity—"I got on Facebook and I had, like, 4,000 friend requests and I was like, Wow, that's really crazy!"—you could swear you had just caught a whiff of chlorine.
Griffin's repertoire includes his teammates and coaches too. When he's not borrowing their voices, he's borrowing their stuff. He delights in relocating the contents of a locker and then sitting back to see how long it takes his victim to notice. "One day I saw him wearing this hat and I said, 'Hey, I have a hat just like that!'" recalls freshman guard Willie Warren. "Of course, it was my hat he was wearing."
Griffin's older brother, Taylor, a senior forward for the Sooners, says two words sum up his sibling: aggressive and goofy. It's not a combination seen at the top of the NBA draft board very often, but it's likely to be this June, because Griffin, a 6'10", 250-pound banger, can do impressions of well-known people on the court too. One Eastern Conference scout, who calls Griffin "the best player in the draft," says that he has "the quickness of Amaré Stoudemire and the strength of Carlos Boozer."
That combination had him averaging 22.0 points and a nation's-best 13.4 rebounds a game at week's end for the sixth-ranked Sooners (17--1, 3--0 in the Big 12). Griffin, who has 14 double doubles, is so physically dominant—he plays "with the most force of anyone in college basketball," says Utah coach Jim Boylen—that most teams' strategy is to double- and triple-team him or foul him constantly, or both. (Though he has improved a bit since last year, Griffin has made only 60.3% of his attempts from the line this season.) Some opposing players just resort to cheap shots to stop him. In the second half of Oklahoma's 73--72 win over USC in Norman on Dec. 4, Trojans forward Leonard Washington hit Griffin below the belt, earning a flagrant foul and an ejection. Nine days later, in the Sooners' 70--52 victory over Utah, Utes guard Luka Drca tripped Griffin as both were running upcourt, a move that earned Drca an intentional foul and a two-game suspension from Boylen.
"To Blake's credit, he hasn't retaliated," says Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel. "Last year, there probably would have been some sort of confrontation; it might have taken him five minutes to calm down. That might be his biggest area of improvement."
Griffin spent the summer working on increasing his range, strength and explosiveness and on becoming the "puppetmaster." That's a concept San Francisco fitness guru Frank Matrisciano discussed often in the almost two months Blake and his brother spent with him. "Teams want me to do something stupid," says Blake. "You want to get to the point where nothing affects you; you control them."
He has kept his emotions in check on the court without losing any of his trademark intensity. "He's like two different people, on the court and off," says Capel. "Off the court he's laid-back, a jokester. When we do certain competitive things in practice, he becomes really different. It's scary sometimes. It could be a four-minute scrimmage, a rebounding drill, a shooting competition. If he misses shots or his team loses, he gets disgusted and wants to do it again. He always plays like he has something to prove."
In his mind he does. Griffin has been driven his whole life by a desire to measure up, first to his brother, then later to the flock of superstars—including Michael Beasley, Kevin Love, O.J. Mayo and Derrick Rose—in his recruiting class. He admits that as a relative unknown from Oklahoma, a football state, he felt eclipsed at the 2007 McDonald's All-American Game in Louisville, even though he won the slam-dunk contest. "I did feel a little overlooked," he says. "But I wasn't mad, because those guys are great and they deserved the respect they got. The good thing is it didn't allow me to become complacent. I wanted to be better, I wanted to keep working until I was with those other guys."
GROWING UP in Oklahoma City, Blake constantly set challenges for himself, asking his family members, Do you think I can jump that fence? Do you think I can run from here to there in 10 seconds? Time me. "Everything Blake did, he made it into a game, a challenge," says his mom, Gail, a former high school business teacher who homeschooled Blake and Taylor through seventh grade. Blake would rush through his schoolwork and then burst outside to play. Recess always became some kind of competition with Taylor. "It could be anything—a footrace, tag—and it would always end in a fight, and most of the time it was because I lost," says Blake. "I was always chasing Taylor, trying to keep up with him. He was three years older, so he was bigger, stronger and faster. I was always one step behind." He adds, smiling, "That's why I've built up so much aggression toward him."
Gail still shudders to think about the time Blake broke 10-year-old Taylor's glasses while they were still on Taylor's face. Taylor eventually grew to 6'7" and 238 pounds, and if the two bumped each other in the hall, the whole house shook. "They were so competitive, and they'd fight over things, and I'd think, Oh, my gosh, they aren't becoming best friends," she says. "But really they were best friends."
When they weren't competing, the two made a good team. As a preschooler Blake would wake up and announce what he was going to be that day—teacher, cowboy, garbage collector. Taylor would help him put together an outfit or find props for his vocation du jour. This was, perhaps, the beginning of Blake's fascination with impersonation and sketch comedy. Along with the animated series Family Guy, he records Saturday Night Live. "Oh, man, would I love to host that show someday," he says.
