Dave Hannigan: Jaylen Brown, the Boston Celtics star considered ‘too smart’ for the NBA

Before the 2016 NBA draft, Jaylen Brown was on the phone to a team that was thinking of selecting him.

Placed on hold at a certain point in the conversation, somebody at the other end forgot to press the mute button so he got to hear the club’s general manager frankly discussing his concerns about signing the highly touted 19-year-old prospect.

“Well,” said the executive, “we’re worried that he is just too smart, he asks too many questions. And is his love for the game, is it there?”

Only in professional sport could somebody’s high level of intelligence and broad range of academic interests be regarded as problematic.

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While a student at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, Brown once petitioned to take a graduate course in Theoretical Foundations of the Cultural Studies of Sport in Education instead of the facile classes traditionally foisted upon star athletes by other schools.

And he hung around campus cafes playing chess in his spare time. Enough to turn all the beige flags red. Like Graeme Le Saux reading The Guardian back in the day, he strayed so far outside the lines of comforting stereotype that many scouts were openly suspicious. The soft bigotry of low expectations.

Eschewing the groupthink, the Boston Celtics regarded his polymath tendencies rather differently and have been rewarded accordingly. Boldly nabbing the 6ft 7in 16-stone shooting guard cum small forward with the third pick in the draft, he, alongside Jayson Tatum, is one of the reasons they will start Game One of the NBA finals on Thursday night as favourites to defeat the Dallas Mavericks.

Voted Most Valuable Player (MVP) in their Eastern Conference finals series victory over the Indiana Pacers, currently on a five-year contract worth $304 million, he has improved with each passing season while simultaneously building the most eclectic off-court portfolio.

The day the Celtics announced his then record-setting new deal in 2023, he was busy teaching a robotics class as part of his ongoing efforts to help underprivileged kids access STEM education.

A fellow of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he has guest lectured at Harvard, and is currently learning Arabic (he converted to Islam four years ago) and Indonesian. At 22, he became the youngest vice-president of the NBA Players’ Association and, conscious of Boston’s chequered racial past, has been quite open about how he wants to impact the city he now calls home.

“I want to bring Black Wall Street here to Boston,” he said. “I wanna attack the wealth disparity here. I think analytics support that stimulating the wealth gap could be actually for the betterment of the entire economy. With the biggest financial deal in the history of the NBA, it makes sense to talk about investment in the community. It’s true also, you know, the wealth disparity here, that nobody wants to talk about is top five in the US, is something that we can all improve on it. It is unsettling.”

When he first joined the Celtics, Brown drove a Mazda CX9, a nice SUV but a long way from the ostentatious Lamborghinis and Porsches preferred by his peers.

At his first All-Star game in 2018, he hosted his very own tech summit, facilitating encounters between players, venture capitalists and Silicon Valley innovators. Two years later, during the tumultuous summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, he drove 15 hours to participate in a civil-rights protest in his hometown of Marietta, Georgia. Every move he makes appears underpinned by his creed, “Basketball is what I do, not who I am”.

None of his attempts to improve himself and the lives of others have insulated him from some of the usual blather surrounding the game. Even during this current play-off run, he got embroiled in an online spat with Stephen A Smith, ESPN’s arch bloviator and tiresome blowhard, who claimed an anonymous source (his modus operandi when fashioning clickbait) told him about Brown, “It’s not so much that he’s underrated, it’s that he’s just not liked because of his I-am-better-than-you attitude. He knows it. It’s the same reason he is not as marketable as he should be”.

Like the YouTube video of Brown giving a talk on Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism at Berkeley, Smith’s low-rent jibe was difficult to understand. Somebody earning $60m a year is hardly underappreciated, and, famously, he rejected an eight-figure shoe deal, preferring to remain a sneaker-free agent because he has ambitions to disrupt that industry.

In a similar vein, he had a marketing contract with Kanye West’s Donda Sports but walked away following the rapper’s anti-Semitic outbursts. Perhaps a more prosaic reason he hasn’t always enjoyed the same recognition as others of lesser ability is because of his steadfast team-first approach to every play.

“Sports is a mechanism of control,” said Brown “If people didn’t have sports, they would be a lot more disappointed with their role in society. There would be a lot more anger or stress about the injustice of poverty and hunger. Sports is a way to channel our energy into something positive. Without sports, who knows what half of these kids would be doing?”

Ten years ago, still an unknown 17-year-old at Joseph Wheeler High School, Brown took to Twitter to vent, “My teacher said she will look me up in the Cobb County jail in 5 years . . . wow”.

Not the last person to read him wrong.