Karl-Anthony Towns was never going to be your garden-variety ninth-grade big man, something he made clear in his early workouts at St. Joseph High School in Metuchen, New Jersey, wearing a New York Yankees jersey and shooting jumpers from two steps inside the midcourt line and making them with uncommon ease.
“Like they were layups,” said Daniel Brix, then a St. Joseph senior among the astonished witnesses.
Towns was already pushing 6-foot-10 as an entering high school freshman, and it appeared his ambition was to someday become the NBA’s tallest 2-guard. His teammates remembered Towns as the varsity’s surest long-range shooter in his first season, even as the seniors tried to persuade him to get his rear end under the rim. Brix and his co-captain, Quenton DeCosey, now a guard at Temple, “wanted him to get in there and dunk on people and get the crowd going,” Brix recalled, but somehow Towns always found a way to drift back to the perimeter.
“He had absolutely no post game,” said Brix, now a guard at Stonehill. “Everything you see at Kentucky, I don’t know where that came from.”
But the upperclassmen noticed Towns honored his height advantage over the opposition on defense, planting himself in the paint and blocking his share of shots. They noticed he wasn’t afraid to assume a leadership role in practice, like the time Brix and DeCosey were dragging during sprints and the newbie shouted that they weren’t going to win a state title if they didn’t run hard, showing the seniors he cared less about enhancing his own stock and more about making those around him better.
Yes, the older boys noticed Towns never carried himself with an air of entitlement. Despite the fact he was a blossoming star in a warped celebrity culture, already identified as the real thing on all social-media fronts, Towns was the prodigy with guaranteed scholarship offers in the dozens who acted like the last man on the bench.