UPDATE: This article originally stated Mason Jr. has won seven Grammys. He has won six. He is up for his seventh on Monday.
Harvey Mason Jr. has (probably) done more in his life than you have. The 6-time Grammy winner is one half of The Underdogs, a production duo that has written and produced songs for Whitney Houston, Britney Spears, Jennifer Hudson, Justin Timberlake, and Toni Braxton. Mason also oversaw the musical production of Straight Outta Compton, Pitch Perfect 2, The Wiz and a lot more, and on top of all that, he was a guard for the Arizona Wildcats who played alongside Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, and Kenny Lofton and made a Final Four under coach Lute Olson.
On this edition of the FTW Podcast, Mason joins to talk to me about the Grammys (which are live this Monday night on CBS), the state of music in 2016, what it was like playing with Steve Kerr, the problems with AAU basketball and how it’s stunting the development of young basketball players, why Lute Olson was such an incredible coach, Kanye West, TV musicals … We talked about a lot.
It was the most fun I’ve had recording a podcast here at FTW, and I hope you all like listening to it. (Highlights from our talk are below.)
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On how AAU teams are hurting the quality of basketball in this country:
It’s a showcase. It’s a place to show off and try to get attention. So AAU coaches are not allowed to teach fundamentals or teach team basketball because that’s not showing off your kid, your son. As a player, you’re not being showcased properly. If you try to get an AAU team to pass the ball more than two or three times, or to run a play, anyone that’s good on that team, they’re going to leave. They’re going to transfer to another AAU team. No AAU program wants to have its best players leave, so they’re going to let them do whatever they want.
Therefore, once they finish AAU, they go to college. And if you’re a college coach, you’re stuck playing an AAU superstar, because you want to get more kids from that AAU program. If a highly recruited kid comes in to your program and you’re the coach and you bench him for not doing the right thing or not running the play or being selfish, the AAU coach that that kid came from is gonna be like Hey, he’s mistreating my kid. I’m not sending any more kids to that program. That’s the problem. The AAU programs have so much power and so much control over what happens, the head coaches are backed into a corner and having to play kids that normally wouldn’t play as freshman. They have to be soft on kids who normally would be getting balled out and benched.
Did you know Steve Kerr would be this good this fast as a head coach?
Yes. I know that sounds like I’m jumping on the bandwagon. The thing with Steve is, he would be the best probably in the world at anything he did. I know that sounds like some wild fantasy. Honestly, when I met Steve I was 18, and he laid the groundwork for me not only in basketball but how to act in life. I was such an admirer and a fan of his, that I studied him. I watched. I was not a super smart guy coming up, I did a lot of dumb stuff, but one of the smart things I did was pay attention to Steve Kerr.
I watched how he lived his life, I watched how hard he worked, I watched how he focused on certain things, and I realized that anything he chose to do he was really, really good at. He wasn’t a great basketball player in middle school and high school, then he decided he wanted to be amazing. Then he went to one of the best programs in the world and ended up being an amazing, All-American type player in college, something you never would have guessed when you saw him in high school. He accomplished what he wanted.