For now he is happy amusing his friends and family, and, of course, himself. His parents say it's dangerous to sit next to him in church, given his talent for sly commentary. His father, Tommy, a high school basketball assistant coach and math teacher, has had to develop what he calls his "church laugh"—a faux cough that can mask a sudden guffaw.
Taylor, more analytical and reserved than his brother, is often Blake's best audience. "We are different in our personalities," says Taylor, "but we have similar tastes in music and movies, and our humor is the same. He's the one doing all this stuff, and I'm the one sitting back and laughing."
They've had plenty of opportunity over the years to develop their rapport. In addition to their time together as homeschoolers, they both helped out with the trophy business their father ran out of their home on the side. Whenever a big order came in, the boys pitched in, assembling trophies and folding ribbons. Consequently the trophies they won often didn't mean much to them. "When the box I kept my trophies in got too full," says Blake, "I'd take them downstairs and recycle them."
There is some hardware he cherishes, however, including the trophies from the four state high school basketball championships he helped Oklahoma Christian School win, two of them with Taylor as a teammate, all of them with their father as coach. Tommy says his sons' battles under the driveway hoop produced more than dustups. "At [Oklahoma Christian], Taylor would throw the ball out, and Blake would suddenly be there to catch it," says Tommy, a former basketball center and track standout at NAIA Northwestern Oklahoma State. "That's the kind of chemistry they had. I've been around basketball a long time, and sometimes even I couldn't see it coming."
Taylor signed with Oklahoma in August 2004 and averaged 3.1 points and 2.8 rebounds in his freshman year under coach Kelvin Sampson. That March, after the NCAA began an investigation of Oklahoma over accusations that Sampson had made illegal calls to recruits, Sampson left for Indiana and was replaced by Capel, a former Duke guard who had coached Virginia Commonwealth to a 79--41 record in four years. As soon as he arrived in Norman, Capel heard about Taylor's brother, who was just starting to draw national attention as a high school junior. When Capel saw Blake play for the first time that spring, he was wowed by the combination of size, strength and athleticism Blake possessed. But he also was taken with something else. "[Blake] played with a chip on his shoulder; he played angry," says Capel. "[That] stood out, because you really don't see high school kids playing as hard as he played."
Capel decided Blake was the player he needed to kick-start his tenure in Norman. But because of school-imposed sanctions levied over the transgressions of Sampson and his staff, Capel was limited to calling high school juniors just once every two months. (He could call seniors once a week.) But at the time text messaging was still allowed, so Capel texted Blake from the time the latter emerged from class to the time he went to bed. They messaged back and forth about Capel's vision for the Sooners program, and they found common ground in a shared appreciation of rap music and in similar family situations—Capel's dad, Jeff, is a coach, and his younger brother, Jason, was a top recruit who signed with North Carolina. As an older brother, Capel worried how Taylor would adjust to his little brother's drawing more attention. "I worried a bit about that too," says Blake. "But I shouldn't have. That's not the kind of person Taylor is."
In fact, Taylor was busy recruiting Blake too. One night he made the 25-mile trip home from campus for dinner and told Blake, "Oklahoma is the place for you. We need you, and I want to play with you again." He added, "There's nothing better than playing for your home state, where the people who love you can watch you play." Taylor's pitch that night "pushed me over the edge," says Blake, who also had been considering Duke, Kansas, North Carolina and Texas. "He hadn't said any of that before."
Blake committed to the Sooners less than two months after Capel took the Oklahoma job, and did so without making an official visit. The coach's joy that day was matched only perhaps by Blake's announcement last spring, after the Sooners' 23--12 season (9--7 in Big 12 play), that he would be forgoing the NBA draft, in which he figured to be a lottery pick, to return to Norman for a second season. He didn't feel ready for the NBA, he wanted to play one more year with Taylor, and, he says, "I knew we could have a great team."
So far Blake's impact on the program has been everything Capel imagined when he first saw Blake play less than three years ago. More top players have signed (Warren, the highest-rated guard ever to commit to Oklahoma, says one of the main reasons he did was to play with Griffin), the Sooners are off to their best start in 23 seasons, the Big 12 championship is within reach, and a national title is a possibility. There are trophies involved with those last two goals, of course. "Those," says Blake, "would definitely mean something to me."
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1150929/1/index.htm
Post Impressionist
Oklahoma forward Blake Griffin is a skilled mimic and practical joker off the court, but on it the sophomore double-double machine does a pretty good player-of-the-year impersonation
BLAKE GRIFFIN is hearing voices. At least he's trying to. As a December wind howls outside, the sophomore power forward sits in a folding chair at the edge of Oklahoma's practice floor, squinting in concentration, trying to conjure villainy. After a moment, his voice changes from his usual low conversational murmur, and he is suddenly the Joker in the movie The Dark Knight. "Do you want to know how I got my scars?" he asks menacingly. "My father was a drinker, and a fiend." You can practically see the smeared red-and-white clown makeup on the late Heath Ledger's face, and the knife glinting in his hand.
