It was close to midnight on a warm night in June, and Kendrick “Perk” Perkins had a confession to make. He was recording an episode of The Old Man and the Three, the wildly popular podcast hosted by JJ Redick, the retired NBA player, and Tommy Alter, a TV producer.

Perkins used to be a center for the Boston Celtics, and, at 6’10” and upwards of 300 pounds, he makes the 6’4” Redick look petite. Perkins, Redick, and Alter (who, at 5’11”, would look regular-size, if not tall, in virtually any other context) are seated in Alter’s living room in Dumbo, sipping on glasses of a 2008 Chambertin grand cru that runs nearly $4,000 a bottle. After they finish recording the podcast, Redick, a wine aficionado, tells me it was just okay, nothing special.

Right before the podcast recording, Perkins had been at the Barclays Center, rehearsing for the live 2022 NBA draft, which would air the following evening on ESPN, where he and Redick are both analysts. Donning a full suit and tie, he looked ready for prime time. Redick was dressed down in a backwards Old Man and the Three cap, gray skinny jeans, and a white tee, revealing his bevy of Christian tattoos. His left arm features a sleeve of the four authors of the Gospels: Matthew, winged and haloed, and below that, Mark, Luke, and John, in the form of various flying animals.

Perkins gets on with his confession: Way back in 2008, when his Boston Celtics were playing LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Semifinals, “I was like, Let us get breaking news that LeBron has tore his ACL or something,” Perkins says, pantomiming shame. “I did, bro. Like, I’m not even lying. I’m not even exaggerating.”

Redick looks at Kylee Kilgore, the COO of his production company with Alter, ThreeFourTwo, who is sitting off to the side. “We have to edit this out,” Redick says. Kilgore happens to be the twin sister of Redick’s wife, Chelsea, as well as Redick’s own best friend.

“No! You can’t edit this out,” Perkins protests. “This is real! That’s how terrified I was of LeBron.”

When the podcast drops days later, the anecdote stays in, and gets picked up around the sports world. This sort of moment, after all, is why listeners like The Old Man and the Three. It’s not everyday that you hear a professional athlete talk about how he was so thirsty for a championship ring, and under so much insane pressure, that he asked God to cripple his opponent. But Redick, who started podcasting in 2016 and retired from the NBA after the 2020–2021 season, is a gifted interviewer, able to coax his podcast guests, mostly former and current NBA players, into opening up. Sometimes too much—Redick was concerned about the backlash Perkins might receive for his audacious confession, which is why his initial impulse was to cut it.

“Because I’m a peer, because we share a lot of the same experiences, there’s an inherent respect level,” Redick tells me a few days later, over lunch at Nene’s Deli Taqueria in Bushwick. “I’m able to ask questions that, if a reporter were to ask that, or if traditional media were to ask that, I don’t think you’d get the same response. That’s the advantage of our show.”

Being a professional athlete is deeply unrelatable: you’re inconceivably rich, inconceivably recognizable, and you possess an inconceivable physical agility. But when Redick talks to other athletes, he humanizes them. His podcast paints a compelling portrait of the emotional cost of spending half your year traveling, away from your family, the pressures of the spotlight, the relentless drive you need to truly master your craft.

Redick arrives at Nene’s fresh off of an ESPN hit, wearing a tailored navy suit, aviator sunglasses hanging from his shirt, his hair slightly gray and duly styled. He never talks with his mouth full or dribbles juices and salsa down his immaculate getup. He takes a picture with one fan, says hi to the family of another on FaceTime. And he shares a warm familiarity with the restaurant staff. It’s hard not to think, Wow, everyone freakin’ loves this guy.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the Orlando Magic drafted Redick in 2006, back when he was a shooting guard at Duke, the basketball world despised him, or so it seemed. He is widely considered to be one of the most hated college players of all time.

“We used to make fun of him all the time at Deadspin. We all thought he was just another snotty Duke white dude,” Will Leitch, the website’s founding editor, says. (One post on the website declared him “America’s Dumbest Student-Athlete,” while another wondered if the fact that he cried during his final Duke game meant that he was a “wimp” with a “weak disposition.”) “He turned out to be a little more interesting than that.”

