Steve Hasseler

A freshman basketball player at the University of California, Berkeley, asked a professor if he could take a graduate level class. The professor said no. The freshman kept asking. The professor said no five times. So the freshman went to a dean, got approved, and earned an A. His final paper was about chess. His name is Jaylen Brown. Here is the whole thing. It started at home. Brown has said his mom set the rules. "My mom, she didn't care about basketball whatsoever. I wasn't allowed to get a B. If I came home with anything less than an A, I wouldn't be able to do some of these extracurricular activities." He was one of the top high school players in the country. He could have gone almost anywhere. He picked Berkeley, for the classroom as much as the court. The class was in the education school. The professor, Derek Van Rheenen, later said he gave the freshman no special treatment. "I gave him no breaks." Brown turned in a 23 page paper, three more pages than the class required. He wrote about chess as a way of looking at the world. He had been captain of his middle school chess team. At Berkeley, he spent free Saturday afternoons at a local café, challenging the old-timers to chess. He also taught himself Spanish. Bill Walton said he was fluent within five months. Later, he started teaching himself Arabic too. He meditated. He studied philosophy. He kept a journal, and in it he wrote down things that had not happened yet, like winning a championship. The Boston Celtics took him third overall in the draft. At 22, the other players voted him a vice president of their union. He was four years younger than anyone else on the executive committee. As a second year pro, he gave a lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Education to a packed room. "Just because I escaped the barriers of society, why should I forget about the people who didn't, or haven't, or won't?" He became a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and he has spoken at tech summits at both Harvard and MIT. NASA had him speak about science education at its Goddard Space Flight Center, where he toured the control center that runs the Hubble Space Telescope. Then he started a program that brings Boston high school kids to MIT to learn artificial intelligence and robotics. When the news broke that he had signed a contract worth up to $304 million, the richest in league history at the time, he was not at a party. He was at MIT, in a robotics session with those students. "So I was able to put my phone down and just get right into class with the Bridge students." And that championship he wrote about in his journal came true. He won a title with the Celtics and was named Finals MVP. That fall, TIME put him on the cover of its list of the world's most influential rising stars. This summer, Boston traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers. Here is the honest part. Not everyone has loved it. Before the draft, there were reports that some teams were wary of his intelligence, and worried a player that curious might not stay locked in on basketball. He has always pushed back on that. "I identify as both, intellect and athlete." The professor told him no five times. He just kept asking. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform The Sports on Tap