Candace Buckner

IndyStar

In the big picture, Myles Turner is the future his franchise is counting on, the gamble his coach is taking, the nearly 7-foot tower of energy his opponents are encountering.

Today, though, he’s just a distracted teenager playing with his iPhone. Turner settles into a small corner table of his favorite Italian restaurant for dinner and sits spread-eagled, his knees almost touching opposite corners of the tabletop as he jumps into the hook of an R&B ballad. The Weeknd’s “Earned It,” a Grammy-award winning song, plays in the background. And Turner doesn’t miss a beat.

“‘Cause girl you’re perfect,” Turner croons softly while thumbing through text messages.

He shouldn’t quit his day job. During a preseason event for Indiana Pacers fans, after team President Larry Bird wanted the big man out of Texas despite concerns over his running mechanics and injury risk, teammates made Turner sing and shake it to another song by this same artist. Back then, Turner’s falsetto voice and awkward hip gyrations made the veterans double over in laughter. These days, his rim clean-ups and midrange jumpers make the Pacers believe he won’t be a punch line ever again.

In so many ways, he’s just a big kid. The teen-turned-starter still buys H&M clothes off the rack and watches SpongeBob in his spare time. He’s tasked with raiding the cooler in NBA visitors’ locker rooms so his veterans will have enough Gatorade on the bus rides to the airport. Inside his childhood bedroom, he still has a pair of size-10 Starbury One sneakers signed by Kevin Durant.

But in so many other ways, the Pacers need him to be a man, if not The Man. They have Paul George, Monta Ellis and several veterans approaching 30. But they also need 19-year-old Myles Turner, who averages 10.1 points on 53.5 percent shooting and 1.5 blocks per game this season.

“We’ve got a young, really talented, special big man in Myles Turner that is going to be up and down,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. “I don’t know how fast and how far he develops in the final 29 games, but it will be a big factor in what our ceiling is.”

Turner has always been this strange brew of a project, a normal, humble child and a rare bird, a player obsessed with shushing his skeptics and yet privately questioning himself. He nods when teammates give him tongue-lashings after mistakes, but there’s nothing they can say that he hasn’t heard from the chorus of critics inside his head.

“I doubted myself a lot,” Turner says of playing in the NBA.

* * *

Turner can take on the responsibility because he isn’t just any 19-year-old. He was raised for this, even if David and Mary Turner thought they were simply bringing up their eldest to earn a free college education and a good job.

So, the family would take part in conversational clashes, the loser getting bounced for using filler words “uhm” and “like.” If Myles slipped up with one of the forbidden words, his mother took no mercy.

“All of a sudden I’d break out and say, ‘I won!’ ” Mary exclaims. “He hated losing. So we had to play again.”

The Turners shut off the television from Monday to Thursday and hid the PlayStation in the garage until summer so Myles could do something that sounds insane to kids of his generation: play outside. Myles was 5 when David purchased a basketball goal, but dad couldn’t install it in the driveway unless the height was adjusted from 7½ feet to 10, regulation size. Mary’s idea.

Mary laughs freely and suffers from CTS (Chronic Texting Syndrome) – she’ll often send the flushed-faced emoji with wide-open big eyes along with a red heart, a message only she and her boy can understand – but she’s also brutally competitive. In the family’s other favorite pastime, Slaps, she once rigged the contest by setting her alarm clock to 2 in the morning just so she could wake up and surprise Myles with the game-ending wallop. By now, you can probably guess the reason why there are no participation trophies inside the Turners’ three-bedroom ranch in Bedford, Texas.

“You don’t know my wife,” David says, chuckling.

While Mary bequeathed her competitive nature, David passed down his passion for basketball to their son.

When he’s in town for Pacers’ games, David is the coach of Section 15, surveying every moment with interlocked fingers resting over his lap and a Bluetooth headset over his right ear. David wasn’t his boy’s first coach, when Myles was such a problem at the rim that rival YMCA dads instructed their sons to stand at halfcourt to stop him from blocking all the shots. But David was the coach who taught Myles the proper way to shoot a basketball. David, at 6-4, swatted away the boy’s weak heaves that started near his belly button.

“And he’d have to go get the ball,” David says. “Pissed him off!”

Myles was short with a round tummy back then. He would square up to shoot jump shots while pigeon-toed and clumsily labor up and down the court, but David noticed the instincts. So did Ken “Slim” Roberson, even though during their first introduction inside an IHOP all he saw was a pudgy pubescent boy with pinchable cheeks.

“He was chubby, man,” says Roberson, a basketball coach who has trained Karl Malone, LaMarcus Aldridge and Chris Bosh, among many others. “I thought he was going to be a fat child.”

But two years later, Turner turned 14 and had stretched into a gangly, 6-3 frame. Now he was ready to work with Roberson.

Turner didn’t pick up his knees when he ran, appearing more like a cross-country skier as he moved. So Roberson instructed him in the same running drills that he once gave Malone. On most days, the training started on the track. Then the weight room and finally, inside to work on his low-post moves and face-up game. Turner was transforming into a force but remained mostly anonymous on the Dallas AAU circuit.

David Turner and Roberson still remember the day when the coach of one of the most prominent AAU programs, a man so respected in the area that he’s referred to as “The Godfather,” described the prospect he was searching for – the tall, lanky, awkward type. Myles possessed all those attributes and apparently, also the gift of invisibility. Though Myles was shooting baskets a few feet away, The Godfather never noticed him.

“Nobody was clamoring over Myles,” Roberson recalls. “Nobody believed in Myles but his parents and myself.”