Leitch no longer has any animosity toward Redick, but he doesn’t necessarily regret those snarky blogs. “I think everybody is different than they were 15 years ago, including Redick,” he says. “He’s matured, the internet has (sorta?) matured. We’ve all matured.”

“For some reason, there’s always a white Duke player who everyone hates,” Josh Hart theorizes over the phone. Hart grew up a University of Maryland fan, and thus, he says, “I hated him.” But Hart, a shooting guard and small forward for the Portland Trail Blazers, ultimately developed a close friendship with Redick when they played together on the New Orleans Pelicans.

A confluence of factors turned Redick into a national villain during his time at Duke. Chief among them, Duke itself, perhaps the most hated college basketball program in the country. “They reeked of entitlement and embodied everything so many people despised in a way that went beyond sports. They had an air about them like I’m better than you,” retired NBA player Etan Thomas explained in a Guardian op-ed in 2019. “Not just on the basketball court, but as human beings. Just overall elitists.”

ESPN writer Bomani Jones put it more succinctly: “If Duke played the Ku Klux Klan, I’d root for a 0-0 tie.” That line, though, is from an article Jones wrote in the early 2000s imploring college basketball fans to stop hating on Redick. “He looks like what so many people associate with Duke—unathletic white players who are pumped up illegitimately by a fawning media—and it’s safe to say that’s what so many people hate,” Jones wrote. “But if my fellow Duke haters aren’t careful, they’ll miss their chance to appreciate one of the best shooters in recent memory.”

“He was the best college basketball player in America while being a white player who played for Duke. That, by definition, was going to make him a polarizing figure,” says Jones now; he is friendly with Redick and appeared on his podcast in 2020. That defense of the Duke shooting guard made such a splash at the time, Jones tells me, that it effectively launched his own sports journalism career.

Other Duke players riled the nation before and after Redick. Perhaps the most infamous was Christian Laettner—handsome, white, perennially smug-looking—who played for the private North Carolina college in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Before Laettner, in the ’80s, Blue Devil Danny Ferry drew widespread ire. More recently, Grayson Allen, who had a nasty habit of appearing to trip his opponents, took the cake.

During Redick’s time at Duke, from 2002 to 2006, he was relentlessly bullied by fans from opposing teams and the sports media. Whenever he’d shoot a free throw, the crowd would chant, “Fuck you, JJ!” Redick wrote in a 2017 op-ed that some fans had speckled their shoulders with red dots to mock his acne, and he’s said that someone once held up a sign saying they had sex with his then 12-year-old sister. Shortly before the 2006 draft, when Redick was charged with a DWI, Leitch categorized the public response to one of Redick’s lowest points as “unbridled glee.”

In a blog mocking Redick’s collegiate poetry, A.J. Daulerio, writing for Deadspin, said, “JJ’s entries make Insane Clown Posse’s ‘Miracles’ read like ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’” A few of Redick’s verses: “No bandage can cover my scars / It’s hard living a life behind invisible bars / Searching for the face of God / I’m only inspired by the poems of Nas,” and “I can’t see what my future has in store / but I move forth with the strength of a condor / The courage of a warrior / The commitment of an American soldier.” Redick now clarifies that he wrote these verses less as poems and more as rap lyrics. “It was terrible poetry, and it was very much subpar rap lyrics,” he says, laughing.

But Redick’s college-era loathing put him in a unique position to win hearts and minds when he went pro—he had nowhere to go but up. “All he had to do was leave Duke,” Jones says, comparing Redick’s trajectory to that of legendary Knicks player Patrick Ewing. “When Patrick Ewing was at Georgetown, Georgetown was seen as being the Blackest college basketball program, which scared the hell out of a lot of people. Patrick Ewing was despised by a significant portion of America,” he says. “Nobody hated Patrick Ewing as an NBA player because it was never actually about Patrick Ewing. It was about where he fit into something larger.”

When the Magic drafted Redick, his relationship with the media and the general public initially remained combative. “I certainly felt like, in my first two years, there was a large contingent of basketball fans that were excited about my struggles and rooting for my demise,” Redick says. It was after his third or fourth year in the league, he reckons, that the public began to warm to him. “I proved I could be a rotation player, at the very least, in the NBA.”