The next moment it's summer in Beijing, and as Griffin does Michael Phelps marveling over his new-found popularity—"I got on Facebook and I had, like, 4,000 friend requests and I was like, Wow, that's really crazy!"—you could swear you had just caught a whiff of chlorine.
Griffin's repertoire includes his teammates and coaches too. When he's not borrowing their voices, he's borrowing their stuff. He delights in relocating the contents of a locker and then sitting back to see how long it takes his victim to notice. "One day I saw him wearing this hat and I said, 'Hey, I have a hat just like that!'" recalls freshman guard Willie Warren. "Of course, it was my hat he was wearing."
Griffin's older brother, Taylor, a senior forward for the Sooners, says two words sum up his sibling: aggressive and goofy. It's not a combination seen at the top of the NBA draft board very often, but it's likely to be this June, because Griffin, a 6'10", 250-pound banger, can do impressions of well-known people on the court too. One Eastern Conference scout, who calls Griffin "the best player in the draft," says that he has "the quickness of Amaré Stoudemire and the strength of Carlos Boozer."
That combination had him averaging 22.0 points and a nation's-best 13.4 rebounds a game at week's end for the sixth-ranked Sooners (17--1, 3--0 in the Big 12). Griffin, who has 14 double doubles, is so physically dominant—he plays "with the most force of anyone in college basketball," says Utah coach Jim Boylen—that most teams' strategy is to double- and triple-team him or foul him constantly, or both. (Though he has improved a bit since last year, Griffin has made only 60.3% of his attempts from the line this season.) Some opposing players just resort to cheap shots to stop him. In the second half of Oklahoma's 73--72 win over USC in Norman on Dec. 4, Trojans forward Leonard Washington hit Griffin below the belt, earning a flagrant foul and an ejection. Nine days later, in the Sooners' 70--52 victory over Utah, Utes guard Luka Drca tripped Griffin as both were running upcourt, a move that earned Drca an intentional foul and a two-game suspension from Boylen.
"To Blake's credit, he hasn't retaliated," says Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel. "Last year, there probably would have been some sort of confrontation; it might have taken him five minutes to calm down. That might be his biggest area of improvement."
Griffin spent the summer working on increasing his range, strength and explosiveness and on becoming the "puppetmaster." That's a concept San Francisco fitness guru Frank Matrisciano discussed often in the almost two months Blake and his brother spent with him. "Teams want me to do something stupid," says Blake. "You want to get to the point where nothing affects you; you control them."
He has kept his emotions in check on the court without losing any of his trademark intensity. "He's like two different people, on the court and off," says Capel. "Off the court he's laid-back, a jokester. When we do certain competitive things in practice, he becomes really different. It's scary sometimes. It could be a four-minute scrimmage, a rebounding drill, a shooting competition. If he misses shots or his team loses, he gets disgusted and wants to do it again. He always plays like he has something to prove."
In his mind he does. Griffin has been driven his whole life by a desire to measure up, first to his brother, then later to the flock of superstars—including Michael Beasley, Kevin Love, O.J. Mayo and Derrick Rose—in his recruiting class. He admits that as a relative unknown from Oklahoma, a football state, he felt eclipsed at the 2007 McDonald's All-American Game in Louisville, even though he won the slam-dunk contest. "I did feel a little overlooked," he says. "But I wasn't mad, because those guys are great and they deserved the respect they got. The good thing is it didn't allow me to become complacent. I wanted to be better, I wanted to keep working until I was with those other guys."
GROWING UP in Oklahoma City, Blake constantly set challenges for himself, asking his family members, Do you think I can jump that fence? Do you think I can run from here to there in 10 seconds? Time me. "Everything Blake did, he made it into a game, a challenge," says his mom, Gail, a former high school business teacher who homeschooled Blake and Taylor through seventh grade. Blake would rush through his schoolwork and then burst outside to play. Recess always became some kind of competition with Taylor. "It could be anything—a footrace, tag—and it would always end in a fight, and most of the time it was because I lost," says Blake. "I was always chasing Taylor, trying to keep up with him. He was three years older, so he was bigger, stronger and faster. I was always one step behind." He adds, smiling, "That's why I've built up so much aggression toward him."
Gail still shudders to think about the time Blake broke 10-year-old Taylor's glasses while they were still on Taylor's face. Taylor eventually grew to 6'7" and 238 pounds, and if the two bumped each other in the hall, the whole house shook. "They were so competitive, and they'd fight over things, and I'd think, Oh, my gosh, they aren't becoming best friends," she says. "But really they were best friends."
