A star is born: How James Harden morphed from ‘nothing special’ to a generational talent

LOS ANGELES — When James Harden walked into the Artesia High School gym the summer of 2003, then-coach Scott Pera said the freshman-to-be was “nothing special.”

“I don’t know that he stood out above anybody else,” Pera recently told The Inquirer. “Rather, I thought a couple other kids might have had more potential than him. … At the time, he just wasn’t somebody that you thought, ‘Oh, this is a star’ or, ‘This kid has everything it takes.’ You just didn’t think it. Nobody did.”

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Pera realizes how preposterous that initial evaluation must seem today. But before becoming “The Beard,” before winning the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award and multiple scoring titles, before the polarization of his playing style and lifestyle, Harden was a late-blooming high school player about 25 miles southeast of Crypto.com Arena. He eventually morphed into a five-star recruit and All-American at Arizona State before embarking on a Hall of Fame NBA career that has taken him from Oklahoma City to Houston, Brooklyn, and now Philly.

“Nothing was given to me,” Harden recently said of his background. “I wasn’t one of the best basketball players growing up. I had to work every single day to be in the position that I am today.”

This week, Harden returns to those roots in the Los Angeles and Phoenix areas for the first time as a member of the 76ers to face the Lakers on Wednesday, the Clippers on Friday and the Suns on Sunday. The Inquirer provides a glimpse inside those formative years, in these formative places, through the lens of people who knew Harden best during that time — and who still marvel at where it’s all led:

“When you’re as close to it as I was during all that development time,” Pera said, “you just never think — at least I didn’t — that he’s going to end up as one of the greatest players of all time. It’s just not something that ever entered my mind — ever.

“I just was trying to help the kid reach his dreams. That’s all I cared about.”

The Los Angeles Times provided Pera with an early motivational tool. Pera, a Hershey native and Penn State Harrisburg graduate, noticed Harden was not included on a midseason list of the area’s top freshmen, which Pera then taped inside Harden’s locker and told him, “When I feel you’ve passed one of these guys … there will be an ‘X’ over his name.”

“By his junior year, I think I had ‘X’d them all out,” Pera said. “I thought he had passed by all of them.”

Pera, who coached at Penn and the high school level in the state, said the game was never too quick even for a young Harden, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the defense and locate passing windows. Because he initially was not an elite athlete, Harden learned how to play “on the ground” instead of in the air, honing fundamentals such as jump stops, ball fakes and taking charges before adding elevating to block shots or taking off of one foot for a dunk to his repertoire. After Harden took fewer than 10 shots in a loss during a national tournament game in Delaware as a junior in 2005-06, Pera spent the cross-country flight home encouraging Harden to become more aggressive.

“When we got back and league play started, he went nuts,” Pera said. “He started scoring 30s and 40s, and then he kind of saw, ‘OK, I can dominate the game. My coaches and my teammates won’t think I’m being selfish.’ It’s just an interesting look into him, his personality and who he was.”

Harden anchored an Artesia team that never lost again that season, going 33-1 on its way to a state championship. He averaged 18.8 points per game on nearly 60% shooting. He won another state title the following season with a 33-2 record, and averaged 18.8 points and 7.9 rebounds per game to become a five-star recruit and McDonald’s All-American.

Then-Washington State coach Tony Bennett was the first in the Pac-10 to offer Harden a scholarship. Harden was irked when UCLA, then a top-10 program producing Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love and Jrue Holiday around the same time, did not take an early interest in him. Pera once sat with then-USC coach Tim Floyd, who had offered a scholarship to Artesia teammate Malik Story instead of Harden, as Floyd lamented, “I took the wrong one, didn’t I?”

Pera, meanwhile, had begun interviewing for college assistant jobs. In “probably the greatest compliment of my 31 years of coaching,” Pera said, Harden vowed that he would sign with the school that hired him. Pera landed at Arizona State and, after a few weeks on the job, was comfortable with assuring Harden “you can explode here.”

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Harden committed in early August and arrived on campus as a 17-year-old freshman in 2007 — and the highest-profile recruit in school history. In early workouts, he again preferred to pass instead of shoot so the Sun Devils would “know what kind of teammate I’m going to be,” Pera recalled. By the end of the season, the Pac-10′s youngest player was an all-conference first-teamer alongside future first-round draft picks Love, Brook Lopez, O.J. Mayo, and Ryan Anderson.