Throughout his career, Redick built a reputation as a reliable three-point shooter. (He has the 18th-highest three-point percentage of all time.) “I knew that people didn’t like him at Duke. But I just always thought of him as a shooter. He was just the guy who was a sniper,” Alter tells me. “Once we got to know each other, I got to see, like—I’ve never met anyone like him in terms of his ability to communicate.”

While someone like Laettner was never quite able to shake his reputation because his career was mostly disappointing, the antipathy toward Redick faded away as he exceeded people’s expectations. In the 2008–2009 season, he helped the Magic make it to the NBA Finals, the team’s first and only appearance there since the Shaq era. Several years later, he was a pivotal piece on one of the best Clippers teams ever, averaging 15.8 points per game and making 44% of his three-point shots during his four seasons in Los Angeles. (To contextualize just how impressive that is: Steph Curry, the best three-point shooter of all time, has landed 42.8% of his attempts from deep throughout his career.)

And now, in the past six or so years, thanks to his podcasting and television persona, Redick has been wholly embraced by casual and hardcore NBA fans alike. “On television, he took on a role that the general public has an affection for, which is, he is the guy calling us—‘us’ being media professionals—on our shit,” Jones says. “And people really enjoy watching players turn it back around on media pundits.”

On The Old Man and the Three, as well as on earlier iterations of it on Yahoo! Sports and The Ringer, Redick exudes authenticity. He is nice. He is funny. He is laid back. He is emotionally available. The podcast has that “it” factor: The listener feels in on a conversation among friends.

“I don’t think of myself as beloved, but I do acknowledge that there is some weird arc that has happened with the perception of my personality,” Redick tells me. “I don’t ever feel like I’ve been victimized by the media. Most anything that has ever been written about me, I’ve probably brought on myself,” he says. “You know, I’ve fucked up a lot in my life…. Dude, there were some dark times. I remember being like, Fuck, man, I don’t feel like I’m a bad person. And then the other part of that was that I acted like a dickhead and probably accelerated the hatred and animosity towards me.”

Said “dickhead” behavior, according to Redick, included “bobbing my head, smiling. Yes, I occasionally talked trash to student sections, people on the front row in visiting arenas, but I was doing that in response. I was trying to create a persona.” Redick says he behaved that way at Duke because he was “young and immature and not really understanding what was happening and not being comfortable with myself.”

So he began going to therapy every week after his sophomore year of college. “I read a ton on consciousness and flow state and insecurities, and I just got to a place where I was comfortable with who I was,” he says. Therapy helped him focus on the things he can control, and let go of the things he cannot. “It became this really diligent obsession with what I can control. That’s why my routine is so important. My sleep became so important. The exact amount of shots I take every Sunday became so important to me,” he tells me. “All this other stuff has no effect on my day-to-day life.”

By the time Redick became a veteran in the league, he was a leader in the locker room, someone whom younger players looked up to. Hart recalls Redick holding a team meeting in New Orleans, during a moment when they were struggling. “He held us accountable and demanded more from us on the court, but also, not being on our phones, being more connected, and those sorts of things,” Hart tells me. “I vividly remember this because it showed the leadership he had, the accountability he had. Everyone came out of that meeting in a positive way because it wasn’t just a veteran guy who was talking to us. It was JJ, someone who puts the work in.”

Redick announced his retirement in September 2021, after 15 years in the NBA. He now splits his time between podcasting and being an ESPN analyst, which is an interesting role for a person who was antagonized by the media the moment he stepped onto the court at Duke.

His experience at Duke, he tells me, profoundly impacted the way he understood what it meant to be famous, and also led him to where he is today, a podcaster and media personality, since when he was in college, Twitter didn’t exist and he didn’t have “a microphone to talk into for an hour.” His media career has not only allowed him to take control of the narrative about him, but also dictate the narrative about other players.

In an appearance on ESPN’s First Take earlier this year, Redick went viral when he called out fellow commentator Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo. Russo had been particularly offended by Draymond Green’s behavior while the Golden State Warriors power forward was playing the Memphis Grizzlies in the Western Conference Semifinals. After Green got elbowed in the face and started bleeding, the Memphis crowd erupted in cheers; in response, he flipped them off, and defended his behavior in his postgame press conference.

