SHAI GILGEOUS-ALEXANDER is off. His first warmup shot clangs around the rim. So do his second and his third.
He’s getting ready for one of the biggest games in Oklahoma City Thunder history, a March 9 showdown at home on national TV against the Denver Nuggets. Gilgeous-Alexander is locked in an MVP battle with Nikola Jokic, and a head-to-head game could sway a voter or three. He can’t afford to be off today.
The countdown clock says there are 78 minutes until tipoff as Gilgeous-Alexander whiffs on his first three shots. But within a second or two of each miss, a ball boy has bounce-passed another ball to a coach, who feeds it to SGA. He fired off the three bad shots in about 10 seconds, then sank the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh jumpers. Suddenly, he’s on fire and stays that way for the next two hours. His shooting slump lasted all of about 15 seconds, thanks to the three ball boys scrambling to feed him basketballs.
For the duration of warmups, Joel Yasuda and two other ball boys crane their necks up and try to corral the rebounds for the home team. At any given time, three basketballs from three different Thunder players are in the air. Yasuda and the others get relentlessly doinked as basketballs flood the airspace above them. Such is life for an NBA ball boy.
“Ball boy” is an inaccurate blanket term for these crews. The Thunder hire only adults and not just men. So these are ball men, ball women, ball people, and calling them that undersells how important they are and how much they do. Once games start, the ball boys take positions as the towel crew, as team attendants working both benches and as assistants in the equipment room. They are everywhere on the court throughout games but are rarely seen or acknowledged. The jobs are mostly part time, with pay hovering around $12-15 per hour. And yet, the NBA couldn’t function without them.
With 68 minutes left before tip, SGA hustles off the court past Chet Holmgren, who’s stretching out near midcourt with a series of balance exercises. He finally tosses away the elastic bands he’s been using and gives a wave for a ball. Yasuda, 20, passes to an assistant who feeds it to Holmgren at the 3-point line.
Holmgren is off, too. His first two shots of the day hit the front of the rim and zip like face-seeking missiles down toward the three ball boys. Yasuda grabs the second one and throws it to an assistant coach, but Holmgren already has another 3-pointer in the air. This one drills the back of the rim and makes a dull thud noise as it soars toward the rafters.
The shot ricochets past Holmgren to half court, where ball boy Bobbie Roy snags it and throws it back. Roy manages the ball rack at midcourt, with basketballs flowing toward both ends of the court. He’s the basketball supply chain for both teams.
Holmgren launches a fourth 3-pointer, and this one is all net. Next one, swish. Next one, swish. Three makes in a row. He has found his shot now, too, and just in time for tipoff. The countdown clocks dip under 20 minutes, and the lights begin to dim. Time for introductions, so the ball boys can rest their necks — but not for long.
The easy part of the night is over.
ON A GAME DAY, the underbelly of an NBA arena is a remarkable thing to observe. A sea of support staffers hustle in the shadows, setting up the benches, racking the basketballs, cleaning uniforms, filling up water bottles, and doing anything else 24 uber-talented athletes and their coaches might want. When players need something, it appears. When they have to get rid of something, it disappears. When they’re hungry, they pull aside a ball boy and hand them $100 for takeout. And when they sweat, they will have it mopped up before they know it hit the ground.
That is not how the NBA used to be. When Marc St. Yves first got hired by the Seattle SuperSonics as a 13-year-old in 1979, the team athletic trainer also managed the equipment, ball boys, travel and a slew of other vital tasks. Nowadays, St. Yves is the VP of logistics and engagement for the Thunder, and the team employs 24 ball boys among a massive support staff.
St. Yves occupies a special place in Thunder and NBA lore. Right away, he was a ball boy prodigy. He busted his ass more than any kid could ever be expected to. At one point early in St. Yves’ tenure with the team, Seattle’s arena sprang a leak in the roof during a rainstorm and St. Yves had the unenviable task of running onto the court between every play and trying to sop up the water. By the end of the second quarter, officials realized it was a losing battle despite St. Yves’ hustle, and the NBA had its first rainout.
At the time, only two teams in NBA history had had a full-time equipment manager. The Sonics were such an afterthought on the Seattle sports scene that the team had almost no storage space at the arena. So the team had to squirrel away equipment all over the city in a variety of storage spaces during the offseason, and St. Yves was one of the few people who knew where everything was stashed. When the team trainer left two weeks before the 1987 season, a Sonics staffer took St. Yves’ parents out to dinner and begged them to let St. Yves leave college early to become the NBA’s third full-time equipment manager.
