SB Nation had the opportunity to talk to former Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz all-star forward Carlos Boozer in a career-spanning interview before he starts playing in Ice Cube’s Big 3 league this summer. The season tips off June 22 in Houston. Tickets are now on sale.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
You grew up in Alaska. What’s it like to be an elite athlete there? What was the competition like? Were you ever playing outdoor games? It had to be such a unique experience.
It was awesome man, I’ll be honest. I was coming from Washington D.C., where my family is from, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. So different from anything I’ve ever seen before. Everything is outdoorsy coming from an inner city. Everything is hiking, camping, fishing, snowboarding, skiing, just an outdoorsy kind of place where you really enjoy nature.
From an overall standpoint, it really opened my horizon to a different way of life and a different appreciation of living coming from being in an inner city and concrete jungle.
Athletically, there was nobody like me in Alaska. We did have Trajan Langdon. He was terrific. After me they had Mario Chalmers. When I was there, there were some tall guys. I played against some 7-footers in high school and a couple guys who were 6’9, 6’10, but they didn’t have my athleticism or my skill set. I clearly was very dominant as far as positional play.
But there were good teams. There’s very good high school coaches up there. I was fortunate to have one of them in George Houston, my coach, who was a terrific basketball mind. Studied a lot of Coach K and Bobby Knight and pretty much implemented that kind of system, especially once I got there. It was exciting, man. Basketball is a growing sport up there. Hockey is the top sport in Alaska, but basketball is right up there.
How did you get noticed up there?
AAU started in my generation. Our AAU team was called EBO. It was coached by Darren Matsubara. It was based out of Fresno, California. I was in seventh, eighth grade when I went down to a camp in California, and Darren walked up to my mom and was like, ‘where’s your son signed to go to college?’ And my mom was like, ‘College? My son is in seventh grade’. And he was like ‘Seventh grade? Oh, my God, I got to have that guy on my team,’ blah, blah, blah. Call my dad up in Alaska. Next thing you know, we’re on a travel team.
It was cool because my travel team was loaded. We had Deshawn Stevenson who went pro out of high school out of Fresno. We had Matt Barnes. We had Brett Nelson, who went on to play at Florida. We had Drew Gooden for a little bit of time. So we were a loaded team out of California.
That was before the NCAA made the rule that you had to be within 500 miles of the homebase of the AAU team. So I was coming from Alaska. We had Brett Nelson from West Virginia. We had a kid from Florida. And all the rest of the kids ... Barnes is from Cali, Deshawn’s from Fresno, we had a kid named Chris Jeffries who went on to play at Arkansas, he was from Fresno.
It was just awesome. Every summer, no matter what happened during the school year, I’d go down to California and play travel ball. I was all over LA, the Bay Area, then we went to Las Vegas.
Back in the day there was a tournament called Big Time. That was like the best 100 teams around the country. D.C. Assault. Michigan Mustangs. All these different teams. That’s where I got a chance to be noticed. During the AAU circuit is when all these college coaches would come scout us. So I was getting letters since I was in the eighth grade. Coach K, Roy Williams, back then he was at Kansas, and Dean Smith was at North Carolina, they were all recruiting me, Jim Boeheim. The way I got noticed was through my AAU ball. And then they would come up to Alaska and watch me play my games back in Alaska.
The first big, notable moment of your NBA career was the free agency deal between the Cavs and the Jazz. In your own words, what happened with that situation? At the time, it was a pretty big controversy.
It was weird. At the end of the day, I always wanted to stay in Cleveland, but it wasn’t going to work out financially. They let me out of my contract. I had a two-year deal with a third-year option, and they took away my option in hopes they could re-sign me. I wanted to stay, but I had three other teams that were offering me significantly more money. Like, almost double the money that the Cavs wanted to offer. It would have been insane for me to ignore that even though I wanted to stay with LeBron and keep going.
