There’s a guy in LaVar Ball’s kitchen in Chino Hills, pitching a TV show. Andy. He’s got gray hair and a bright yellow coat and yellow sunglasses perched on his forehead. His idea is a cartoon: Basketball players by day, superheroes by night. They live a double life, see? Andy’s cell-phone ringtone is the Inspector Gadget theme song, because he helped create Inspector Gadget. He’s a UCLA season-ticket holder. That’s how he met LaVar Ball and his three sons—Lonzo, 19, who is a virtual lock to be a top-three pick in the NBA draft this month; LiAngelo, 18, who just graduated from Chino Hills High and will follow in Lonzo’s footsteps this fall by playing at UCLA; and LaMelo, 15, who scored 92 points in a high school game last year and will now spend his last two years at Chino Hills as perhaps the single most watched prospect in the nation. In the cartoon, Andy says, the boys will be basketball players, as they are in life. “And for the superhero part, we’re going to bring in Stan Lee.” Stan and Andy are partners, Andy says.

It’s a rainy Friday in the middle of February, and the two younger boys have a playoff game tonight against Junípero Serra. Last year, with all three boys playing for Chino Hills, the team went 35–0 and finished atop the USA Today national rankings, earning the attention of pretty much everyone who follows the sport. They did things on a court no coach would sanction. They shot from half-court. They beat teams by 30, 40, 50 points. They were the Golden State Warriors reborn in a suburban gym. The NBA had been careening toward this style of play for years now—the pace of it, the wild shooting, the impatient abandon. Somehow the Ball boys were already there.

Now they’re trying to repeat without Lonzo, who’s currently seeking his own national championship with UCLA. All afternoon people come through the house hitting up LaVar for tickets. When LaVar goes to a Chino Hills game, he goes with 20, 30 people—family, friends, people he trains for his training business, reporters, Andy. Some huge portion of the seats are just his. He’s the gatekeeper. You have to come see him or join the other sad parents spending their Friday lining up outside a high school. “There’s folks in line right now. In the rain!” LaVar says, making an incredulous face. He stands tall and slightly bent in his kitchen, limping around like the former college basketball player he is, loud as a marching band. “This is for high school!”

A young kid in a hooded sweatshirt comes in with his mother. LaVar greets her, asks after her grandmother. He turns conspiratorially to the rest of us in the room. “Susan’s got a grandmother—80 years old. Beautiful. If I was an old man, I’d hit twice.” Susan doesn’t blink. Everyone here is used to LaVar Ball. And he in turn is used to the attention. People gravitate toward him, always have. Though obviously now things are different, stranger, more consequential. There is a wrecking ball of money and fame on its way. It brings out a certain element—a hunger—in those around you. People from LaVar’s past getting in touch. Representatives from shoe companies. Guys like me and Andy.

High school phenom LaMelo UCLA-bound LiAngelo

“You’ve got plutonium in a bottle,” Andy says to LaVar.

LaVar nods. He’s been preparing for this moment for so long already. He’s registered numerous trademarks. On the pool table, just outside the kitchen, are stacks of the family clothing line, Big Baller Brand. One “B” for each boy. No one goes to a game, or out in public with LaVar, without wearing the brand. When I arrived today, this was the first thing LaVar told me: “Yo, what size you wear? Medium? You’re a medium. You’re with us now.” He threw me a shirt, told me to change in the bathroom. There are journalistic ethics to consider, and I do. There is also the force of LaVar’s personality, the size of it, the way it overflows whatever room it’s in. I put on the shirt.

As more people wander in and out of the house, LaVar stands in the kitchen and predicts the future. By midsummer, Lonzo Ball will be a Los Angeles Laker. This is what LaVar wants, and the Lakers seem to love Lonzo, so everyone is going to spend between now and the NBA draft willing this outcome into existence. “It’s a better story,” LaVar says. “Hometown kid, the Ball fans are all here.” (In May, this dream will inch closer to reality when the Lakers land the second pick in the NBA draft.)

"If I’m not crazy, they’re not good enough.”

“And don’t think he going to the NBA and be happy to be there. He’s going to murder people. I think he’ll be a Laker. The only dude who can talk to him is Magic. He’s going to put his arm around him and talk to him. Magic won in his first year—as a rookie. That’s what Lonzo’s going to do. It took Jordan seven years.”

Andy says: “Magic has been in my cartoons!”

LaVar’s wife, Tina, comes downstairs, tall and lovely, her long hair brushed straight, wearing black boots and a black sweater with Big Baller Brand’s bbb logo in gold on the hem. “Here we go,” she says, smiling: “LaVar-ology.”

