Jalen Brunson recently hosted his father, Rick Brunson, on the ‘Roommates Show’. After talking about Hart and Jalen’s childhood stories, the Brunsons touched on their one-on-one matchups.
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Co-host Matt Hillman brought up how JB has talked about the first time he beat his dad in a 1v1 matchup and then asked Rick if their stories would match up. “They definitely don’t,” the 52-year-old responded. “[To] be honest, I don’t know if he ever beat me.”
That typical dad-response cracked up both Jalen and Josh.
But to be fair to Rick, he was no scrub himself. The 52-year-old played 9 seasons of NBA basketball and a handful of years in international leagues, so it’s not hard to imagine him beating his All-NBA son when the latter was a kid. However, Rick would admit, it wasn’t through talent that he got the better of Jalen.
He shared how his son would rarely keep track of the score during their 1v1s. As the sole scorekeeper of the two, Brunson Sr. confessed that he would cheat when JB didn’t remember the scores himself.
“He doesn’t even realize, he probably beat me more than what he thought. Cause he didn’t know the score. And I just cheated. ‘I’m up 5-4 that’s game,’” Rick jokingly recalled. Jalen didn’t respond to the story so it’s hard to tell if he was already aware of his father’s antics.
Brunson Sr. then revealed how one such matchup led to him seeing the All-Star potential in his son. “So I kill him, and he mad, like angry. And he’s like, ‘Dad, all you do is f***ing cheat!’…I was like if you cuss again, Imma whoop you. But then I walked away, I was like okay, he got something inside of him, some fight,” Rick recalled.
JB would chime in after the story and add that he did actually beat his father during his junior year of high school. The two still couldn’t agree on the facts but one thing became abundantly clear, the role Brunson Sr. played in developing his son’s talent.
Jalen was on ‘All the Smoke’ with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson earlier this year when they talked about an old video of his father working him out. “It was like more mental than anything,” the two-time NCAA champion shared. He added how his father was a coach at University of Virginia at the time but he would never take JB to work out at the college’s air conditioned facilities.
“In the hot summer, he had me working outside at the high school gym…He pushed me and pushed me and he was like, ‘You make a shot here, you can make a shot anywhere.'”
Clearly, Rick Brunson knew what he was talking about. His son is making shots at Madison Square Garden now where Brunson Sr. continues to coach him from the sidelines.
