Road to Duke
The winter the heat went out, they turned on the stove. “There was a time we didn’t have any heat in the wintertime and we would have to turn the stove on to try and heat the house,” Jayson Tatum told ESPN years later, by which point he was leading the Celtics into the NBA Finals. “I was sleeping in bed with my mom, ’cause we had one space heater, and we had to close the door.” He was born March 3, 1998, in St. Louis, and his mother was eighteen, with a volleyball scholarship she was never going to use.
Brandy Cole did not tell her own mother she was pregnant until her body forced it, when she collapsed from anemia at the photo counter of a Walgreens three and a half months along. She had already enrolled in college and she was not stopping. “I just didn’t want to be a statistic,” she said. “I didn’t want to take a semester off because I was afraid I would never go back. I just put my head down and I just dug it out the whole way.” Not long after Jayson was born she moved out of her mother’s house, slipping away while her mother was at work, because she was determined to do it on her own. She brought the baby to her lectures. She did her homework after she put him down. In time she finished a bachelor’s degree, a master’s and a law degree, and her son watched her go from cleaning houses for people with briefcases to carrying one herself.
His father, Justin Tatum, had played at Saint Louis University and overseas, and had put a ball in Jayson’s hands before he could walk. By elementary school the boy was telling adults he was going to the NBA, and the adults were suggesting a backup plan. “I would always tell them, ‘I don’t. I don’t have one,’” he said. “I’m going to make this work regardless of who thinks so or not, or the circumstances. If I don’t, it’s either this or die. Nothing else matters.”
When he was thirteen, his mother wanted him to train with Drew Hanlen, the St. Louis skills coach who was working with Bradley Beal. Hanlen did not take middle schoolers. Cole went to Beal, whose mother had been her high school volleyball coach, and Beal vouched for the kid, drove him to workouts, and refused every gas card she tried to hand him: “Stop it. That’s my little bro.” Then she told Hanlen she would take out a loan to pay for the sessions. “That to me was when I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to train this kid,’” Hanlen said, “because I see how much his mom is willing to do anything and everything for Jayson.” The first session, the thirteen-year-old had to leave the gym twice to keep from throwing up.
She wanted a humble star. Hanlen wanted a killer, and kept telling her so. After Chaminade lost the state championship game his junior year, Cole turned to the trainer and conceded the point in her own words, which Hanlen quotes with the profanity intact: turn him into an arrogant one. Her other rule was that she would not be the one waking him up. “I can’t want it more than you do,” she told him. He had a key to the Chaminade gym, and she knew he understood when she woke at 5:30 and he was already gone.
Jon Scheyer found him by accident. In July 2013 Scheyer was a 25-year-old special assistant on his first recruiting trip, sent to an AAU tournament outside Chicago to be seen watching Luke Kennard on Court 3. “As I’m walking into the gym, the games are going on beforehand, and on Court 1, I’m walking through and I stop and I look,” Scheyer said, “and I see this skinny 6-7 kid, who has the biggest baby face you’ve ever seen, just dominating. From that point on, it was my mission. I felt like he belonged at Duke.” Cole was soon texting Scheyer after high school games. One of them, quoted by ESPN with the expletive dashed out, informed him that her son needed to rebound.
A few days after Duke won the 2015 national title, Krzyzewski, Jeff Capel and Scheyer sat in the family’s 900-square-foot home in University City while Cole served her tacos and, for the only time Scheyer has ever witnessed, Coach K drank a Bud Light. Krzyzewski was deep into his pitch and the recruit, overcome, had not said a word. His father spoke for him. “Just so we’re clear,” Justin Tatum told the coaches, “he’s coming.”
At Duke
He arrived as the Gatorade National Player of the Year and did not play a game until December 3. A sprained foot at a preseason workout cost him the first eight, and with them the part of a freshman season where the speed of the game becomes normal. “There’s an adjustment period,” Scheyer said. “But really, the last six weeks of the season, he was the best player in the country, and I don’t think it was even close. I think people just got caught up with what happened earlier.” The numbers for the 29 games he did play: 16.8 points, 7.3 rebounds, 84.9 percent from the line, third-team All-ACC and the All-Freshman team.
The night the season turned, by Tatum’s own telling, was February 15 at Virginia. Duke led 25-21 at the half and he had two points, and Krzyzewski met him in the locker room with a sentence Tatum has repeated on podcasts ever since, the version below with one word softened: “You soft St. Louis kid. If I knew you were going to play like this, I would’ve left you back in St. Louis!” He scored 28 in the second half, 6 of 7 from three, and Duke won 65-55.
Three weeks later Duke went to Brooklyn as the fifth seed and won the ACC Tournament in four games in four days, the first team ever to do it that way: Clemson, Louisville, North Carolina, Notre Dame. Danny Ainge, the Celtics’ general manager, was in the building. He watched Tatum score 24 against Carolina in the semifinal and put up 19 and 8 in the final. Luke Kennard was the tournament’s MVP. Tatum, asked about the week, said, “We’re extremely tough, and we never say die. Especially this last week, we’ve found that out.” Krzyzewski, describing one Tatum play in the final, gave the whole bench’s reaction: “What are you doing? Yes! You did it. How the hell did you do that?”
The NCAA Tournament lasted two games. Duke beat Troy and then lost to South Carolina, 88-81, in Greenville, and the one-and-done season was done. What he took from Durham was not a banner. Sometime that winter his mother visited and could tell something was wrong; she gave him a hug at the hotel and told him whatever it was, she had his back. At three in the morning he called and told her he was going to be a father.
