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How Joakim Noah went from being the teenage hot dog vendor at ABCD All America camp to being an NBA All-Star and the emotional leader of the Chicago Bulls
Noah’s performance at ABCD put him on the radar for a Division I scholarship, but many coaches were still hesitant. “People had a hard time seeing what position he’d be,” McNally said. “He wasn’t a 3. He wasn’t a 4. He wasn’t a 5. He’s just a really good player. Some people had a hard time getting their mind around that.” Noah took recruiting visits to only Florida and Virginia. “And Duke was calling,” McNally said, “but he didn’t really see himself as a Dukie.”
After Poly Prep, Noah did a postgrad year at Lawrenceville, a New Jersey boarding school just outside Princeton. Again, Noah stunned coaches with his work ethic. “I’ve been coaching for 26 years and just about every team, you think of a guard, if not the point guard, as the guy who brought out the best in everybody else,” Lawrenceville coach Ron Kane said. “In Joakim’s case, it’s fascinating that it’s a 6-11 guy.”
Ostrom continued recruiting Noah as the young big man led Lawrenceville to a state championship. “Most recruits, they want to know about the college and how you’re going to use them and style of play and things like that,” Ostrom said. “Even during the recruiting process, Jo wanted to get to know you. He wanted to get to know Billy. He wanted to get to know our staff. He wanted to know what made us tick.”
Noah eventually decided on Florida after a daylong visit with the Donovans. Joakim and his mother stayed for hours with Billy Donovan, his wife Christine, and their children. “You weren’t impressing them with a steak-and-lobster dinner,” Christine Donovan said. “They wanted to know who you were as people.” Florida felt right. Noah was ready for the SEC.
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Donovan watched how Noah responded to this challenge over the next several months, and the coach saw that he had something in common with his player: No matter what obstacles faced them on a basketball court, they would refuse to back down. Donovan was once a scrawny guard who fought his way to play under Rick Pitino at Providence before becoming Pitino’s protégé as an assistant coach at Kentucky in the early-to-mid-’90s. “They don’t do anything halfway,” Christine Donovan said of her husband and Noah. “It’s either balls-to-the-wall or they don’t do it at all. If my husband is going to give my kids a bath, they’re going to be so clean. My husband washes the car, he’ll be out there for three hours.”
When Donovan recognized this trait in Noah, he understood that he could coach the player hard — that Noah’s desire and toughness wouldn’t falter if Donovan pushed him. Early in Noah’s sophomore season, Donovan noticed that his big man lacked his normal energy. Besides his class and practice schedule, Noah had been accepting invitations to talk at elementary schools and do volunteer work at hospitals, acts of generosity that were tiring him out. “You’re in awful shape because you won’t take care of yourself,” Donovan told Noah in front of the team. “You’re not in the condition you were to start the season. All you’re doing is running yourself down, and now you’re not even in shape to play like you need to play.”
“He took that to heart,” Donovan said recently. “So I get a phone call at like eleven o’clock at night from our manager, and the guy’s like, ‘Coach, Joakim is on the track right now running sprints.’”
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“You’re allowing everyone else to rob you of your happiness,” Donovan told him. “The thing about it is, you’re going to play in the NBA, [so] you’re never going to escape competition. If you just go back to being who you are, you’ll have a lot more fun playing. You’re trying to be something you’re not, or something you feel like you need to live up to, or what you think the no. 1 pick in the draft should look like.”
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ven though the Bulls finished the 2006-07 season with the eighth-best record in the NBA, Chicago executive (he’s now the team’s general manager) Gar Forman knew he’d have a lottery pick in the following summer’s draft. That’s because the Bulls had the right to swap draft picks with the Knicks — a leftover provision of the 2005 Eddy Curry trade — and New York missed the playoffs with a 33-49 record. During the season, Forman had traveled to Gainesville to watch Noah practice for three days. “Everybody’s going to pick it up a notch when you’re playing on national TV,” Forman said. “But he was that way in practice. They are running some type of drill and it was so competitive that if there was a manager or somebody refereeing, Jo would start arguing over calls because he wanted to win the drill.”
