{"id":296690,"date":"2025-11-20T08:57:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/296690\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T08:57:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:57:08","slug":"mobley-once-almost-quit-basketball-he-was-in-sixth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/296690\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobley once almost quit basketball. He was in sixth \u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6812753\/2025\/11\/19\/evan-mobley-cavs-nba-all-star-rise\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:Mobley once almost quit basketball. He was in sixth grade, and having consistently played up two grade levels, growing up in Murrieta, California, he was tired of being beaten on by the older, stronger boys.;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">Mobley once almost quit basketball. He was in sixth grade, and having consistently played up two grade levels, growing up in Murrieta, California, he was tired of being beaten on by the older, stronger boys.<\/a> He was an easy target: tall but lanky. Skinny. Young. To make matters worse, Isaiah, 20 months his senior, was racking up all the accolades. Evan was just an afterthought. \u201cDad, I don\u2019t want to play basketball anymore,\u201d Evan said. \u201cHold on,\u201d Eric said. \u201cPump your brakes. You\u2019re just not on your right team [for your age group]. You are really, really good, and you just don\u2019t even know it. So, let\u2019s try first to put you in your own age group and go from there.\u201d Evan reluctantly agreed, but soon realized his father was right. He dominated on his new team, scoring 30 points in his first game. Soon, he fell in love with the game. He began even asking his dad to take him to the court at 5 a.m. each day to practice.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6812753\/2025\/11\/19\/evan-mobley-cavs-nba-all-star-rise\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:New York Times;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mobley once almost quit basketball. He was in sixth grade, and having consistently played up two grade levels,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,485,170096,170094,170095,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-296690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-mobley","13":"tag-murrieta","14":"tag-sixth-grade","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}