Jaylen Brown is a proven baller in the NBA. The 28-year-old superstar is a three-time All-Star and is the reigning Finals MVP for the Boston Celtics’ 2024 NBA Championship win. Yet, a trait of Brown that basketball fans might not be aware of is his sharp intellect.
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At 21, Brown was invited to speak at Harvard University, shortly after beginning his NBA career. While that alone is impressive, the story of how that came about is even more interesting.
Brown was always considered ‘too smart’ for the NBA in scouting reports. But his Harvard stint was not a result of his intellectual endeavors. JB recently revealed in an interview with Sports Illustrated that it also started with an interview that went viral.
But before that, the Celtics star spoke about how important proper education was in his family.
“It was not negotiable,” Brown said. “It was kind of the mindset. It was anything below an A, it was unsatisfactory. You needed to be trying your best. And maybe if my best would’ve only been a B, they would’ve accepted that, but that wasn’t my best.”
The interviewer then asked Brown about his speaking engagement at Harvard, and how it came about. After revealing that Harvard “slid into his DMs” to book him, he claims that a controversial interview he did with The Guardian was the main reason for the call.
“I did this crazy article when I was in my second year in the league. I’m talking to some guy who I thought was just a regular Boston beat writer. I had no idea. But he’s asking me all these questions about college and I’m giving him all these answers about stuff that I learned. It turned out he was one of the head writers for The Guardian,” Brown revealed.
“They titled the article, ‘Sports is a Mechanism of Control [in America]’ and put my face right on the cover. It became controversial and viral that this young player who just had his life changed and just walked into a certain amount of wealth because of sports had made this statement saying sports is a mechanism for control—at 21 years old. It made people kind of interested,” he added.
Brown’s speech at Harvard was truly something. He engaged his listeners with a conversation about the class division in the United States. He went into further detail, suggesting that some at Harvard might become members of the political elite while others would “fill the prison complex and work vocalization jobs.”
His main point of the lecture was the strategy that most of society sees in America: some people need to win, and some people need to lose. This same mindset is very important Brown’s work in the NBA as well, and he’s done his very best to secure his legacy.