They said yes, and St. Yves never left, not even when the team relocated from Seattle to Oklahoma City in 2012. He’s the poster child for the idea that ball-boying can become a career. Over the past 40 years, St. Yves has moved up the Thunder ladder over and over again. Now, he’s a VP who manages security, travel and the equipment team.
As high up in the food chain as he has gotten, St. Yves still has an uncanny ability to spot a good ball boy. He hired a teenager named Wilson Taylor more than a decade ago, and now Taylor is the Thunder’s equipment manager in charge of the ball boys. In fact, he’s the NBA’s reigning equipment manager of the year.
They’ve created a ball boy culture that is completely different from and much more professionalized than what St. Yves was hired for. Taylor conducts what is essentially a ball boy scouting combine every year where he tests out job applicants’ ability to hustle on and off the court, mop up spills, and rebound for players.
Two hours before the Nuggets game, the ball boys begin to show up. Yasuda & Co. touch base with Taylor in the bowels of Paycom Center in the equipment room, where he has hung up that day’s assignments. He has a board not unlike a head coach might have, with a lineup of who will do what assembled using magnets with everybody’s names.
Taylor has built upon St. Yves’ legacy with an operation that runs like a SEAL Team 6 mission. He has what amounts to a small strip mall nestled into the unseen corridors of Paycom Arena. There’s a Walgreens worth of shelves and carts full of razors, soap, shampoo, flossers and gum. There’s a mini laundromat nearby, with two washers and dryers that can do about six times as much clothing as typical home units. And of course, there’s a Bed, Bath & Beyond-level number of towels — on a typical game night, the Thunder use about 500 towels. Taylor has plain white towels, nicer white towels with Thunder logos on them for the home team, and enough top-shelf bathrobes to stock a Four Seasons or two.
As the Nuggets-Thunder game gets closer to tip, the six ball boys duck off the floor for a last chance to use the bathroom or grab a water. Then they turn into what Taylor calls his “tac teams.” “Tac” is short for tactical, which at first seems like an overhyped term for the six young men who spread out and take seats right beside the court. But the more you watch them, the more the term makes sense.
Two ball boys sit behind each hoop. Their job is to bring out Swiffer-like handheld mops during timeouts and after free throws. But they also take cues throughout the game from a ball boy stationed on the floor of the court near both hoops. For monster messes, all three pounce.
On this day, Yasuda is the ball boy on the floor near the Thunder bench. As the pregame introductions begin, he grabs a blue cushion and a white towel and heads for the corner. He’s about to spend the next two hours coiled on the floor, ready to battle against the enemy of all pro basketball players — a sweaty court.
SWEAT IS GROSS. But it’s also one of the most important evolutionary traits in human history. Our sweat glands have allowed us to become the only animal on Earth that can reduce heat through glands. Other creatures can self-regulate their body temperatures, too, but it’s harder work. Dogs pant out of their mouths. Bumblebees vomit on themselves. Seals pee on their own bodies. Human sweat doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
“Sweating is humanity’s superpower,” says Sarah Everts, a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ontario and author of the book “The Joy of Sweat.” “It’s our evolutionary secret card that has allowed us to live all over the world.”
Sweat, however, is an absolute injury nightmare for every NBA player’s existence. A fan’s spilled beer or some water on the sidelines is one thing. But most of the sweat that NBA players drip on the court also includes a substance called sebum, which is a waxy natural fluid the body produces to keep the skin moisturized. So sweat combines with the sebum to produce an oilier substance that is a bit harder to soak up than regular fluid, making the court a cesspool of bodily goo if it doesn’t get removed.
The Thunder towel crew is trained to towel-dry sweat puddles, then do a quick foot check where the towel crew member slams his foot down and plants it on the floor to make sure there’s no slippery aftermath. Yasuda is tall and lean. So when he does a post-mop-up foot check, he slams his sneaker onto the court like a bad golfer might ground a pitching wedge.
On this day, the starting lineups of the Thunder and Nuggets feature some of the world’s most impressive athletes — a slate of players that earns almost $250 million — hurtling through the air and pivoting off the hardwood at breakneck speeds. The organizations trust Yasuda and the rest of his team to quickly clean the puddles of sweat, blood, spit and water the players leave behind.
“I always tell our crew: You have the most important job in the arena, hands down,” St. Yves says. “Players’ safety revolves around them doing their job well.”