Pera believes Harden would have been a lottery pick had he entered the NBA draft following that season. But as a sophomore, Harden learned how to handle the attention of being on a regional cover of Sports Illustrated (alongside Arizona State women’s basketball star Briann January) and having fans wait outside the team hotel on road trips for his autograph. He became the Sun Devils’ first consensus All-American, led them to back-to-back 20-win seasons for the first time since 1981 and then went third overall in the 2009 NBA draft to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Coincidentally, the worlds of Harden and Pera converged a few years later, just as Harden ascended into NBA stardom after being traded to the Houston Rockets.

Harden was at Pera’s introductory press conference when he was hired as the head coach at Rice. They had regular catch-ups at Rockets shootarounds and practices. Harden wore a Santa hat while visiting Pera’s home during Christmas and took goofy photos with Pera’s two daughters, who are now 15 and 13 years old. Harden still occasionally works out at Rice’s gym during the offseason.

“To watch it all unfold … was just magical,” Pera said. “What are the chances that he was the star player in the city where I’m the head coach at one of the schools? … I really tried to take the time to appreciate it, because I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I knew how lucky I was that he was right there.”

Now, Pera’s high school friends, who once playfully poked at Harden’s off-the-dribble three-pointers or certain extracurricular activities, have joined him in cheering for the Sixers’ latest major acquisition.

“No matter what he does, somebody is hitting me up,” Pera said. “It’s nonstop. But, look, I’m used to it. It’s been my life with him.”

While working out with Arizona State players at their facility, former Suns All-Star wing Shawn Marion pulled off a slick transition move on his way to the basket.

The next day, teammate Antwi Atuahene watched Harden replicate that exact move.

Playing with Harden was like participating in poetry in motion, Atuahene said. Unlike some young players who, when faced with the college game’s increased speed, became robotic with and without the ball, Harden was already smooth in his second college workout.

“He didn’t force anything,” Atuahene said. “He was like a martial artist, where he just reacted. If you went left, he went right. He’d pump fake, get you in the air and then go by you. He was reading the game at a fast level. His IQ was more than I’ve ever seen in anybody at that age in my life, especially at his size [6-foot-5] and position.”

That feel for the game was particularly handy when Harden, Atuahene and a few other teammates assembled a group called the “rec boys,” who would populate the courts open to all students around 9 o’clock each night after practice. Though Harden usually was the one “dunking on guys,” Atuahene said, one night he set Atuahene up to flush one on his buddy.

“After that, it’s been an ongoing joke,” Atuahene said. “Every time we’d see that guy, we’d laugh with him about it. … James was that type of guy. He loved to shine, but he also wanted to see you shine.”

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As a veteran guard when Harden arrived, Atuahene became a big-brother figure who fielded questions from an inquisitive Harden “all day, all night.” They talked about about the physicality he would face in his collegiate debut to help quell Harden’s nerves. They discussed how to manage time as a student-athlete. They bonded over their music tastes and fashion.

“We built a rapport that way,” Atuahene said. “We built trust with each other. I learned a lot from him, as well.”

After Harden returned from LeBron James’ camp between his freshman and sophomore seasons, Atuahene called him “a whole different person” with increased athleticism, strength and aggression. Atuahene could no longer “bully” Harden in their one-on-one matchups and realized, “Oh, he’s out of here,” following his sophomore season.

Atuahene was also part of Harden’s time with the Rockets, helping spearhead his charity work through fundraising events and internship and college-scholarship programs. He remembers the workout when Harden proclaimed he would win MVP, or that time he predicted his 60-point triple-double against the Orlando Magic in 2018 “like it was regular.”

Now the general manager and head of basketball operations of the Niagara River Lions of the Canadian Elite Basketball League, Atuahene plans to reunite with Harden when the Sixers play in Toronto next month.

“It’s manifestation at its best and it’s super inspirational,” Atuahene said. “I’m super proud of him for everything he’s done.”

Greg Howell first met Harden when he was “a little chubby kid with braids” going into eighth grade. What started as a basketball friendship quickly went deeper, thanks to a shared blend of competitiveness and goofiness that allowed them to “laugh without saying anything.”

Harden and Howell regularly slept over at the home of teammate Derek Glasser (who also played with Harden at Arizona State), which Howell acknowledged was “a little different” than Harden’s setup, ”so him getting to my side of town … just kind of let him be him, feel free, feel safe.” They would cruise through Santa Monica and Marina del Rey, including one time when karma struck as Harden attempted a lefty toss of an egg. It instead broke inside the car.

Yet as high school teammates, Howell observed how serious Harden was about sharpening his jumper and his finishing during extra early morning and post-practice workouts. When Arizona’s Lute Olson and Washington’s Lorenzo Romar began showing up courtside, “You kind of knew something was brewing around here.”

