Kyrie Irving is truly one of the more complex individuals in the NBA today. He often plays by his own rules and doesn’t particularly care too much about what other people might think about him. That was on full display when he stubbornly refused to take the vaccine despite it meaning he couldn’t play home games for the Nets and it ultimately played some role in the team spectacularly falling apart in the postseason.
Kyrie isn’t going to change his ways, however, as he is extremely headstrong, and we can expect more issues behind the scenes for the Nets this upcoming season. He is a mercurial character, and it turns out that he has always been a bit different right from a young age.
Kyrie Irving Made An Interesting Admission Regarding His Childhood
Kyrie was a guest on the latest episode of Uninterrupted’s The Shop, where he spoke on a lot of interesting topics, including the pressure he felt as a 19-year-old to replace LeBron James, who had left Cleveland in 2010. He also went a bit further back to his childhood during a conversation about whether athletes understand the business of the sport and revealed that he was actually a nerd growing up who had a unique perspective on the business side of things.
(starts at 27:57 mark):
“I was a nerd way before I was an athlete. Like, just a quirky, awkward kid. So I did it based on the ROI in fourth grade, because my dad’s a financial sector head. He knows a lot of information about the market, saw him wake up (at) 5:30, 6 a.m. to go to Wall Street. So, I got a different perspective. Fourth grade I went to my closet and I said, ‘I am going to the NBA.'”
“So just imagine me in fourth grade, I’m looking at the ROI on what NBA players make per year. And I’m just doing this as a curious young man exploring the world. And now that I’m 30 years old, I have (a) fiduciary responsibility to the Players Association, representing not just me now, but the next generation to come after. It can be a lot to handle, when you learn about the tension behind the scenes.”
That is unique, to say the least, and it perhaps explains why he is vice-president of the Players Association today. Whether you like him or not, doing things his way has gotten Irving this far, and one doesn’t change when things are working for them.
His former teammate LeBron also came out recently in support of Irving after this episode aired, as he claimed that the Nets star is misunderstood and that he has grown a lot over the years.