Before his pre-draft interview with Noah, Forman expected to have a typical, somewhat mundane back-and-forth. Most potential draft picks are coached by their agents to respond to questions with cliché-filled, boilerplate answers. But Noah was different. “He was brutally honest,” Forman said. “We would ask him tough questions about his background. He wasn’t holding anything back.” Noah was so honest and unfiltered that during his pre-draft workout, he told Bulls officials that he grew up a Knicks fan who hated Michael Jordan.
A year earlier, Noah probably would have been the first of his lottery-bound Gator teammates to be selected. Instead, he ended up going last among Florida’s big three. Horford was taken third overall by the Atlanta Hawks and Brewer went seventh to Minnesota. The Bulls plucked Noah with the ninth pick, and he walked to the stage to greet then-commissioner David Stern in one of the most memorable outfits in NBA draft history. Noah wore a cream-colored suit and a giant bow tie, with his unruly, overflowing hair crammed into a Bulls hat, and he flashed a huge grin along with the peace sign while meeting Stern. Rick Morrissey, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, was not impressed. He called Noah “half TV creation and half marshmallow soft.” Morrissey promised to dress his article in salsa and eat it on the off chance Noah managed to become a quality player in three years.
At first, it seemed Morrissey would be right. Noah entered the NBA like a wild horse that needed to be broken. His rah-rah attitude irked veterans and seemed impossible to keep up over an 82-game NBA season. “I think there’s a tendency for some guys to pace themselves, and some guys are good at that,” Forman said. “With Joakim, there’s no pacing yourself. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it 110 percent, and that may have rubbed some people wrong.” The Bulls regressed in Noah’s rookie season, and midway through the year they fired coach Scott Skiles en route to a 33-49 finish.
Missing the playoffs ended up being a coup for the franchise’s long-term prospects. With a 1.7 percent chance at securing the top spot in the 2008 NBA draft, the Bulls struck gold and won the no. 1 pick. That summer, the Bulls selected Derrick Rose and hired Vinny Del Negro, a coach who saw the value in Noah’s approach to the game. “He gives you everything he has at all times and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” Del Negro said. “He brings out the best of his teammates because of the presence that he has.” Noah played a pivotal role in Chicago’s classic 2009 first-round playoff series against the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics. Four of the games were decided in overtime. Game 6 alone featured three extra sessions. Rose and Rajon Rondo thrilled, while Ray Allen poured in 51 points for the Celtics and John Salmons had 35 for Chicago. And Noah secured the play of the series by outsprinting Paul Pierce, covering the length of the court with his hair flying in all directions as he dunked to seal Game 6 in triple overtime. Noah had become a quality player, and Morrissey had to literally eat his words.
“I’ve been with the Bulls 16 years, and that’s one of my favorite plays,” Forman said. “It was just incredible, and you remember the energy in the building when he did it. It was amazing.”
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Tom Thibodeau replaced Del Negro as the Bulls’ head coach for the 2010-11 season. Noah inked a five-year contract extension worth $60 million, but once again he missed several games, this time with a hand injury. Even so, the Bulls rallied to a league-best 62-20 record behind Thibodeau’s stifling defensive schemes and an MVP performance from Rose. “I’ve always had a philosophy [that] if you can’t coach your best player hard, you really can’t coach your team,” Forman said. “You’ve got to have guys that will respond, and Joakim, that’s who he is. Tom can coach him as hard as anybody on the team and he’s going to respond. And so [will] Derrick and some of the guys we have.”