For a time, not even Myles believed in Myles.

* * *

Turner remembers getting penciled onto the "B" team during middle-school tryouts and being iced out at his first practice with the Trinity High School varsity team. These memories are old wounds that should’ve been patched up by all his recent triumphs. Still, Turner can’t help but to pick at his sutures.

“I’ve just always had to work my way up through the ranks,” Turner says. “I was definitely overlooked in high school.”

Older kids laughed at the way he ran, but Turner loved the game. He was piling up team championship trophies – not those participation throwaways. He had the potential to be great, so he played on. And really, how could he stop and listen to their taunts? Turner kept busy; for a while, he played on four teams at the same time.

He was improving, but not fast enough by his own standards. When Turner did watch TV and saw Shaq and D-Wade winning the NBA Finals, he wasn’t like the other kids who went to sleep dreaming about holding the Larry O’Brien Trophy.

“I never thought I’d be strong enough. I always got pushed around all the time,” Turner stresses. “As far as the NBA was concerned, I loved watching it … but I never thought I’d actually be able to do it one day.”

Then, Turner got a taste of high school life and basketball seemed like a burden. He longed to be normal and just hang out at the mall. He wanted to quit basketball.

But before his sophomore season, a miracle happened: Turner broke his ankle.

“I was really ready to quit before I got hurt, because I got burned out,” Turner says. “But having the game taken away from me for six or seven months made me realize I can’t live without this.

“I gotta hoop.”

Turner missed summer workouts but recovered in time for his junior season. Then after high school ball, Turner describes his AAU experience as a “no-one-could-stop-me-kind-of-summer.” He jumped to No. 2 in the ESPN 100 rankings behind Jahlil Okafor. Still too low if you ask him. The ranking gnawed at him, but his confidence was soaring. Suddenly, Myles Turner had respect.

“That’s when I thought,” Turner says, “I really can do this.”

* * *

Now, Turner’s self-belief flourishes. He needed the confidence during his one season at the University of Texas when he came in as the No. 2 recruit in America but played as Connor Lammert’s backup. Any other entitled big man might have pouted, but Turner starred from the bench and led the Big 12 in blocked shots (89) and defensive rating (86.3).

Turner needed the confidence once again when he declared for the draft but questions swirled about his running style.

“Coming out of Texas,” Turner’s agent Andy Miller says, “I think that there was a concern that he’d even be a top-15 player in the draft.”

So Miller went to work disproving the notion about Turner’s anatomical issues. For three days in New York City, Turner visited the Hospital of Special Surgery and underwent tests on his hips, knees, ankles and joints. Everything checked out. When the Pacers selected Turner at No. 11, they recognized the potential. However in November, a thumb injury stalled his progress. Turner missed 20 games but continued to work on his game even with his left hand bandaged. During this time, the team began to abandon its small-ball brand and with the team mired in a cold stretch and Turner now back in the lineup, Vogel made the risky decision. The teen would be the new starting power forward.

“You would have to say fairly that he’s one of the most, if not the most, surprising players in the draft,” Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy said recently. “I think everybody pretty much knew he was going to be a good player, but I think a lot of people thought it would take more time than this and he’s playing very well.”

Still, he’s 19 and mistakes happen. At Austin, Texas, Turner picked up a playbook for the first time. Before then, he had winged it off instincts and IQ. Never having run plays until college may help explain why Turner forgot to set a screen in the closing seconds of regulation against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Feb. 1, a game the Pacers lost in overtime. Turner’s learning. And after those flubs, teammates are more than willing to teach harsh lessons.

“He’s in a grown man’s place,” C.J. Miles says. “He’s playing like a grown man, so we’re going to treat him like a grown man.

“You can see him and he’s so upset,” Miles continues. “He’s more upset because he feels he let the team down.”

But the kid never stays down.

On Friday night against Oklahoma City, the Pacers trailed by three late in the game. This time, Turner didn’t forget to set a screen. Rather, he stretched out beyond the left corner arc. With the game clock winding down to less than a minute to play, Turner collected a pass that was aimed at his shoelaces and without hesitation, swished in the game-tying shot. His first career 3-pointer.

A long time ago, a young and deferential Turner asked Durant to autograph his $14.98 hi-tops. On Friday, Turner, stone-faced and swagged-out, held up three fingers as Durant looked on.

“His biggest quality is that he’s not afraid. He’s never afraid, he’s never shying away from the moment,” George said about the rookie after the Pacers’ 101-98 win. “He asks questions, he wants to learn, wants to get better, works hard. It’s everything you want in a young player. He has it and he’s going to be special for us.”

With this role comes added responsibility. Not too many teenagers can claim endorsement deals with Shiftman Mattress, Sprint and Nike. He also uses his fame for others. Turner has teamed up with Mary to create W.A.R.M. (We All Really Matter), a program intended to help the less fortunate and the homeless. He also served as a quinceañera padrinoor Godfather for his friend Alyssa Cortez, who was born with spina bifida.

Life is busy, so that's why Turner carries two cell phones. He has to take calls from an agent, a business manager, a publicist and of course, his parents.

Back at the restaurant, his knees hugging the table, his iPhone rings.

“Hello, mom?” Turner says

After the brief call, Turner devours his tortellini and cheese bread. He tries to eat as many carbs as possible because with all this newfound playing time, he’s losing so much weight. Turner will need the added pounds and strength, because the Pacers will need him.

He’s come a long way from the kid who ran funny and was not considered good enough to break past the "B" team in middle-school tryouts. But, like the hit song says: He earned it.

Follow IndyStar reporter Candace Buckner on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner.

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