We had a really good year. He made the rookie team. I made the sophomore team. I was onto a promising career in Cleveland with him. We were two games out of the playoffs, Milwaukee had taken the eighth spot. [Editor’s Note: It was actually Boston who took the eighth seed by a game over Cleveland. Milwaukee finished sixth.]
I really wanted to stay because I really embraced the city of Cleveland in the few years I was there, but I can’t turn down an additional $35, $40 million. So I told them, if you guys can even come close to what they’re offering me, I don’t care if it’s $5 or $10 million less, I’ll stay. But they just wouldn’t make the moves to make it happen.
I had an incredible opportunity to go to Utah and learn from Coach [Jerry] Sloan and become good friends with Karl Malone and partner up with Deron Williams the next year when we drafted him. We had a great run in Utah.
It ended up being a little bit of a controversy because we could have had a great tandem with me and LeBron. But the way it worked out financially, I had to move on.
As a basketball fan, I still think back to the summer of 2010 as one of the craziest times I can remember. You were one of the central characters in that. What was the summer of 2010 like for you when you were heading into free agency?
The biggest domino was LeBron. We all knew [Dwyane] Wade was gonna stay in Miami. Amare [Stoudemire] told me he was gonna go to New York. Chris [Bosh] and D. Wade had the same agent, Hank Thomas, so it was pretty obvious they were trying to pair up Chris and Dwyane to play together because they were two young stars. So for me, even though I really was thinking about coming to Miami, it made sense for them to go get Bosh. Obviously it worked out, they won a couple championships.
Everybody was waiting on LeBron. He basically told everyone, ‘I want to see the team and how it’s made up before I make my decision.’’ Amare went to New York. D. Wade and Chris Bosh signed in Miami, and I went to Chicago. So I had a great chance to link up with Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, Luol Deng, and obviously Coach Thibs, who was in his first year leaving Boston and coming to be our head coach in Chicago.
So we’re all waiting to see what LeBron wanted to do. We had a big conference call and he told us his plans. Next thing you know, he’s going to South Beach. It ended up being a great decision for him.
But for me personally, it was just an awesome summer, man. I thought about coming back to Utah and continuing my career there. I just felt like we were like a real center away from being something special. We were like a center away. If we had a Marcus Camby type, or a Tyson Chandler type, we may have been able to beat the Lakers who had incredible size, or the Spurs, who had incredible size. In Chicago, we had that in Joakim Naoh. And then we also had Nazr Mohammed. And we also had a superstar point guard in Derrick Rose who ended up winning MVP that year.
It was fun man, I’ll be honest. Going to Chicago and my years with the Bulls were very exciting. I got a chance to play for a team that we all fell in love with because of Michael Jordan. I was eight, nine years old watching MJ win championships and do his thing in the ‘90s. So for me, it was awesome being able to play with that franchise.
So LeBron had a conference call with all the other free agents to let you know where he was going?
He was trying to make a decision, so he called all of us and let us know what his thoughts were and what he was gonna do. It was all documented.
He wanted to win. He was at that stage where he had gotten to the Finals and lost to the Spurs. He wanted to win a championship. So he linked up with D. Wade and Chris Bosh, and won back-to-back, got there four years in a row.
That first year on the Bulls, you guys were significantly better than anyone thought. I remember D. Rose showing up to training camp and asking, ‘Why can’t I be MVP?` Everyone was rolling their eyes at it, but he ended up pulling it off. When did you realize that team was special?
Right away. That’s the reason I went there. I played against D. Rose and I saw his talent from the year before in 2009, and saw how good he was. I had played against Joakim Noah — with his tenacity, he was an incredible defensive player and really good passer. I watched Luol Deng, obviously being a part of The Brotherhood (Editor’s Note: That’s a Duke reference), so I had seen him play. I was always a fan of Coach Thibs because I was close with Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, and they talked about how incredible his defensive mindset is. Obviously they won a championship with Doc Rivers and the Celtics.
So for me, it was a no brainer. You add me to the group. We added a couple other guys. We added Kyle Korver and Ronnie Brewer, we added Keith Bogans and a couple other integral pieces. C.J. Watson was part of our bench mob. We had Taj Gibson.