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The Bulls scrambled to find a new identity in Rose’s absence. Noah provided that character. “I know a lot of people from here are not even my fans, they’re fans of [Noah]’s and how hard he plays,” said Rose, a native Chicagoan. “They’re just a fan of hard work and what he does.” The Noah-led Bulls epitomized Chicago’s hard-nosed values. “Chicago, if you’re coming in to just show your skills, if you’re coming in to just look good, the city of Chicago is not going to accept you,” said Luol Deng, Noah’s teammate for several seasons. “Chicago is a city that they want to see you work hard night in and night out, and the city will love you for that. I realized I wasn’t the greatest scorer. I wasn’t the greatest rebounder. I wasn’t the greatest defender, but one thing that I did, I gave it everything I can. Jo was the same.”
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Throughout the season, and especially in the playoffs, Noah began to look like the heir apparent to Kevin Garnett, a disruptive force who can survey the court and coordinate a team’s defense. “He’s a big man that plays defense, rebounds, sets screens, and makes plays for anybody,” Deng said. “For any basketball player, that’s the perfect guy to play with.”
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If it seemed as if Chicago’s decision-makers were waving the white flag on last season, then Thibodeau, Noah, and the rest of the Bulls didn’t get the message. “All these other teams, when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, they don’t care,” Noah said. “It’s like a wounded animal. When a team sees that you’re wounded and you’re in low spirits, or if things aren’t going well, they’re going for the kill. We didn’t want to be that wounded animal that teams would just come in here and kill.” Aside from the Bulls’ typically staunch defense, Thibodeau began running the offense through Noah at the high post. “In the last four years, when you look at his overall growth, it’s really a quantum leap,” Thibodeau said. “Each year he’s gotten better and better, and I think he’ll continue to do that throughout his career because of the way he works.” Noah plugged the middle on defense and won the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year award. He also served as Chicago’s best offensive player, finishing the season with career highs in points (12.6) and rebounds (11.3) while averaging an eye-popping 5.4 assists. He earned a reputation as the game’s best passing center since Vlade Divac and ranked fourth in the league’s MVP voting.
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“Everything that’s happened to us, I feel like it’s happening for a reason,” Noah said, referring to Rose’s injuries, Deng’s trade, the playoff disappointments. “I mean, you can’t relate it, but this city, the people in this city deal with a lot of adversity,” Noah continued. “I think that everything we’re dealing with as a team, it represents this city.”
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Noah also tries to visit Hawaii every summer. “Hawaii is the only place where I feel like I can recharge my batteries and really let go of everything that happened in a season,” Noah said. And then there’s Sweden, his mother’s homeland. “When I think of Sweden, I think of my grandparents,” Noah said. “I just think of simplicity when I’m there. Farm life, good people. I love it there. Very simple people, but strong as well, [with a] Viking type of mentality.”
All the places — France, New Jersey, New York, Gainesville, Chicago, Cameroon, Sweden, Hawaii, and others — have combined to influence Noah. He may be the only NBA player who will listen to Bob Marley, then talk trash to Kevin Garnett and LeBron James, and then turn around and quote Shakespeare.
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“In my eyes, he’s probably the most unprecedented success story in basketball in America,” Vaccaro said. “To be mentioned with these great, great players who everyone [knew] was going to be great — Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Kevin Love. You knew they had a chance to be brilliant; it’s just [a matter of] when they accomplished it. Joakim Noah — you can’t duplicate that. It can’t happen again. I’ve never seen this. I’ve seen the great ones and they all have vanity and ego and all that crap. He was wiping the floor.”
Noah’s past shaped his present and helped turn the son of one of France’s biggest celebrities into a humble, generous grown man who also happens to be among the best players in the NBA. In Chicago, the Bulls staff has grown used to watching Noah train by himself in empty gyms and seeing the big man push himself as hard in the late summer as he would in the deep winter. Noah’s work ethic, the trait he traces back to watching his father rely on no one but himself on the tennis court, has become one of the son’s greatest talents as a basketball player. Another thing Noah picked up from his father was the desire to be a citizen of the globe. Noah holds French, U.S., and Swedish passports, and he thinks of himself as a constant wanderer.
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