I want to live March Madness: Tony Parkers brother, T.J., has eyes on coaching in college b
VILLEURBANNE, France — T.J. Parker’s eyes light up when the conversation shifts to his dream job.
The 35-year-old younger brother of San Antonio Spurs legend Tony Parker has been on the coaching staff at ASVEL, the top basketball club in their native France, since Tony became more involved in the ownership group six years ago. When the time is right, T.J. would like to be a head coach in Europe, preferably for a team in the EuroLeague, the continent’s top club competition. But none of that constitutes the big goal, the one with the biggest, boldest letters on the shiniest marquee in Parker’s dreams.
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What Parker really wants to do someday is coach college basketball in the U.S. He wants all the bells and whistles that come with it — the packed campus arenas, the Dick Vitales, the rivalry games and, above all, the NCAA Tournament. He played three years for Bill Carmody at Northwestern, but he didn’t get his college basketball fix. If you followed any journalists on any social media platform in March of 2017, you probably heard that Northwestern made its first NCAA Tournament that year, more than a decade after Parker left. That he missed out on the Big Dance gnaws at him to this day.
“I want that experience,” Parker says. “That’s why I went to the States for high school — to try to earn a scholarship to play in college and go to the tournament, to March Madness.”
As is well-documented, Parker grew up in a basketball family. His father, Tony Sr., played college at Loyola University Chicago and professional ball in Europe. Tony Jr. was a first-round NBA Draft pick in 2001 and won four NBA championships with the Spurs, claiming six all-star nods and an NBA Finals MVP award along the way. The youngest Parker brother, Pierre, played two years at Loyola.
If they weren’t somewhere actually hooping, the boys regularly played NBA Live with their close friends, including Gaëtan Müller, who is now the managing director at ASVEL. “We were obsessed with everything basketball,” Müller says. They loved watching American games. A friend in their group, for reasons T.J. no longer remembers, had access to a regular supply of VHS tapes of NBA and college hoops broadcasts. (Remember, this is the 90s.) T.J. always sought out the college videos. He watched Duke and Michigan State and North Carolina — “whatever games I could get my hands on.”
“I fell in love with it,” T.J. says. “I watched everything, every conference. I always liked the Big Ten and ACC.”
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Parker left France at 14 to play high school hoops in his dad’s hometown, Chicago. He picked Northwestern over scholarship offers from Baylor, Georgia Tech and Marquette, leaving the school after his junior year to pursue professional hoops. He played five seasons in France, including two solid years with Paris-Levallois Basket, before a knee injury ended his career.
He moved to San Antonio with his brother after that, running the Tony Parker Basketball Camp. It was there, working with kids aged 7-18, that Parker realized how much he enjoyed teaching the game. The ASVEL ownership group’s efforts to bring in Tony as a minority shareholder were already underway at that point, making the connection easy for T.J. to move to Villeurbanne, the smaller twin city to Lyon in east-central France, and try his hand at coaching.
In his initial years at ASVEL, Parker trained prospects on the club’s youth squad and prepared them to transition to the senior team. “I really enjoyed seeing their progress,” Parker says. Charlotte wing Nicolas Batum, who has gotten to know the Parkers over the years and is ASVEL’s director of basketball operations from afar, says “the guys want to work with T.J. He spends a lot of time on the floor with them, and that’s huge for a coach.He wants to get the best out of you.” In addition to projected first-round NBA Draft pick Theo Maledon, Parker coached Matthew Strazel, another promising teenage guard, and Amine Noua, a 22-year-old wing. All three now play for ASVEL’s professional team, which competes in France’s top-tier league as well as the EuroLeague.
Parker climbed the ranks on the staff, and in 2018 he served as interim head coach for six months before Zvezdan Mitrovic’s hiring. As Mitrovic’s right-hand man, Parker is on the path toward a head coaching gig in Europe — thanks to a stingy defense, ASVEL is one of the surprises in the EuroLeague, sitting one game out of a playoff spot in its first regular-season appearance in the competition in 10 years.
“Whenever T.J. becomes a head coach, he’s going to be great just because of his knowledge and background,” says David Lighty, the former Ohio State star who plays for ASVEL. “Being around the Spurs, talking to those guys and seeing how they run things, I can say (the Parkers) bring that mentality from San Antonio over here and T.J. has embraced that. He’s been around it for 20-plus years. Mixing that with his understanding of the game has been great.”
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Lighty, along with Tonye Jekiri, Adreian Payne and Jordan Taylor, is one of the Americans on the ASVEL squad who loves talking college hoops with Parker. Three of them — Lighty, Payne (Michigan State) and Taylor (Wisconsin) — played in the Big Ten like Parker, making perfect conditions for endless trash talk.
The banter connects Parker to those long-held feelings for college hoops. The memories of walking into packed gyms at Iowa or Michigan own important real estate in his memory. His adores the school pride that comes with college sports. He also believes his story, about thinking he’d be an NBA player only to end up injured while playing in Europe, can resonate with young players when pitching the importance of going to college.
Most of all, talking with the former college stars adds kindling to Parker’s desire to go to the NCAA Tournament. He has never even attended a tournament game as a fan because his schedule never lines up. Plus, that’s not what he is looking for.
“I want to be in March Madness,” Parker says. “I want to live it.”
(Photo: Tolga Adanali / via Getty Images)
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