I didn’t know we were going to be No. 1 in the East and win 62 games or whatever it was that year [Editor’s note: It was 62!], but I knew we had a team that could compete for a championship. We went all the way to the conference finals, lost to the Heat in the conference finals, I knew we had something special.
But no one could predict what would happen with D. Rose, with him getting injured every year after that. We always felt like if D. Rose was able to stay healthy, we definitely would have broke through the Eastern Conference and got the Finals one of those years to have a chance at a championship.
That 2012 team, you guys were top five in both offense and defense. That was before Rose’s injury in the playoffs. That team was so balanced. Do you think that team could have gone all the way eventually if it stayed healthy?
We were loaded, man. We went and signed Rip Hamilton in the summer time. We also got Nate Robinson, who is a close friend of mine. We also have a podcast called the HolDat podcast, brought to you by Sports Illustrated. We talk about it all the time. ‘What if they would have kept that team together?’ I think part of it was they didn’t know how D. Rose and Nate would mess together.
But as far as the offense goes, we were loaded. Luol Deng. Jimmy Butler was emerging as a two-way player, primarily as a defensive player, but he started to get his offense going. Rip Hamilton was phenomenal from the mid-range. Obviously we had D. Rose for a short period of time. We had myself. We had Taj Gibson come off the bench. The system we had with Nate, Nate coming in and being explosive off the bench. We had a lot of weapons offensively.
And then Joakim, as you know if a very underrated passer. He has great court vision and is almost like a point forward at the center position for us. We ran a lot of offense through Joakim and he’d make decisions for us. Especially when teams would double team D. Rose or double team one of us. And then obviously defensively we could switch so many things. We were very aggressive defensively. Our defense was turning into our offense a lot of times.
I saw a headline that read “Carlos Boozer: Nate Robinson used to bake us cupcakes on the road.” What’s the deal with that?
He’s just an awesome fucking teammate, bro. He was a guy who never missed practice. Wanted to play in every game. Super competitive. One of those guys who was all for team camaraderie.
Every road game — we had 41 road games — he would bake us cupcakes. His daughter got him into baking. And he would hook it up with different flavors. It would be caramel or vanilla or chocolate and strawberry. It was different but it was really cool, man.
For us, I had never had a teammate like that, who was thoughtful enough to bake us all cupcakes every road game. Every road trip he gave us something different. He was definitely one of the best teammates I had in my career.
I have to ask about the time you accidentally punched the ref in the groin against Dallas. What happened with that?
Dallas jumped on us early that game and we were making a little bit of a comeback. I think I had like six or eight points in a row. I was getting kinda hot, started cooking up a little bit. And I made a move on Dirk where I took him to the middle, spin baseline, and he fouled me as I got the and-one — AND-ONE — and then I was in the middle of a celebration punch because of the excitement. It happened to land right in his chicken nuggets.
Thank God Danny [Crawford] was OK. I checked out to make sure he was alright afterwards. We had a quick laugh about it. Thank God I didn’t follow all the way through with my punch. He was OK.
You’ve always had so many catchphrases. You were always yelling for rebounds. When did that start and why did you continue to do it? Do you think it helped you?
I’m just a talkative player, man. I just enjoy playing basketball. I always have fun with it. Our team was so close, we were like brothers. We’re still brothers.
I was just talking to Joakim, he’s out in Maui right now with his kids and his family. At the end of the day we were so close. Jo was an animal on the glass. I was an animal on the glass. You partner us together in that era and we just used to fight over rebounds. I’d be like “you go ahead and grab that, Jo”. We were always screaming “HolDat”.
At the end of the day, it was always so much fun playing basketball with those guys because we were so close off the court. We’d go hang out together, we’d go eat together, we’d go celebrate together. If we lost a close game, losing to the Heat, to the Celtics or whatever, we’d all be in together watching film without Coach Thibs. And obviously, Coach Thibs is very thorough, so we’d have to watch film with him, too. We were always trying to figure out different ways to be with each other and to grow. It was bigger than basketball. We are still close now.
