By: Alejandro Danois
At the mere age of 25, DeMarcus Cousins has successfully redefined the combo big man role in the NBA as a center/power forward.
Sunday evening, he made his second straight appearance in the All-Star game after a spectacular opening half to the season that has seen him score a career high 48 points on Jan. 23 against the Indiana Pacers, which he followed up by breaking Chris Webber’s single-game scoring record when he accumulated 56 points two nights later against the Hornets. Sunday, Cousins scored 11 points on 5-of-5 shooting, including a 3-pointer, in the West’s record-setting 196-173 win over the East.
For those who have followed Cousins’ meteoric rise in the game, they’re keenly aware that nothing came easy for him.
Before he became one of the world’s most dominant basketball players, he was a bundle of energy being raised by a single mother in a humble, blue collar pocket of Mobile, Alabama.
The home might have been small, but the love that flowed within the home was immeasurable.
“I come from a family of educators,” Cousins’ mom, Monique, told me as we sat in her living room four years ago, as her son was preparing to leave for his second NBA training camp. A tall, radiant woman, her melodic, soothing words spilled out with a pronounced Southern drawl. “My mom was an elementary school teacher and my father was a high school teacher. Education was always an important factor in our home.”
Cousins didn’t grow up with dreams of basketball stardom. Like most kids growing up in the state, he dreamed of playing football at the University of Alabama. But as he began to grow, his mother advised him that he might want to focus on another sport.
As a 6-foot-4 seventh-grader whose only basketball experience was keeping the scoring book for his middle school team, his life trajectory changed when he was approached by a coach looking for eighth-graders who were interested in joining a hoops team.
Clumsy and unskilled initially, Cousins developed at an astonishing pace and went from not playing until the eighth grade to being recognized as the country’s top ninth grader a year later when he averaged 26 points, 15 rebounds and 10 assists per game. He went from barely being able to execute a layup to being recruited by the top colleges in the country.
“I was playing against seniors and started killing everybody,” Cousins said. “My confidence was out the roof, and I felt like nobody could stop me.”
But many people thought that his supposed attitude problem and surly behavior might stop him along the way. For those who knew him, they knew who the real DeMarcus Cousins was.
“On the court he may be tough, but off the court he’s scared of the dog,” his former LeFlore High School coach, Otis Hughley, told Yahoo Sports in March 2010. “He’s not a wussy kid, but he’s a sweet kid. I don’t know anyone that’s met him that doesn’t like him.”
Despite a negative perception early on, NBA fans are beginning to find out who the real DeMarcus Cousins is, both on and off the court.
Four years ago, people were labeling him a thug.
“I’ve been around thugs growing up, and I’m no thug,” he once told me. “That bothers me. Because I play with an attitude? I get mad when I make a bad play or when the play doesn’t go the way I want it to. And at the same time, I’m the happiest person on the floor when something goes well for my team.”
Those erroneous labels have since disappeared as Cousins, who is now universally recognized by his nickname, “Boogie,” has become more embraced as he blossoms into perhaps the best big man in the NBA today.
“Through all of my mistakes, I know what I’m capable of,” Cousins told me years ago as he was trying to become acclimated to the NBA. “I know there’s nobody in the world that can stop me. My whole thing is, I just have to put it all together. And when that happens, it’s gonna be a scary sight. The real highlight for me is gonna be when the world realizes it.”
That time might just be right now.
Alejandro Danois is a senior writer and editor with The Shadow League. The former senior editor of Bounce Magazine, he is also a freelance sports and entertainment writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, Sporting News, Baltimore Sun, The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, SLAMonline and Ebony Magazine, among many others.
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