SAN FRANCISCO– It might not be possible for someone to love something as much as Natalie Nakase loves basketball– and the basketball world itself can’t seem to comprehend why one person could hold that much passion and derive that much joy from a game that comes down to (to use a Nakase-ism) “two hoops and a ball.”
You can hear their mystification– their intrigue – oozing in the questions Nakase’s been asked lately, as the Golden State Valkyries find themselves in the WNBA Finals and the spotlight that comes with it. At the WNBA Finals media day, with close to a hundred media members from various outlets across the country coalescing in various scrums around each of the Golden State players, with Nakase’s scrum being one of the more crowded ones, a reporter asked the second-year head coach if she’d heard of the term “basketball sicko.”
“People have been calling you a basketball sicko,” the reporter told Nakase, a reference to how the online WNBA discourse has become enraptured with the intensity Nakase brings to her day-to-day operations to the point where it’s become an endearing meme of her dedication to the game. Particularly, “sicko” is not far off from the “fiend” or “junkie” descriptors Nakase’s peers have used to describe how she works when not under the public eye.
“Have you heard that?” the reporter asked.
“I mean, welcome to my life,” Nakase exclaimed. “(It’s been like that since) I was like five years old!”
Perhaps the answer to why Nakase loves basketball is as simple as that because she’s not kidding when she says ball has always been her life. Because Nakase’s father, Gary, was the original basketball sicko.
Gary, described as the “father of Japanese American sports in Orange County,” was a key figure in growing Japanese American basketball leagues in Southern California, founding the Orange Coast Sports Association in 1981. Playing in the JA Leagues, Gary lived and breathed basketball, a love he imparted onto his three daughters from as early as they can remember.
“We lived, breathed, slept basketball 24/7. It was year-round,” Natalie’s eldest sister, Nicola, told ClutchPoints, describing how her father procured them a skills trainer and a strength-and-conditioning coach to regiment their hoops training.
“She was surrounded by basketball ever since she was little, so that's all she knows,” Natalie’s older sister, Norie, told ClutchPoints. “She doesn't know anything else, and it's just basketball, basketball, basketball. She watches just basketball.”
Because Natalie took to her father’s passion so easily, the two were inseparable.
Games, practices, tournaments – Gary drove her to everything, even trekking as far as Tennessee for Natalie’s club team (because Gary didn't like to fly). Gary was Natalie’s first coach, cussing her out in the car ride home and setting up the cones. When Natalie went off to UCLA and made the team as a walk-on, Gary went to every possible Bruins game he could to cheer her on from the stands (and so he could also give his two cents on the game). Even as Natalie went as far as Tokyo to pursue her coaching career, or rose within the Los Angeles Clippers organization and the professional basketball world, the two always called to check in so she could get Gary’s basketball opinions on basketball-related problems.
For the Nakases, basketball was a love language. And remains their love language.
Though the words “I love you” weren’t ever said aloud, that feeling permeated Gary’s actions. Whether it was waking the three of them up at 8 am on Saturday mornings to work out, building a makeshift gym so they could start weightlifting, or going so far as to encourage them to focus on basketball more than their studies, the game ultimately became the vehicle Gary used to prepare his daughters for the world.
“My dad owned his own business, so my dad never took a day off,” Norie said. “It didn't matter what day it was. He was in there. He was always going to check out the plants, what's happening at the yard, who's at the yard– he did that every day. He worked hard. And we saw that since we were little that he went into work every day. So I think that's instilled. Natalie has that in her too. That going to work every day, and it's every day, is basketball. She doesn't take days off.”
Loving basketball too much?
But it’s possible to be too enveloped in your work. Even if it’s your passion. And taking no days off caught up to Nakase in the fourth quarter of the Valkyries' do-or-die Game 3 with the Dallas Wings.
With 1:40 left in the game, Nakase collapsed while arguing with an official, due to what she later ascribed as “exhaustion,” which the broadcast caught in a scary and dramatic moment, before picking herself up off the hardwood, gutting her way back into the team huddle, and carrying on the rest of the night to guide Golden State to the biggest win of the franchise at the time.
A day later, Nakase assured the public that while she was fine, that moment was a “wake-up call” for her.
“I've talked to you guys about what I have to learn from my father,” Nakase said, addressing the media in an emotional moment at the podium. “He was an extremely hardworking man. I followed in his footsteps, and I thrive in that. But he told me, this was about 10 years ago when I never knew what I was going to do with my career, ‘Do not let your career ever get involved if your mental health or your health gets complicated.”
