Sights on the NBA, Kiwi Gardner Concludes Explosive Rookie Year

What's This?

Kiwi Gardner drives to the basket for the Santa Cruz Warriors in a game against the Los Angeles Defenders this season.

By Sam Laird2014-04-30 16:26:30 UTC

This piece succeeds "The Ballad of Kiwi Gardner: A YouTube Legend Fights for His Basketball Future," a Mashable Spotlight profile that originally published Nov. 25, 2013.

In May 2013, Kiwi Gardner was a 20-year-old YouTube hoops sensation seemingly condemned from pro basketball. After two false starts in college, for all the 5'7" point guard knew, he'd been ejected from the sport entirely.

By October, Kiwi was a desperate man. He traveled the West and paid money to participate in open tryouts for teams in the NBA Development League (D-League).

He needed to impress someone. Anyone.

See also: A YouTube Legend Battles for His Basketball Future

On Oct. 31, 2013, Kiwi sat nervously at a friend's house. He followed the D-League draft online and hoped just one team would give him a shot in the NBA's official minor league. Finally, in the draft's final round, the Santa Cruz Warriors gave him that opportunity.

On Dec. 12, 2013, Kiwi was the D-League's youngest player. He charged off the bench late in a game against the Bakersfield Jam to score 23 fourth-quarter points. He singlehandedly led a wild Warriors comeback just weeks after watching his basketball career nearly die on the vine.

"I don't think I've ever seen anything like this," Warriors coach Casey Hill told his assistants on the bench that night.

Neither Hill nor Gardner knew this at the time, but many more special moments would follow. On Saturday Kiwi played in the D-League finals. The Santa Cruz Warriors' season ended there with a loss, but the team's surprise playoff run was a fitting end to a life-changing year for Kiwi, a season that seemed all but impossible this time last year.

This is the latest chapter in the story of Kiwi Gardner's ongoing basketball journey. It's a trip that comes straight out of a Hollywood screenplay, but is in fact the real life of a young man from the tough streets of Oakland, Calif. It's the story of a precocious ascent, a devastating fall and one hell of a comeback. And it's a tale with many chapters yet to come.

From the bottom to the D-League

Asked to describe his rookie year in a single word, Kiwi chose "surreal" on the day of Santa Cruz's final regular-season home game.

"I don't want to stop," he added, referencing some of the players and coaches he'd met over the past several months.

Kiwi's season averages (6.8 points and 2.9 assists per game in Santa Cruz) might seem pedestrian to the casual observer. But considering his journey to this point, they're downright phenomenal.

Kiwi, who turned 21 April 6, played basketball non-stop as a toddler inside his mother's home in hardscrabble East Oakland. His grandmother nailed a regulation metal rim to a bedroom wall. By adolescence, Kiwi's skills became the stuff of local renown. But it was in 2009, after meeting Travis Farris, that Kiwi found Internet fame.

Kiwi Gardner, age 17 and a high school junior, reacts to the action while playing for the Drew Gooden Soldiers.

Farris, a Bay Area native in his 20s, supported his day job at Bed Bath & Beyond by relentlessly traveling Northern California to film local high school players. He set the best plays to hip hop beats and uploaded the resulting "mixtapes" to his YayAreasFinest YouTube channel. When Farris first saw a tiny, 16-year-old Kiwi dominate a team of future college stars in a local tournament, he knew he'd discovered a special subject.

Thanks to Farris, Kiwi's diminutive height, explosive athleticism, bouncy dreadlocks and on-court showmanship made him an instant hit with fans online, during his junior season. Millions upon millions of views piled up. Farris earned ad revenue, while the teenage Kiwi enjoyed notoriety among hoops junkies worldwide as one of basketball's first YouTube sensations.

"He's family to me now," Kiwi told me of Farris last fall. "No doubt about."

Kiwi committed in 2010 to play for Providence College in the Big East, at the time considered America's top basketball conference. Then, just when it appeared he'd arrived, everything fell apart.

Kiwi was deemed academically ineligible and had to sit out his first year at Providence. Just before his second year was set to begin, he was told the team no longer needed him. So he landed at a junior college in Texas, where he earned starting point guard. But he left that team mid-season after struggling to get along with a coach who months later made headlines for a series of strange, apocalyptic outbursts across the Southwest.

Nearly two years out of high school and without a team, school or real plan, Kiwi had tumbled from YouTube fame to being off the basketball map entirely.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘What am I playing for?’” he said.

A former teacher connected Kiwi to a young agent named Noah Betzing, and the two formed a new plan: First, spend the spring and summer training up to eight hours per day. Then, embark on a barnstorming fall 2013 tour to try out for D-League teams throughout the West, while chronicling the journey in a YouTube series of his own, called The Truth.

“Basketball-wise, this is it,” Kiwi told me in Oakland last autumn, two weeks before the D-League draft. “It’s do or die now. I’m putting all I got into this. All I got.”

Kiwi Gardner with his agent, Noah Betzing of Fakework Sports, in autumn 2013.

Image: Josh Christopher, Fakework Sports

Only in rare cases do players actually reach the D-League via open tryout. But Kiwi impressed coaches in Santa Cruz; the Warriors selected him in the final round of the draft. Kiwi had earned an invite to training camp in November 2013.

Underage, undersized and playing against older players whose college games were regularly broadcast on ESPN, Kiwi held his own and earned a roster spot. The D-League pays little, and no player aims to spend his entire career there, but Kiwi had somehow completed his unlikely comeback from basketball purgatory.

A new step, however, was just beginning.

'People here see something in him.'

Kiwi Gardner rallies teammates during a game in Santa Cruz this season.

If making the Warriors roster was the culmination of a grueling, daunting process for Kiwi, earning Santa Cruz fans' love came effortlessly and immediately.