“It worked out how it was supposed to,” said Howell, who is now one of Pera’s assistant coaches at Rice. “Under the radar, and just quiet and grinding. The ones that needed to know, knew.”

Howell and Harden inadvertently disconnected in college, when he played for Waldorf College in Iowa. By coincidence, they also linked again in Houston, when Howell was hired as a marketing associate and scouting assistant for the Rockets the summer before Harden was traded to the team.

There, Howell became Harden’s roommate and helmed his AAU program as Harden evolved into a perennial All-Star. After a late night of work, Howell would typically head downstairs and find Harden putting up extra shots. Every day, Howell watched his childhood friend given “a lot of leeway to lead” a franchise.

“It was very, very surreal to him to have so much impact on the organization,” Howell said. “His confidence, our confidence, gave everyone a sense of, ‘OK, this is how things are supposed to be.’ It kind of elevated him and kept him motivated. He didn’t stop working.”

Former Arizona State associate head coach Dedrique Taylor can recall every detail of the sequence in front of his team’s bench that propelled Harden to stardom.

In a 2008 overtime game against rival Arizona, veteran defensive stopper Jawann McClellan, who is now a Houston police officer, was guarding a freshman Harden so high on his left side that he was “damn near [at] halfcourt,” Taylor said. And Harden began chirping with the ball in his hands with about a minute to play.

“The clock is winding down. It’s like 10 … 9… ‚” Taylor recalled. “And he’s like, ‘I’m about to go left. You’re way up there. I’m about to go left now.’ And he jukes the dude to the right, and the guy jumps way below. Like, way below. There’s no screen, but way below James. And he opens up the left-hand side of the floor and he takes two dribbles … game over, done.

“In my mind, I thought, ‘a star is born.’ I’ll never forget it, because, to me, it’s one of those moments that you don’t experience over your lifetime, you know what I mean? You wish, you hear about certain things, and then when you’re actually able to witness that, they’re etched in your memory forever. That’s what that moment in time was for me.”

That captured the newfound confidence brewing inside a teenage Harden that Taylor viewed as somehow humble and plain, yet dynamic and gravitational.

Taylor credits a lot of that personality to his relationship with his mother, Monja Willis, which the coach first observed in the summer of 2006 when his only job as a recruiter was to go wherever Harden played. Mom was always around her son, but not in a hovering way. When Taylor once asked Harden if he would ever get a tattoo, he responded with, “For what? Why would I do that? My mom would kill me.”

As a high school player, Harden had not yet realized how his talent could single-handedly change the trajectory of a game. But he often had three or four teammates around him who wanted to tag along wherever he went.

“He didn’t necessarily understand it,” said Taylor, who is now the head coach at Cal State Fullerton. “It was authentic, because it was just him being him. There wasn’t the hoopla. There wasn’t all this stuff that’s around him now. It was just pure, unadulterated, ‘This is who he was.’”

After Harden arrived at Arizona State, Taylor watched Harden use a diligent work ethic to trim his “fleshy” body. He sat down in coaches’ offices and asked about his potential from a place of curiosity. He constantly used his lethal left hand during a drill when he would catch the ball on the left block, turn to face up and jab-step like he was about to go right before going left.

“That was his move. I knew that. I was his coach,” Taylor said. “And every single day we did this drill, he would get me every single time. And I knew what the dude was doing. But that’s how gifted and how quick and how uncanny he was with not only his mental approach, but just understanding [of] ‘How do I get to my left?’

“That, in my opinion, makes him unique is he knows who he is and he’s driven by that. Most people, they’re trying to figure out, ‘How can I be 16 things?’ as opposed to being really, really good at one thing.”

Taylor said it has been “fascinating” to watch Harden’s post-college career and life evolve. He got a first-hand look at Harden’s two sides as a pro, when on a visit back to Arizona State, Harden persuaded Taylor to partake in a night out with him and then was “up and ready to rock” for a 9 a.m. workout the following morning. Taylor is not sure if he even has Harden’s current phone number, but it’s “all love” whenever they have crossed paths throughout the years.

“He just finds a way to make things happen in true James Harden fashion,” Taylor said. “As he’s grown, not only do those things happen, but they happen in spectacular fashion. They happen in jaw-dropping fashion. They happen like, ‘Wow, did he just do that?’ And I just sit back and say, ‘Yep, he sure did.’”

“My minute portion of his world was awesome, and it’s even more awesome to watch him go and be who he is. And if he needs me, he knows where to find me.”

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