{"id":561326,"date":"2026-03-24T15:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T15:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/561326\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T15:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T15:02:10","slug":"and-she-was-like-you-mean-the-mlb-and-i-said-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/561326\/","title":{"rendered":"And she was like, \u2018You mean the MLB?\u2019 And I said, \u2018No, \u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Austin Reaves: \u201cI mean, I always had delusional confidence. The weirdest story was, like I said, I\u2019m from a town of a thousand people, so there\u2019s nothing to do. You hunt, you fish, you do all the country stuff. I remember my mom\u2019s best friend at the time took me hunting one day, and we were sitting there talking. I was probably nine years old, and she asked me, \u2018What do you want to do when you get older?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Oh, I want to play in the NBA.\u2019 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ooy5PjM2W3E\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:And she was like, \u2018You mean the MLB?\u2019 And I said, \u2018No, I want to play in the NBA.\u2019 And she thought it was the craziest thing, because I played, but I didn\u2019t really actually play like that yet;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" data-yga=\"{&quot;yLinkElement&quot;:&quot;context_link&quot;,&quot;yModuleName&quot;:&quot;content-canvas&quot;,&quot;yLinkText&quot;:&quot;And she was like, \u2018You mean the MLB?\u2019 And I said, \u2018No, I want to play in the NBA.\u2019 And she thought it was the craziest thing, because I played, but I didn\u2019t really actually play like that yet&quot;}\" class=\"link \">And she was like, \u2018You mean the MLB?\u2019 And I said, \u2018No, I want to play in the NBA.\u2019 And she thought it was the craziest thing, because I played, but I didn\u2019t really actually play like that yet<\/a>. But when it really came to reality, I was at Oklahoma, and Lon Kruger followed me out of practice one day and told me, \u2018I think you could be a first-round pick.\u2019 And, you know, he\u2019s been around basketball forever. So once he said that, I was like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019ve got a chance.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ooy5PjM2W3E\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:YouTube;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" data-yga=\"{&quot;yLinkElement&quot;:&quot;context_link&quot;,&quot;yModuleName&quot;:&quot;content-canvas&quot;,&quot;yLinkText&quot;:&quot;YouTube&quot;}\" class=\"link \">YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin Reaves: \u201cI mean, I always had delusional confidence. The weirdest story was, like I said, I\u2019m from&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":561327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,30097,63,276824,591,85],"class_list":["post-561326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-austin-reaves","tag-australia","tag-lon-kruger","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561326","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=561326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}