The game tips off as the six tactical team members settle into their spots on the court. After Jokic misses a foul shot early in the game, two crew members wait for the players to cross midcourt and then each walks one side of the free throw box with the mops and the two meet in the middle. When they get to where Jokic was shooting, they touch mops and begin to walk backward, mopping as they go but eyeballing the other end of the court to make sure a fast break isn’t coming their way.
“It gets a little nerve-wracking for my family at the games,” Yasuda says. “My mom said she was holding her breath the whole game today, and my sister said her heart rate went up.”
Most teams have a similar towel crew structure, with a point person who manages normal sweat situations and unexpected, rapid response moments. March was a particularly strange month for towel team supervisors. When Tracy Morgan barfed in the front row of a recent game, the Knicks’ towel crew spent 10 minutes furiously cleaning everything up. Morgan was wheeled off the court a few minutes later — with a towel over his head. “Appreciate my MSG family for taking such good care of me, and I need to shout out the crew that had to clean that up,” Morgan said afterward, blaming food poisoning. “More importantly, the Knicks are now 1-0 when I throw up on the court, so maybe I’ll have to break it out again in the playoffs.”
At a Lakers game the week before, Luka Doncic retrieved the ball between James Harden‘s free throws in the fourth quarter and wiped the sweat off his forehead with it. When he flipped it toward referee Sha’rae Mitchell, she gave him a disgusted look and let the ball bounce several times. She hit him with a delay of game call, refusing to pick the ball up with her hands. She kicked the ball toward the corner, and out of nowhere, one Lakers ball boy flipped a towel to another one, who wiped the ball down and threw it back to Mitchell. The camera caught LeBron James checking into the game and making a “What the hell?” gesture.
At halftime of the Nuggets game in OKC, Yasuda takes a short breather. He looks up into the crowd and gives a nod to his family. His parents got season tickets when he was a toddler and started taking him and his sisters to almost every home game. He remembers feeling captivated by the players and the games, to the point where he began to study the peripheral characters, too. He’d notice security guards, the scorer’s table workers and especially the ball boys. Their jobs looked so fun. He remembers noticing Wilson Taylor, who is now his boss, darting around the court.
And his eyes would often wander over to the visitors’ bench, where team attendants would take care of James, Steph Curry and all the other opposing superstars. He still recalls 10 years or so ago, when he noticed one team attendant who was not like the rest. Most of the ball boys and other team attendants looked like college students. But this guy? He looked as if he was about 40 years old, twice the age of the other ball boys. Yasuda thought maybe the man had worked his entire career as an NBA ball boy.
Someday, he thought, I want to be just like that guy.
THEN-NUGGETS COACH MICHAEL MALONE is signaling wildly to Jokic to get back in the game. Denver went up by double digits early, then watched the home Thunder come roaring back to lead late in the second quarter as Jokic sat.
Jokic comes flying out of his seat on the Nuggets bench and tries to shed his warmup jacket as he goes. He eventually shakes it loose as he checks into the game. But he forgets that he has a large heating pack around his waist. He’s a foot onto the court when a man appears behind him, scooping up Jokic’s jacket as he closes the distance behind the Serbian star. He gives a tug on the heating pack and Jokic hesitates for a minute without turning around. The man unfastens the pack, gathers it into his arms alongside the jacket and disappears behind the bench as quickly as he appeared.
The man is Marty Jones, 47 — the older guy that Joel Yasuda used to notice down on the court. Jones has been with OKC since 2012, when the team moved from Seattle. Jones is one of two Thunder employees working the visitors’ locker room and bench on this day, which includes chasing down Nuggets players as they shed their gear.
Jones is a middle school teacher by day and a ball boy by night. His actual rebounding and towel days are behind him, though. “I’m too old for that,” he says, and gives a small laugh. He’s a quiet, gentle soul, but man, he hauls ass to accommodate visiting players. He has been doing it long enough that he has become friendly with several NBA players, especially older guys like Steph Curry and Vince Carter. “They’ve been around, and so have I,” he says.
Team attendants are a close cousin to ball boys in an NBA equipment crew’s org chart, and many employees bounce between positions. Team attendants have almost always been ball boys, and ball boys almost always have some experience as team attendants.