On the show, Russo said that “America’s tired of Draymond Green,” and he should just “shut up and play.”

“That has the same sort of connotation that the ‘shut up and dribble’ crowd has towards athletes, and I have a real problem with that…. The people on Fox News talk about them that way,” Redick said. “People want to hear what Draymond has to say because…he is real, authentic, and unfiltered.”

I tell Redick that, because of this moment, my friend’s brother referred to him as “the woke guy from ESPN.”

“I am not woke, I don’t consider myself to be woke,” Redick maintains. “What happened with Mad Dog—I don’t think what he said was right. I wanted to point out why it was wrong. It’s that simple. There’s no agenda there.”

He might not identify as woke, but Redick is by no means apolitical. After the 2016 election, he began publicly commenting on presidential politics, speaking out against Donald Trump not infrequently: “I’m about as anti-Trump as you can get,” he said during a postgame press conference in 2017. That same year, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was “horrified” by Trump, and by the prospect of Americans “losing their health care” and women “losing their right to decide what to do with their body.”

“I’m a registered Democrat. I believe in science. I believe in trying to treat people with respect, and I believe in not grifting people,” he tells me. While he wasn’t particularly involved in politics pre-2016, he’s had a longstanding interest in the intersection between sports and social justice.

“Sports and politics have always been intertwined,” Redick says. His heroes are Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two Black athletes who raised their fists during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics, and were expelled from the team and the Olympic Village in response. “They risked everything, and they were just fucking ostracized from the US track-and-field community, and they paid the price for that for years and years and years,” he tells me. “They were willing to do it because they were standing up for something they believed in. That was 1968. Politics and sports? C’mon. That’s not a new fucking thing.”

When it comes to contemporary sports-politics issues, Redick leans leftward. “I support trans athletes,” he tells me. “It goes back to just a basic level of empathy. They want to be able to compete. They should be able to compete.” Colin Kaepernick? “For a number of years, he deserved a spot on a roster and didn’t have that opportunity.”

Draymond Green, who solicited Redick’s advice on podcasting while interviewing Redick on his own show, often talks about this idea of the “new media,” which is made up of athletes like himself and Redick, a new generation of sports-media talking heads who approach analysis from the perspective of the player. During a live recording of The Old Man and the Three in June, Green anointed Redick as “the leader of the new media.”

While retired athletes have built second careers in sports analysis for many years, the sports media radically changed during Redick’s tenure as a professional athlete—transitioning from highlights and straight news to debate shows and 24/7 social media scrutiny—which influenced the way his generation of athletes-cum-pundits, this “new media,” approach their commentary.

Debating something like whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is a better basketball player, which happens on ESPN and social media frequently, is about “lifting one person up and pushing another person down,” Redick says. “It’s total bullshit.”

During the 2020–2021 NBA season, Redick was traded from the New Orleans Pelicans to the Dallas Mavericks—he knew he was going to get traded, but he had asked to be sent somewhere closer to his family in Brooklyn, and was dismayed to find himself so far away from his wife and children. “You’re giving up some autonomy by being an NBA player. By and large, the good far outweighs the bad,” he tells me. “Anytime any athlete complains about anything, the immediate response—it drives me crazy—is like, Shut up. You’re getting paid a lot of money. It’s just dehumanizing.”

After the season ended, Redick decided to retire. Although he had hoped to win a championship before leaving the league, he tells me that after receiving treatment on his Achilles tendon that failed, he wouldn’t have been able to play anyways. And his kids were getting older, and he wanted to be around to take them to school.

Last September, he publicly announced his retirement in an emotional video he released on The Old Man and the Three YouTube channel. “Recording that podcast where I retired, we obviously had to cut out me sobbing hysterically, like, 20 times,” he tells me.

In his new life as a full-time media commentator, he has retained his competitive spirit that made him a formidable NBA player. “I want to be really great at something. I want to win,” he says. “I don’t know how you win in media. But I’ll figure it out.”