“I understand this job for me. I love it. Sometimes I love it too much to a point where I overwork, and so I just want to make sure I'm being smart. So for all you guys too, I know you guys work extremely hard. Just make sure you guys take care of yourselves, check in, and understand that your loved ones are the ones who (get) very concerned. Because my sister was, I mean, she was crying. So I have to be very smart.”
“It was a little stressful,” Norie summarized, downplaying the scariness of the moment when redescribing watching the chaos unfold from way back in the stands when Natalie collapsed.
“So we kind of didn't know (what happened), but we were both like teary-eyed and crying, and then we were talking about how the last two minutes of the game, we don't know what happened. Because we weren't really like… We were there watching it, but not really concentrating on seeing what was happening.”
Back in SoCal, Nicola found it equally confusing to decipher what was going on with only the broadcast and social media to go off of. But once Natalie relayed what happened to her to her family, something along the lines of “I just got dizzy. I didn't eat,” Nicola recounted; both sisters had a good idea as to what happened to her.
“I know that game was a little bit early and it was too early for her to eat breakfast by the time she (usually) gets to the arena,” Nicola said.
Natalie has always been an extremely picky eater, Nicola explained. Her daily breakfast is some sort of variation of scrambled eggs, toast, and avocado. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s fast, and it’s easy. So when work demands more attention and her routines get jumbled, like any workaholic enveloped in their work, it becomes harder for Natalie to make time for her own needs.
Norie echoed this when asked whether she worries about Natalie’s self-care when work gets busy.
“It's just finding simple foods that she will eat before she leaves,” Norie explained. “I've found like she'll eat boiled eggs, which are fast to eat. I found English muffins yesterday that she will actually eat and she really likes.”
Natalie noted earlier this week that Norie left a bunch of pre-packed meals and snacks around her kitchen for her to take into work so that she wouldn’t have to worry about eating as she rolled through her daily schedule as head coach of the Valkyries. Norie noted that the meals she packed were very specifically designed so Natalie could eat on the go– hard-boiled eggs, Spam musubis, toast, those kinds of things.
“She'll say like, oh, she wants this, she wants that, technically it's like yeah, you say that, but you're not gonna eat it,” Norie said. “It has to be like stuff that she can just stuff in her mouth. My thinking is when she's on the go, it's something that she'll just eat really fast. They give her sandwiches and stuff, but she's not gonna eat that because it takes too long to eat.”
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Basketball is Natalie Nakase's form of connection
Still, it’s hard for Nicola and Norie not to worry about their sister, even if they’re doing everything they can to support her.
“You can't monitor her 24/7. So a lot of it is just basic stuff like sleeping and eating,” Nicola said. “You can't force her to sleep or stay asleep, and you can't force her to eat… I just try to be a sounding board for her… I try to watch as much film and like all the interviews of her opposing team, and give her all the intel I can just so that she's not stressed out staying up all night watching film.”
But Nakase's taken the wake-up call to heart. She’s wearing a heart monitor for the foreseeable future as a precaution to track her vitals. Norie noted that she’s mixing in episodes of Friends in between her film sessions to break up all the basketball. Earlier in the week, Natalie admitted she’s realized how little she eats when it gets busy.
“I do realize now, watching myself, I don't eat,” Nakase said. “So I need to do a better job. Because I'm so excited with the film and the game planning, and so I just,- I forget.”
Still, if you watch Nakase long enough, you can understand why she gets so caught up in what she loves. In the small glimpses we get of Golden State's practices, you'll see the 5-foot-2 Nakase in the midst of a drill competing with her players. You'll see her high-fiving anyone and everyone she goes up to. You'll realize it when she calls the Valkyries her family. For some, that sounds like coach-speak. For Nakase, it's the truth. After all, basketball is what brings her family together.
Basketball energizes Nakase; it energizes her relationships. And above all else, this is her dream. And dreams might mean as much to Nakase as basketball does.
Last season, during some downtime between media availabilities, Nakase talked to a couple of beat reporters and asked one if they enjoyed covering Golden State and being a sports journalist. The beat reporter responded, “Yeah, of course, this is my dream job,” which pleased Nakase.
“That's good. I'm big on dreams,” Nakase said.
When basketball is your dream, and basketball is what binds your family, how can you not be an all-in, “sicko” like Nakase is? That's the only way she knows. And it has her on the precipice, with her and the Valkyries four wins away from basketball glory.