When they weren't competing, the two made a good team. As a preschooler Blake would wake up and announce what he was going to be that day—teacher, cowboy, garbage collector. Taylor would help him put together an outfit or find props for his vocation du jour. This was, perhaps, the beginning of Blake's fascination with impersonation and sketch comedy. Along with the animated series Family Guy, he records Saturday Night Live. "Oh, man, would I love to host that show someday," he says.
For now he is happy amusing his friends and family, and, of course, himself. His parents say it's dangerous to sit next to him in church, given his talent for sly commentary. His father, Tommy, a high school basketball assistant coach and math teacher, has had to develop what he calls his "church laugh"—a faux cough that can mask a sudden guffaw.
Taylor, more analytical and reserved than his brother, is often Blake's best audience. "We are different in our personalities," says Taylor, "but we have similar tastes in music and movies, and our humor is the same. He's the one doing all this stuff, and I'm the one sitting back and laughing."
They've had plenty of opportunity over the years to develop their rapport. In addition to their time together as homeschoolers, they both helped out with the trophy business their father ran out of their home on the side. Whenever a big order came in, the boys pitched in, assembling trophies and folding ribbons. Consequently the trophies they won often didn't mean much to them. "When the box I kept my trophies in got too full," says Blake, "I'd take them downstairs and recycle them."
There is some hardware he cherishes, however, including the trophies from the four state high school basketball championships he helped Oklahoma Christian School win, two of them with Taylor as a teammate, all of them with their father as coach. Tommy says his sons' battles under the driveway hoop produced more than dustups. "At [Oklahoma Christian], Taylor would throw the ball out, and Blake would suddenly be there to catch it," says Tommy, a former basketball center and track standout at NAIA Northwestern Oklahoma State. "That's the kind of chemistry they had. I've been around basketball a long time, and sometimes even I couldn't see it coming."
Taylor signed with Oklahoma in August 2004 and averaged 3.1 points and 2.8 rebounds in his freshman year under coach Kelvin Sampson. That March, after the NCAA began an investigation of Oklahoma over accusations that Sampson had made illegal calls to recruits, Sampson left for Indiana and was replaced by Capel, a former Duke guard who had coached Virginia Commonwealth to a 79--41 record in four years. As soon as he arrived in Norman, Capel heard about Taylor's brother, who was just starting to draw national attention as a high school junior. When Capel saw Blake play for the first time that spring, he was wowed by the combination of size, strength and athleticism Blake possessed. But he also was taken with something else. "[Blake] played with a chip on his shoulder; he played angry," says Capel. "[That] stood out, because you really don't see high school kids playing as hard as he played."
Capel decided Blake was the player he needed to kick-start his tenure in Norman. But because of school-imposed sanctions levied over the transgressions of Sampson and his staff, Capel was limited to calling high school juniors just once every two months. (He could call seniors once a week.) But at the time text messaging was still allowed, so Capel texted Blake from the time the latter emerged from class to the time he went to bed. They messaged back and forth about Capel's vision for the Sooners program, and they found common ground in a shared appreciation of rap music and in similar family situations—Capel's dad, Jeff, is a coach, and his younger brother, Jason, was a top recruit who signed with North Carolina. As an older brother, Capel worried how Taylor would adjust to his little brother's drawing more attention. "I worried a bit about that too," says Blake. "But I shouldn't have. That's not the kind of person Taylor is."
In fact, Taylor was busy recruiting Blake too. One night he made the 25-mile trip home from campus for dinner and told Blake, "Oklahoma is the place for you. We need you, and I want to play with you again." He added, "There's nothing better than playing for your home state, where the people who love you can watch you play." Taylor's pitch that night "pushed me over the edge," says Blake, who also had been considering Duke, Kansas, North Carolina and Texas. "He hadn't said any of that before."
Blake committed to the Sooners less than two months after Capel took the Oklahoma job, and did so without making an official visit. The coach's joy that day was matched only perhaps by Blake's announcement last spring, after the Sooners' 23--12 season (9--7 in Big 12 play), that he would be forgoing the NBA draft, in which he figured to be a lottery pick, to return to Norman for a second season. He didn't feel ready for the NBA, he wanted to play one more year with Taylor, and, he says, "I knew we could have a great team."
So far Blake's impact on the program has been everything Capel imagined when he first saw Blake play less than three years ago. More top players have signed (Warren, the highest-rated guard ever to commit to Oklahoma, says one of the main reasons he did was to play with Griffin), the Sooners are off to their best start in 23 seasons, the Big 12 championship is within reach, and a national title is a possibility. There are trophies involved with those last two goals, of course. "Those," says Blake, "would definitely mean something to me."