I was watching and rooting for D. Rose and Taj in that series against Houston. Obviously they are overmatched. Sometimes talent just wins out. Even though I do think Minnesota has a great deal of talent. I think you can agree with that. But Houston’s on a different path. They’re close to being championship worthy.
During that time, we just had a lot of different catchphrases. Some of them made the court. Some of our phrases didn’t make the court. But we were all very close.
What does “HolDat” mean?
It’s a little bit of a humblebrag. It’s an ‘I see you.’ I like this pair of kicks you got on, maybe it’s a pair of Js. I’m like “nice Js”, you could be like ‘Yeah, HolDat.’ Brush your shoulder off and be like, yeah I like my style, too. Or if someone is trying to lock you down, talking trash to you, being like you can’t score on me, you can’t score on me, then you hit them with a fadeaway jumpshot, you be like, ‘Yeah HolDat.’
It’s like a humblebrag, but it can apply to anything in life. Whether it’s your shoe game, your basketball game, your car game.
For you as a writer, if someone is saying you don’t write good pieces, or you don’t articulate what the people say, but you come up with a Pulitzer type of paper or report, you be like, “yo HolDat.” It’s like a humblebrag.
I’m gonna start using that.
Please. Go do that.
I have to ask about the infamous spray-on hair against Boston. Are you still hearing about that from people?
OK. Let me tell you the story. At the time, there’s something called Bigen. Bigen was taking over. You would see guys like Rick Ross and LeBron, different guys were wearing the Bigen in their beards or their hairlines, trying to get their hairlines together.
So my barber at the time was like, ‘Yo Booz I think we could do the Bigen on you and you could get your hairline back.’ I’m like, ‘Eh, I like being bald. I like my look.’ Over about three or four or five weeks, he kept talking to me about it.
So we’re about to play Boston the next day, in Boston. We had a few all-stars, they got a few all-stars. Nationally televised game. I was was having a hell of game. I think I had a 20-20 game.
Long story short, my man got the wrong shade. Like super dark. Hella dark. I didn’t even know. I’m just enjoying my cut, I’m on the phone. Then I go look in the mirror and I’m like WHOA. So I grab a bunch of shampoo, I try to wash this thing out like seven times. And it had stained my head so bad it wouldn’t come out. So I had to grin and wear it man. I got cracked on heavy ‘til it washed out.
At the end of the day, everybody makes mistakes sometimes, and that’s one of the mistakes I made. I’ll never do it again, I’ll tell you that.
You’re playing in the Big 3 this summer. You’re on the Ghost Ballers. You got the legend Ricky Davis on your team. You got Mike Bibby. You got Lee Nailon. Marks Banks, Mario West. What’s going on with this Big 3? You gonna be yelling HolDat and putting up double-doubles?
The schedule’s out, the tickets are on sale. We’re going all over the place, starting out in Houston on June 22. We’re coming to Chicago during the year, we’re going to Barclays in Brooklyn, we’re going to Miami in July. We’re going to the Bay Area. Come check us out. We got a good team, Mike Bibby, Ricky Davis, Marcus Banks and the rest of the crew, Ghost Ballers.
Shout out to Ice Cube for putting this together. Whether you’re retired, whether you’re 35 or 40, you always think you got it. Once a player, you always think you got game. So we get a chance to go out and have fun, play some 3x3 against old foes. I get a chance to play against guys I’ve been competing against most of my career. Kenyon Martin, Al Harrington, so on and so forth. If you get a chance, come check us out there summer.
I’m excited about this because I used to write a feature called the Booz News where I would give Carlos Boozer updates after you left the Bulls because everyone thought you were such an endearing personality. So hopefully I get some Booz News out of this. Some good highlights, some good clips.
I’m gonna be screaming ‘HolDat’, I’m gonna get a whole bunch of double-doubles, I’m gonna try to get Joakim to come to one of the games so I can scream at him, grab that Jo. It’s gonna a lot of fun.