The draft is the part people remember. Boston held the first pick and traded down to third, sending it to Philadelphia, who took Markelle Fultz. The Lakers, at two, wanted Lonzo Ball and did not bother to bring Tatum in for a workout. “The Lakers were my favorite team, and Kobe was my favorite player,” Tatum said. “So it was crazy that the Lakers had the second pick and I was so close to a dream come true. But it was just like they didn’t want anything to do with me at the time.” The Celtics had worked him out in Los Angeles and watched a supposed midrange player make three after three. “After my workout, I remember one of the Boston scouts came up to me and said, ‘That was a great workout. I’m excited for you. But we got the No. 1 pick, so we’re not going to pick you,’” Tatum said. The scout still works there. Tatum still gives him grief about it.
Krzyzewski, a year later, said he had gone into that draft thinking Tatum “probably was the best player,” and added a line that would take on a different weight in time: “Just keep doing what he’s doing. The only thing that could stop him is a serious injury.”
After Duke
Jayson Tatum Jr. was born December 6, 2017, seven weeks into his father’s rookie season. Tatum calls him Deuce and calls 2017 the biggest year of his life. The rookie went to the conference finals, and the next spring Kobe Bryant made an episode of his film-study series about him. Tatum found the video in his messages after practice and watched it twenty times. Then the text: “Hey, what’s up? This is Kobe. You’re playing great. I’m excited for you. Keep it up. This summer, if you’re ever in L.A. and you want to connect, just reach out.” He was twenty. “It was one of the coolest moments of my life.” He took a screenshot, flew to Los Angeles that summer, and called as soon as he landed.
On April 30, 2021, against San Antonio, he scored 60 points in a comeback win, tying Larry Bird’s franchise record. By the 2022 Finals he was a first-team All-NBA player and the first winner of the Eastern Conference finals MVP award, and the Celtics had climbed from eleventh place in January to the last round, which is where he was when he admitted to ESPN what the January version of him had been asking. “‘Damn, am I good enough? Am I good enough to be the guy on the championship team?’ Like, ‘Man, maybe I’m not ready.’ But I just kept believing myself, kept doing what got me here.” Golden State won in six.
Two years later he was. Boston went 64-18 and beat Dallas in five, and in the clincher on June 17, 2024, Tatum had 31 points, 11 assists and 8 rebounds; he led the Celtics in all three categories for the series. A week after that his old Chaminade gym-class friend Matthew Tkachuk lifted the Stanley Cup with Florida. On July 1 he signed a five-year extension worth up to $314 million, then the largest contract in league history. That summer in Paris he won a second Olympic gold, and mostly watched: 5.3 points a game and a couple of nights on the bench that became a story. Six All-Star teams, five All-NBA selections, and an idea forming that the sport’s next decade might belong to him.
May 12, 2025. Game 4 at Madison Square Garden, fourth quarter, and he went down reaching for a loose ball. Ruptured right Achilles. Surgery the next day in New York. His first public words came in August. “That first six weeks of this was probably the toughest six weeks of any point in my life,” he said. “Rehab is tedious, man. It’s six days a week.” And then the sentence that sounds most like his mother: “Just had to accept it and happened and now I got to do everything in my power to get back.”
Where Is He Now
He spent the fall of his rehab in Durham, sort of. On October 7, 2025, Duke named him its first Chief Basketball Officer, a volunteer title Jon Scheyer invented for him: a former player who would mentor the roster on development and professionalism and career management, sit in on team sessions by video, and give Scheyer an NBA read on roster construction. “Jayson has been incredibly loyal to Duke since the day he committed,” Scheyer said. Tatum: “This program means so much to me, and I had an unbelievable time here. As former players, we all share the responsibility of supporting the next generation of Duke Basketball.” It is a striking thing for a one-season player to say, and he has kept saying it.
On March 6, 2026, ten months after the surgery, he started against Dallas at TD Garden. He missed his first six shots, then made six of his next ten, and finished with 15 points, 12 rebounds and 7 assists in a 20-point win. “It’s been 42 and a half weeks since I played in an NBA game,” he said. “So just trying to get caught up on the speed and everything.” In 16 regular-season games back he averaged 21.8 points and 10 rebounds. The Celtics won 56 and took the second seed, then blew a 3-1 lead to Philadelphia in the first round, the first time in franchise history that had happened. Tatum played six of the seven. Tightness behind his knee in Game 6 kept him out of the seventh, a 109-100 loss on May 2. “It was just unfortunate timing, but I guess a little bit to be expected, right?” he said. “Rehab was just going so well the entire time. I guess it was inevitable at some point that I was gonna have to deal with something.”
Deuce, born in 2017, is a fixture at the arena; there is a younger child, born in 2024, with the singer Ella Mai. When ESPN visited during the 2022 Finals run, his mother was living in the townhouse next door, sharing a driveway, making his bed while he was on the road, and warming up tacos when he texted from the airport at two in the morning. The Jayson Tatum Foundation works on homeownership for low-income families in St. Louis; SoFi put a million dollars into that program in 2024.
Brandy Cole has a joke from when he was a boy, from the years when he was so quiet and so certain and she was the only other person who believed it. She would come into his room and press two fingers to his wrist, and he would ask what she was doing. “I’m just checking for a pulse,” she would say. “Making sure you’re still here.”