EXCLUSIVE: Karl-Anthony Towns and his dad on making it in the NBA
It's no surprise: On Father's Day budding NBA superstar Karl-Anthony Towns will be home with his dad, Big Karl. His success is a family affair.
UNION - The NBA postgame routine for Karl-Anthony Towns goes something like this: team meeting, shower, get dressed, media interviews.
Somewhere in there, the best young basketball player in the world will glance at his phone and see his dad’s thoughts on the action.
“By the time the game ends, there’s a text message,” he said. “It’s takes a little time, but I’ll usually get back to him.”
Sometimes the text comes from their home in Piscataway. Often it comes from the upper reaches of the arena. “Big” Karl Towns attends about half of his son’s games with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
What is the content of those texts?
“It depends on who we played and how he did,” the elder Karl said while sitting next to Karl-Anthony at Kean University on Thursday. “It’s mostly, ‘Great game, be safe, love you.’”
There were a lot of great games for Karl-Anthony this past season. At age 21, the second-year pro became the NBA’s youngest player ever to average at least 25 points and 10 rebounds. He set the T-Wolves’ single-season scoring record (2,061 points) and became the league’s first player ever to tally 2,000 points, 1,000 rebound and 100 3-pointers in a season. He made $6 million in salary alone.
Now he’s home for Father’s Day, and of course he and Big Karl are spending it knee-deep in hoops. On Thursday and Friday they worked the Citi Karl-Anthony Towns Basketball ProCamp for 150 kids at Kean. This right after an NBA ambassador trip to Paris and Denmark — Karl-Anthony brought both parents along as a combined Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gift.
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On Saturday they watched the much-anticipated Andre Ward vs. Sergey Kovalev fight at home, followed by a little backyard barbecue Sunday.
“I see him a lot, to say the least,” Karl-Anthony said of his dad, with a little smirk. “A lot.”
View from the top row
Big Karl is a character — gregarious, sharp-witted, often with the volume on high — but he’s not some hanger-on. He knows basketball, and he’s spent a lifetime teaching Karl-Anthony. He still holds rebounding records at Monmouth University, and for nearly two decades he coached a successful high school team at Piscataway Vo-Tech.
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By eighth grade Karl-Anthony was 6-foot-9 and draining 3-pointers. The God-given talent was obvious, but the work ethic and level-headed demeanor that eventually separated him from the other prodigies — those traits were instilled by Big Karl and mom Jacqueline, who works at Rutgers University.
“I love the grind,” Karl-Anthony said of what he learned most from his dad. “When it comes to locking in and putting the work in, that’s something I’ve always loved to do.”
It’s the product of countless hours together in the gym.
“I just wanted to see him be successful,” the elder Karl said. “Every time I sit in the stands and watch him, I am just amazed at how much better he has gotten and how mature he is. Is it surprising to me as a parent? I knew he was going to be good, but I didn’t know he would be this good as such an early stage.”
When Karl-Anthony played at St. Joseph-Metuchen High and during his one season at the University of Kentucky, his dad was an obvious presence in the stands or behind the bench. But he’s tried to recede a bit at this point and enjoy the view.
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“I sit at the top of the arena and his mom sits at the bottom,” Big Karl said. “I’m not going to be the voice of opinion and the voice of distraction. I’m just going to be a parent. At this stage of his career, I don’t have to show him direction. He knows this is his job. His mom, she likes being down close because it’s her baby.”
A couple of jokesters
Another thing dad passed down is personality.
“I’m a jokester,” Karl-Anthony said. “I can be goofy with things.”
In a 7-foot, 250-pound superstar, that trait works in the advertising world. His hilarious pitches for Kit Kat bars and Jack Link’s Jerky have been well-received. An ad with Gatorade drops next week.
“It’s so cool because in high school I was always drinking Gatorade,” Karl-Anthony said Thursday. “Now that my face is on bottles of Gatorade across the world, it’s amazing. Instead of drinking the fruit punch, I am the fruit punch.”
Though he is admittedly “a little more quiet, more in the background,” than his dad, Karl-Anthony is becoming more assertive in the locker room.
“From him (dad) being a coach, I know how to talk to my teammates, how to get them motivated,” he said.
After two losing seasons, including a 31-51 ledger in 2016-17, expect to see more of that next winter. The Timberwolves sport one of the league’s most talented young cores, so the potential for something big is simmering. Turning great stats into wins is a topic of conversation in the Towns family.
“Now it’s about showing him what I can do when I’m playing with a winning team,” Karl-Anthony said. “That’s what I expect to do next year.”
No matter what happens, he’ll never stray far from home. He still checks in with high school teammates regularly. When Ramapo won the New Jersey Athletic Conference Tournament in February, Towns texted Roadrunners point guard Jimbo Long. He recently shouted out former frontcourt mate James Ziemba as the Duke University pitcher transitioned to professional baseball.
“I keep in contact with all of them,” Towns said. “Just because I’m in the NBA doesn’t mean I’ve left my family and friends behind.”
Quite the contrary. As he prepared to instruct campers at Kean Thursday, Karl-Anthony was asked if he could remember the first time he beat his dad one-on-one.
“I know the exact date,” he said. “It was November 17, 1995.”
Both father and son burst into laughter.
“Yeah,” Big Karl said. “That was two days after he was born.”
Staff Writer Jerry Carino: jcarino@gannettnj.com.