Dan Wetzel - Epic Athletes--Kevin Durant

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IT WAS THE FINAL MINUTE of the fourth quarter of Game 3 of the 2017 National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals and a single basketor rebound, steal, missed shot, or turnoverby either team could swing not just this neck-and-neck contest, but potentially the entire championship. The Cleveland Cavaliers led the Golden State Warriors, 113111 in a matchup that was about as close and tense as basketball can get.

Golden State had jumped to a 20 lead in the best-of-seven Finals, but heading into this contest, the Warriors knew better than to get overconfident. Just a year prior theyd won seventy-three regular season games and led these same Cavs 31 in The Finals. Theyd looked like one of the greatest teams in NBA history. Then LeBron James led a historic comeback that saw Cleveland win Games 5, 6, and 7 and take the NBA championship.

Now a year later, late in Game 3, every single Warriors player, coach, and fan had to wonder if LeBron might do enough to win this game and steal another championship from Golden State.

Thats when Kevin Durant reached up high with his long, long right arm and snatched a missed Cleveland shot out of the air. Suddenly Golden State was on the offensive with a chance to tieor take the lead.

Moments like this were exactly why the Warriors had brought Kevin to the team. And this was exactly the type of moment Kevin had hoped would come when hed signed with Golden State. He hadnt played for the Warriors in 201516 when theyd fallen short of winning The Finals. In the offseason that followed, Golden State signed Kevin as a free agent because the team felt it lacked one more player who could come up big in the sports loneliest of momentswhen the pressure of roaring fans and high stakes cause nerves to fray. They felt they needed someone who could close out games, like tonight, and thus would ensure that another LeBron-style comeback never happened again.

Officially Kevin is listed at six foot nine, but hes admitted that in his signature Nikes, he stands seven feet tall. He said he likes being listed as shorter than his true height as a joke, part of his fun, free-spirited personality.

Hed always been the tallest anywaythe tallest in his class in kindergarten, fourth grade, and middle school. He was this skinny kid who kept growing and growing and growing while being raised in Prince Georges County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. As much as his height helped him become a talented basketball player, it was his arms that set him apart even in the NBA, where almost everyone is tall.

With his arms stretched out, Kevins wingspan measured seven foot five end to end, and somehow he was still coordinated. He could shoot and dribble like someone a foot shorter. Yet he could rebound and block shots in a way no six-foot guard could even dream of doing.

So snagging that rebound was the easy part. What to do next was the tougher decision.

There were about fifty-one seconds remaining in the game. Golden State needed a basket. It needed a hero.

Kevin had always felt he was built for these kinds of make-or-break scenarios. His combination of size and skill made him nearly impossible to defend. He felt that when his team needed to score, he was the one capable of doing it, especially in big games.

Yet getting to the ultimate pressure-filled stage, The Finals, had proven difficult for him throughout his career. Hed spent eight years playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder (and one year prior when the team had been based in Seattle and was called the SuperSonics). Hed reached one NBA Finals in 2012, but lost to LeBron, who was playing for Miami then.

Kevin was twenty-two years old at the time and thought hed return regularly to The Finals.

He didnt. Oklahoma City always fell short. Sometimes it was in the Western Conference Finals. Sometimes it was due to injury. Whatever it was, Kevin couldnt get the NBA championship that he coveted.

He noted that hed spent his entire basketball life in second place. Hed been ranked the number two high school player in the country. He was the number two pick in the 2007 NBA draft. He finished, for years, at number two in the NBAs MVP voting (although he eventually won the award in 2014). He was always the runner-up, and never the champion. After ten years in the league, hed made millions of dollars and acquired millions of fans, hed starred in movies and television commercials, he was huge on social media, and he had become active in charitable giving.

The one thing he didnt have, however, was an NBA title.

He wanted one so desperately that he left Oklahoma City, where he was a beloved fan favorite and life was comfortable, to join the powerhouse Warriors in Oakland, where he needed to adjust his game and mentality to fit in with other established players. At Golden State, he wouldnt be the most popular player (that was Steph Curry), but he thrived on being part of a true team that could win it all.

So now he had not just the ball in his hand but destiny as well. Over twenty thousand Cavaliers fans were beginning to shout inside of the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, screaming to distract Kevin as he took the ball and began dribbling it up the court. De-fense! they chanted. De-fense!

That Kevin was able to masterfully handle the ball, at such a height, was a wonder that had become commonplace. He made it look easy, but in the rich history of basketball, there may never have been a player this tall who could dribble so well. There may never have been a seven-footer who could so effortlessly take over the role of point guard in an instant.

It had begun back in Prince Georges County, at a simple city recreational building in his hometown of Seat Pleasant. It was in Seat Pleasant that Kevin grew up with his older brother, Tony, raised mostly by his mother and grandmother (his father would reenter his life later). It was there that he met a couple of youth basketball coaches, Taras Brown and Charles Craig.

While they saw a kid who was taller than the other players, they didnt teach him the game in the traditional way. They didnt want Kevin to just play down low and grab rebounds, or learn only to score around the basket, as is the case for most power forwards and centers. He was too athletically gifted for that and his coaches saw that the sport of basketball was changing.

They taught Kevin how to play all the positions, including schooling him on dribbling, passing, and shooting from a distance by putting him through endless, repetitive drills. Dribbling through cones. Dribbling with both hands. Dribbling two balls at once. Dribbling, dribbling, dribbling.

Then theyd move on to shooting practice. Shot after shot, day after day, year after year. It was a basketball science project, like they were creating the perfect player in a lab. And Kevin was all for it, a tireless worker who understood that there were no shortcuts to becoming truly great.