Towel crew members get paid a little more than team attendants (typically $15 an hour, versus $12 for team attendants). But team attendants often receive sizable tips, so the money ends up being much better. They work closely with both teams — most NBA teams treat the visiting team like gold, especially OKC. The Thunder even have something called “The Taylor Cart,” named after Wilson Taylor, that is essentially a rolling Target checkout line. It has shaving cream, razors, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, flossers and gum for the visiting locker room. “If we didn’t have gum, there’d be a total meltdown,” Taylor says.
Taylor is a good boss to have. His staff members love how down to earth and forgiving he can be. He has done all of their jobs and worked his way up, so he understands what it takes to have a flawless game and meet the needs of what can be a finicky group of professional athletes. Plus, he has some awesome war stories from his time as a wide-eyed ball boy years ago.
Once, when Caron Butler joined the Thunder in 2014, he told Taylor he needed at least three McDonald’s straws per game. He liked to bunch them up with his teeth — Taylor calls them “straw logs” — and gnaw on one for 45 minutes or so, then get a new one. They had to be McDonald’s straws, with the red and yellow stripes. So Taylor went to a local Mickey D’s and asked for the manager. He explained the situation, and the manager gave him a box of 500 for the season. “Caron was very happy,” Taylor laughs now.
His workers also enjoy the laminated Carmelo Anthony photo Taylor still has in the equipment room. It’s a picture of Anthony when he was with the Thunder, looking like somebody kidnapped his dog. Writing on the photo says, “Don’t forget my sleeves,” a reference to the tight sleeves Anthony wore on his arms every game of his career. Taylor had been told on day one by Anthony that he needed a new pair every night, that he couldn’t play without them.
But in one game, Taylor forgot to put them in his pocket. Anthony was despondent as he walked onto the court to enter the game. Taylor sprinted into the equipment room as play resumed. Anthony played a few minutes before Taylor arrived with the sleeves. “I almost pulled myself out of the game,” Anthony said, and Taylor could tell he wasn’t kidding.
Taylor’s staffers become a NASCAR pit crew at halftime. When the Nuggets and Thunder leave the court on March 9, the area under where the players sit is a wasteland of fluid, empty water cups, protein bars and gum wrappers. Within five minutes, though, Jones, Yasuda and the rest of the gang have combined forces to sweep up the cups and mop up the fluids.
Most of the crew members are between 18 and 25 years old, and many are in college. Yasuda is a sophomore at Oklahoma, majoring in finance. He originally thought he wanted to follow his parents into the medical field and become a doctor. But he took his first college biology test and said to himself, “Nope, that’s not going to happen.” He’s one of several ball boys who has big dreams about working in the NBA as a career.
The Thunder have a development plan for their ball boys and team attendants that is as thought-out as what Sam Presti has done with the actual team. Quite a few work their way up from ball boys to team attendants to potential full-time jobs in the equipment department. Several ball boys mentioned how ecstatic they are when the Thunder G League team plays at home, because they’re often tested with bigger roles for those games. St. Yves and Taylor serve as great examples of where a good ball boy can go in basketball.
Yasuda plans to finish his degree at OU. But really, his eyes are on working in the equipment room or as a video coordinator for an NBA team. “Joel is a very high-performing kid,” says his boss, Taylor. “He has a lot of potential.”
Jones has no such ambitions. This is just a cool part-time gig he works hard at 41 times a year. He’s married with two older kids and works his teaching job during the day, then comes over and handles the visiting locker room for home games. There’s always a lot of action for visiting teams. Jimmy Butler always offers a $100 tip to whoever will run and get him food from Raising Cane’s. Last year, Gradey Dick requested jumbo playing cards. Team attendant Dave Brylewski called nearly every store within 25 miles of Paycom Center before finding a CVS that had one deck. “Hold them for me and I will be right over to get them,” he said.
St. Yves remembers Shaq once pulling aside a visiting team attendant during a game and saying he needed an old-school Walkman for the plane ride home. The attendant left midgame, hit a RadioShack and came back with a Walkman. Shaq gave him $100 — plus a $1,000 tip.
The team attendants have a hectic job. But it’s usually not as frantic as what the ball boys go through. Falls are absolute panic. Huddles and free throws can be messy, for sure. But those are dead ball situations. With falls, any time a player hits the floor, the Thunder towel members are instructed to dart out onto the floor and get it as dry as possible, often while a play is going on. Cameras rarely catch it, but in person, it’s shocking how many times some of the world’s quickest athletes are 25 feet away from a college freshman, toweling furiously on the ground.
