The First Pick’s Second Choice

In the 1988 Summer Olympic Games, a woman named Tricia Duncan competed in the 100- and 200-meter backstroke for the U.S. Virgin Islands. Swimming was the family’s go-to — her older sister was also a competitive swimmer and her younger brother was widely regarded to be even better than she was. And he planned to follow in her footsteps (or kick-splashes, I guess?). By thirteen he was ranked among the best swimmers in the United States in the 400-meter freestyle, and he held the island records in the 50 and 100 free. He was on the path to go to the Olympics himself, planning to try out for the United States team for the 1992 Games.

That never happened, but he succeeded athletically in ways that the rest of us can only dream of.

In September 1989, Hurricane Hugo struck St. Croix, the island that the Duncans called home. It was a Category 4 storm with winds near 125 miles an hour, and it took its time — a federal review of the disaster noted that St. Croix absorbed an unusually prolonged battering, lost the tank supplying most of its drinking water, and in some neighborhoods went without telephone service until March of 1990. Hugo killed dozens of people across the Caribbean and left thousands more on St. Croix with no roof over their heads. By the time the storm left, fishing boats were sitting in the streets of Christiansted. The island’s only Olympic-sized pool, the one the Duncan kids trained in, was ruined.

The young Duncan boy stayed out of the water for two weeks. When the swim team regrouped, it moved practice to the ocean, and his attendance quietly fell off — fears of shark attacks kept him out of the water. Then, the following spring, the boy’s mother died from breast cancer, just one day before his 14th birthday. She made him promise he’d attend and graduate from college, and he agreed — and also decided that swimming was something he’d leave in the past. As Sports Illustrated notes, he never swam competitively again.

But he didn’t stop competing. The boy — Tim Duncan — turned his attention toward basketball.

After their mom’s death, Tim’s oldest sister, Cheryl, and her husband, Ricky Lowery, moved down to St. Croix. Lowery was a former Division III college basketballer himself, and he decided to play some 1-on-1 games on the hoop that the Duncans’ father had installed in their backyard years prior. Tim Duncan showed some early skills, and then, in high school, grew nearly eight inches taller. There weren’t a lot of places to play basketball in St. Croix, but there were enough that people took notice. Per Fox Sports, at one point, a former Wake Forest player named Chris King came through on a tour with a group of NBA rookies and watched the sixteen-year-old Duncan hold his own against future All-Star and Hall of Famer Alonzo Mourning. Duncan attracted the attention of recruiters, ended up attending Wake Forest, and — on his path to graduation — was drafted first overall by the San Antonio Spurs in the 1997 NBA Draft.

He never did make it to the 1992 Games as a swimmer, but he does have a medal to his credit — he was on the U.S. basketball team that took bronze in 2004. Oh, and he also has five NBA titles, two league MVP awards, an NBA Rookie of the Year award, and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020.

Bonus fact: Lots of NBA players have nicknames — there’s “Magic” Johnson, Julius Erving is “Dr. J,” Michael is “Air” Jordan, and Kobe Bryant was “Black Mamba.” Duncan was sometimes called “The Big Fundamental” because his game was so fundamentally sound, but that nickname wasn’t so widespread — nor his first choice. Per ESPN, he originally wanted his nickname to be “Merlin,” not because he was a wizard on the court, but because he was one off the hardwood. Specifically, as ESPN noted, Duncan is into Dungeons & Dragons, and has a particular affinity for spellcasters.

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