My Life, My Fight

Steven Adams is only the second New Zealander to play in the NBA. And he’s had a decent career too. He’s never been an all-star, but he had five solid years with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and at one point signed a $100 million contract with them.

Adams is known to be one of the nicest guys in the NBA – very friendly, very down-to-Earth. There’s a video floating around of him giving up an easy shot to prevent an opponent from taking a hard fall.

(Here’s a full 17-minute video of Adams being a “gentle giant.”)

This is his autobiography. It was written in 2018 towards the end of his stint with OKC. Since then, he’s bounced around for a few different teams – he’s currently playing for the Rockets.

I don’t have any particular affinity to NBA bios, but he’s Kiwi (so am I, remember), which is neat, and I’ve always been partial to the big, background guys who support their teammates rather than take center stage.

Adams was one of 14 kids. Actually, no one really knows how many kids his father had – reports range from 14 to 21. His father apparently had an thing for Pacific Island women, because there were quite a few different mothers involved who were mix of ethnicities, but they all mainly stayed with their father, which is interesting.

Adams mother is Tongan. One of his (full) sisters is Valerie Adams, who won a couple Olympic gold medals in the shot put, and another sister is Lisa Adams who was born with cerebral palsy yet has also managed to win shot put gold medals in the para-Olympics.

Everyone in the family was tall. Both Adams and his father are 6’11’ (his mother, curiously, was only 5’1”). Val is 6’4”, and he has a couple of brothers who played semi-pro basketball in New Zealand.

His family life was pretty fractured. He was very close to his father who died when he was 13. After that, he bounced around a bit, lived with his mother for a stretch, got into trouble, but was then rescued by a network of friends who moved him from Rotorua to Wellington and into a prominent private high school where he could develop his basketball talent. After school, he did one season of pro ball in New Zealand, spent one year at the University of Pittsburgh, and was then drafted to the NBA in the first round.

Again, this was written right at the end of his five years with the Thunder. He goes through those five years in detail – he played with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbook during that time – and does a nice job in explaining some of the intricacies of basketball without getting bogged down in it (it reminded me of Andre Agassis’s autobiography, Open, in this sense).

He talks about friendships and how the business of basketball sometimes makes that hard. In one anecdote, he sits next to a teammate on the bus ride to a game, then notices his friend never came inside the building – turns out he was traded right as he stepped off the bus. Adams gets back to New Zealand as often as he can, and he’s dragged a bunch of his teammates back over the years to work at his youth basketball camps.

(Anoter fun quirk is the New Zealand slang. Adams uses a lot of it, and doesn’t always explain what it means. Sometimes you can pick it up from context, but other terms remain a mystery.)

He has a couple comments about race. He refers to himself as a “brown kid” more than once. At one point, in an interview, he referred to some black opponents as “quick little monkeys,” and was accused of racism. He discusses how “monkey” has a different slang meaning in New Zealand, and he was genuinely ignorant of its meaning in America. He makes the point that even though he’s technically a person-of-color, he’s considered “European White” by his teammates, but “colored” by Americans, which leads to some weird double standards.

The book is simple but endearing. It had a co-author, of course, but it’s a friend of Adams’ from New Zealand who played basketball with him, so it doesn’t seem overly polished. Adams genuinely seems like a nice kid who came from nowhere, grew up with nothing, and loves his sport, yet still has very strong ties to his family, his friends, and his country or origin.

Book Data

Author

Steven Adams

Year

2018

Pages

288

Acquired

Not recorded

Open Library

OL21185471W

• I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on July 10, 2026.
• A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.