LaVar puts his arm around her, keeps going:

“I told my boys that one of them wasn’t going to make it. Because if you’ve got three, only one, maybe two make it to the NBA.” He says, right in front of everyone, that he thinks it’ll be his middle son, LiAngelo, who doesn’t make it. He says he’s told him that. “He’s going to be taken care of either way,” he says. At least Gelo is the handsomest of his sons, he says—if basketball doesn’t work out, maybe he could be a model.

Tina says: “All my boys are handsome.”

LaVar says Melo, with his curly blond hair and highlight-reel game, has the most star power. Tina says: “They all have star power.”

LaVar has heard the comparisons to the maniacal sports parents who have come before him. Let them compare all they want, he says—after all, look at where their kids ended up. “You thought Tiger Woods’ dad was crazy. You thought Michael Jackson’s dad was crazy. Venus and Serena’s dad was crazy. I’m on the right path! If I’m not crazy, they’re not good enough.” You could quibble with his methods. Just not his results. Anyway, neither Earl Woods nor Joe Jackson nor Richard Williams had vision like LaVar Ball has, says LaVar Ball. Did any of them, for instance, have their own clothing line?

He gestures at the pool table and the clothing that’s piled on top of it. A $495 Lonzo Ball signature shoe, the soon-to-be-infamous ZO2, will debut in May. But the brand is already strong. “Eighty dollars for a T-shirt—that’s how you know the brand is good. My hat, my leather hat, $100!”

Tina stands next to him, mouthing each word before he says it.

The Ball boys have put Chino Hills on the map, and LaVar has turned their home into a basketball-phenom factory.

Reasonable people can debate the exact moment that LaVar Ball became a household name. Right now, in February—not yet. But you can feel it beginning, the drumbeat of whatever is coming. In a few days, LaVar will tell TMZ that Lonzo is going to be better than Steph Curry. In March, he’ll tell USA Today that in his own heyday he would’ve beaten Michael Jordan one-on-one. Talk shows will begin calling him up and inviting him on, just to see what he’ll say into a microphone. It will get very big, very fast. A Nike consultant, George Raveling, former coach of USC, UCLA’s crosstown rival, will describe LaVar as “the worst thing to happen to basketball in the last 100 years.” On March 21, after hearing LaVar suggest that LeBron James’s young son was likely to be “not that good” at basketball, LeBron himself will respond. “Keep my family out of your mouth,” LeBron will tell an ESPN reporter. “This is dad to dad. It’s a problem now.” By May the elder Ball will attain such ubiquity that headlines will drop his last name. He will become, simply, LaVar.

But here in the rainy first week of February, in the luxuriant silence of his subdivision, LaVar is already a legend in his own mind. “I’ve always been famous,” LaVar says. “It’s just who you famous to.”

His children had already been renowned for some time. How could they not be? Three boys in a distant, unlovely Los Angeles suburb whose high school team went undefeated in 2016. Lonzo, the eldest and steadiest, was one of the most effortlessly unselfish players to come along in years, a point guard whose passes seemed to come with a notarized letter of instruction about what to do with them. LiAngelo—broad and quiet and shy—was the type of athlete other athletes bounce off of. And LaMelo, the youngest and most mischievous, whose constant talking exhausted even his father, routinely made shots from places Steph Curry would look at skeptically. When I first called LaVar and introduced myself, this was what was on my mind: I wanted to meet the man responsible for such a remarkable thing. But along the way something weirder and different happened. LaVar himself became the story.

One afternoon, as we sat at the edge of the basketball court behind their home, Lonzo told me with some amusement: “He’s on SportsCenter more than me!” LaMelo, in his high, playful voice, agreed—it was like the family had gone through the looking glass. “When I was younger, I always used to [turn on] ESPN just to watch everybody play,” he said. “I was like: ‘I wish I could be on there, or know somebody who’s on there.’ And turn on the TV now, every time you hear LaVar.”

Almost daily, people went on television and on radio and criticized LaVar for the way he had raised his sons, which seemed strange, given their otherworldly talent and success, their unflappable demeanor. What was happening was crazy, but it was also full of crazy love: Only a parent could believe their own children capable of what LaVar knew his children to be capable of. The spectacle was occasionally weird and sometimes grotesque, but every day he was going to war for his kids.

"He’s been doing that as long as we’ve been alive. That’s how we know him.”

As the attention mounted, LaVar’s weight seemed to fluctuate and his voice would become hoarse; I often thought he looked tired on TV. Tina, who was just as enthusiastic a booster for her sons as her husband was, but who is generally lower-key and sane-making, like the grade-school teacher she is, seemed to vanish: One day she was there, and then the next time I visited the house, she was not. To someone like me, who’d just met the family, it all seemed overwhelming—unbearable, even.