At the end of the Warriors' second regular-season game, chants of "We want Kiwi! We want Kiwi!" reverberated through Kaiser Permanente Arena. All this for someone who, just one month before, had considered life without basketball.

A few days later, he scored a driving layup while being fouled on a fast break. It was a meaningless score late in a blowout win — but the home crowd reacted as if he'd just made a game-winning buzzer-beater.

To call Kiwi a fan favorite in Santa Cruz would be "the understatement of the year," said Adam Johnson, a writer whose Sea Dubs Central blog covers the Warriors.

"People here see something in him — he's that guy that everyone can relate to," Johnson told me in April. "In a world of giants, he's the regular guy. But he's more. You can see in his eyes he's not scared of anyone he goes up against. He's fearless and reckless at the same time."

As the season progressed, Kiwi's role grew from fan-favorite to key component of the team. One December night he exploded for 23 fourth-quarter points, many against Dennis Schroder, a touted prospect and first-round pick in the 2013 NBA Draft. Soon after, he outplayed one of the D-League's top players, Idaho Stampede point guard Pierre Jackson, in Santa Cruz. There were plenty of other sterling performances too, including this acrobatic game-winning assist in April:

He also developed a special relationship with Hill, Santa Cruz's first-year coach who took Kiwi under his wing as a personal project.

"I see the potential this kid has, and to have someone come as far as he as in the amount of time he's been with us is really kind of special," Hill told me near the end of the season. "To see the very, very meaningful impact that basketball can have on his life, then to have some measure of control over that in my position, I feel somewhat responsible for him."

"It's not in me to look at him as just another player," Hill said.

Before long, fans began to recognize Kiwi around town. He signed autographs after games and even netted a small endorsement deal with startup shoe company TESH Sports. Two local weeklies ran cover stories on him mid-season.

But what if the Warriors hadn't nominated Kiwi as their final draft pick last October? Where would he be now?

"I'd probably be in school. I guess. Hopefully," Kiwi told me late in his rookie season.

Both he and and his agent remember how close his surreal Santa Cruz season was to never happening at all — and how far Kiwi still has before reaching his ultimate goal, the NBA.

"There are a lot of Kiwi Gardners who never made it walking around East Oakland right now," Betzing said as the D-League season wound down.

But Kiwi's not the only one who grew up this season. So did the man who made him a YouTube hero.

Kiwi Gardner attempts a layup against the Bakersfield Jam during a game this season.

'Maybe his work was done.'

After several years of manically driving around Northern California, countless hours editing basketball footage, hundreds of millions of YouTube views and undisputed status as the de facto kingmaker of Bay Area basketball, Travis Farris hung up his video camera and called it a career last winter.

"I'm 28 years old," Farris, who got married last year, told me this spring. "If 10 more years go by and I'm still doing this, how weird would that be?"

Kiwi was Farris' signature YouTube subject and they'd grown to be friends, so Farris followed the Santa Cruz season. Early on, he attended a Warriors home game at home. After the game, Farris snapped a picture of Kiwi (below) then uploaded it to Instagram with an emotional caption reflecting on their intertwined basketball lives:

They said he couldnt do it...There been a lot of ups and downs... but MY DUDE @easy_ki is a PRO BASKETBALL PLAYER!!! Proud of you tonight fam!!!

When Kiwi was in high school, he and Farris would discuss his dreams — college ball, pro ball, hopefully the NBA. "He always had faith in me," Kiwi said late this season. Farris quitting YouTube mixes just as he reached a huge basketball milestone of his own, Kiwi said, was appropriate timing.

"Maybe it can just be a symbol," Kiwi told me. "Like, maybe his work was done, you know?"

Sights remain on the NBA

Kiwi Gardner at the free throw line during game one of the NBA D-League Finals in Santa Cruz, Calif., on April 24, 2014.

“There’s only really one thing I wanna remember, you know?” Kiwi told me last fall, as he teetered between the D-League draft and a future without organized hoops. “That’s playing in the League [the NBA]. That’s the only jersey, the only picture, the only film I want to remember.”

That hasn't changed, and most will tell you Kiwi's growth during his rookie season — on and off the court — was phenomenal. Learning to play as an under-control point guard — not an undersized, kamikaze scorer — has been his biggest step, said Kiwi, Coach Hill and Johnson, the Warriors blogger.

So the question remains: Can 5'7" YouTube sensation Kiwi Gardner make the NBA?

"It will be interesting to see where he is next year," Johnson said after watching and writing about the Warriors for Kiwi's entire first season. "If he sticks with Santa Cruz and keeps getting better like he has, then with his trajectory I definitely think he can make it to the NBA next year or the year after."

Hill won't go that far. But he readily admits "Kiwi's put himself in a wonderful position to be successful in the game of basketball for a long time." That could mean playing professionally in the NBA, China, Europe or elsewhere.

More than anything, considering Kiwi's future reminds me of a story from his past, one his mother Kendra Gardner told me last fall. Kiwi was in middle school, and Kendra came in for a parent-teacher conference. The three of them — Kendra, Kiwi and his teacher — sat around a table. The teacher asked Kiwi what he wanted to be when he grew up.

"I'm playing pro basketball," Kiwi said. "I want to make the NBA."

The teacher dismissed his idea as preposterous, encouraging Kiwi to pursue more realistic options. But after the meeting ended and they left the classroom, Kendra had a message for her middle-schooler son.

"Don't ever let anyone tell you what you're going to be or what you can do," Kendra remembered last fall. "Don't ever stop living your dream just because someone says you're not going to do this or can't do that."

And Kiwi hasn't stopped since. All that remains is how much farther he can go.

Keep following Mashable for updates on Kiwi Gardner's tremendous basketball journey.

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