Against the Nuggets, Yasuda has to deal with the two biggest wipeouts — and wipe-ups — of his young career. The scariest one is when Jamal Murray misses a 3 and tumbles to the ground. Murray thinks he has been fouled, so he stays down, staring at a ref with his hands raised. The other nine players break toward the other end before Murray finally rolls to his side and starts to stand up.
In the corner, Yasuda is crouched and ready to surge onto the court. His right hand is holding a towel while also serving as a launcher for his body — he’s almost in a defensive lineman’s 3-point stance, just with a towel pinned to the ground. He has to jet out to the 3-point line as the game roars on nearby. A steal and an outlet pass would be a disaster, and the ball boys had earlier been shaking their heads at the idea of somebody like Luguentz Dort sprinting back their way while they’re mid-mop-up. And rightly so. “I’m glad our ball boys are fast,” Dort says with a smile. “I will run through them. I will not wait. I’ll keep going.”
Yasuda is at the top of the arc on his hands and knees, scrubbing like his life depends on it. His eyes never leave the play at the other end, and he lucks out that Alex Caruso pulled up on the fast break and has started to run a play. By the time Isaiah Hartenstein’s floater goes through the net, Yasuda has ducked back into his spot on the floor. “My mindset is escape to the sidelines,” he says.
Later in the game, Caruso gets knocked to the ground on an and-1 under the hoop, staying down on the floor for a good 10 seconds. By the time Caruso’s teammates grab his hands and lift him to his feet, Yasuda has been idling with a towel behind him the entire time. Caruso, probably the Thunder’s biggest sweater, is barely airborne when Yasuda drops to the ground and frantically starts drying the floor with rapid, circular hand motions. He looks like a guy hand-scrubbing a vintage car, but on fast-forward. Caruso moseys toward the free throw line a few feet away as Yasuda cleans up the aftermath of the fall.
By that point in the fourth quarter, the Thunder begin pulling away. SGA has a rough day from long distance (2-11 on 3s) but is brilliant from midrange near the free throw line (13-22 on 2s, finishing with 40 points). Holmgren, still working his way back from a pelvic fracture in November, looks spry as he goes 6-10 for 14 points.
“Shout-out to our ball boys,” Holmgren says after the game. “It’s extremely important to find your shot before the game. Every time I come to the arena, I have to find the touch a little bit. Sometimes it’s not there right away, so it’s important to have rebounders out there to get us the ball. You can get 10 shots up in succession in a way you can’t if you’re rebounding for yourself. You can get your rhythm. That happened for me today.”
AFTER THE GAME, ball boy and team attendant jobs again merge. Yasuda and his tactical team members come over to help clean up around the home bench, while others aid Jones with the Nuggets bench. They round up discarded towels and cups, then mop and towel up any remaining fluid. They’ll eventually take a quick run over the entire court with their Swiffers, too.
They’re filling up two rolling towel bins when somebody mentions how much of a relief it is that they don’t have to deal with a repeat of two nights earlier, when the Thunder starters all sat during a win against the Blazers. Afterward, the team dumped ice and water on backup Jaylin Williams, who’d had his first career triple-double in the game. The ball boys tried mopping it up at first, but quickly realized they were just pushing ice and water around. So three ball boys had to use roughly 25 towels to soak up the water and pinch-scoop the ice cubes.
After the Nuggets game, Yasuda chucks his white towel into a bin on the way off the court. He still thinks about how it wasn’t that long ago, just a year-and-a-half earlier, when he took the court for his first home game and almost tripped Steph Curry as Curry rebounded for the Warriors during pregame warmups.
On his way off the court today, Yasuda’s mom and sister wave down to him from their seats as he leaves the floor. He’s at an age where the lure of frat houses and fake IDs pulls in some college students. But Yasuda has an incredible passion for his job. “I’m not really a party guy,” he says. “My job is what I do for fun.”
Yasuda walks out of the arena an hour later with a spring in his step. He’s going to grab dinner then get ready for classes tomorrow and another game against the Nuggets the following day. Friday was a long day. Sunday was a long day. Monday will be a very long day. He’ll have spent a healthy chunk of 72 hours chasing rebounds, sprinting to towel up sweat and crouching down on a small blue pad between the panic of running out onto the court as an NBA game is happening. That sure feels like a lot on a 20-year-old’s plate. He seems like he should be exhausted and worried about his gas tank.
“Nah, this is the life I want,” he says. And with that, he heads toward his car outside the arena. The day is over, and he barely broke a sweat.
