There’s a new and completely absurd docu-comedy series on HBO called “The Rehearsal,” which simulates raising a child from birth to adulthood at warp speed by regularly swapping out actors and aging the fake kid by three years every week. It’s just as jarring as it sounds. Kind of like watching Adou Thiero (in real life) grow a foot from freshman year of high school to the summer before his freshman year in college, which his parents have done. Or like seeing the kid shoot up the last couple inches just since he signed with Kentucky, which the coaching staff has done. Or like realizing that he’s still actively growing and wondering what he might be by the time he plays his first real game for the Wildcats, which everyone who knows Thiero’s story is now doing.
“That’s the thing I’m waiting to see, seriously,” his father, Almamy, says. “Adou is gonna mess around and be a 6-8 freshman before the season starts. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he has no facial hair, no underarm hair, nothing. He’s not even close to done growing. We always knew this would happen at some point — his mom is 6-4 and I’m 6-9, so the genetics are right — and we know more is still coming. We’ve prepared him for this. We’ve told him that the pains that come are a natural thing, something to be thankful for and not to worry about. We’ve told him if his knees hurt, push through it, because growing pains are not injury pains.”
Yes, this whole thing is as weird for Thiero as one might imagine, like trading places every few days with a larger version of himself. Like waking up in a whole new body every few months. He was a 5-foot-7 high school freshman, then a 6-foot junior, then a 6-5 senior, and now he’s listed at 6-6, 200 pounds on Kentucky’s official roster, which is probably already inaccurate. Teammate Chris Livingston says he’s about 6-7 and Thiero, who was easily shorter the first time they met, stands basically eye-to-eye with him today.
“It’s insane. It doesn’t make sense,” Livingston says. “Like, who knows where it stops? That’s crazy exciting for his potential.”
“I swear to you, I look at him and I say, ‘He’s getting bigger,’” says John Calipari, who coached Almamy at Memphis. “He was 5-8 at my basketball camp. Eighth grade, ninth grade. Dad would bring him down and he’d always say, ‘I want to play for you,’ and I’m looking at 5-8 like, OK, kid. But then I went and watched him (last season), and he was 6-5 and I’m like, wow. His instincts are so good and, because he’s played on the ball, when he gets it, he can make plays. And he’s big.”
Sounds like Adou Thiero might get some run the other four starters tonight. Kid balled out last night.
— Kyle Tucker (@KyleTucker_ATH) August 11, 2022
Bigger all the time. Which has led to some strange new realities. Thiero says he’s not as good a shooter as he once was, because his hands have grown so large. But he can really handle the rock because “the ball just feels little in my hands now.” He didn’t get his first in-game dunk until junior year of high school — and that was a rim-grazing putback — but these days he’s “trying to dunk on someone every chance I get.” There are still surreal moments when his mind tells him he’s an undersized point guard but his body, now that of a small forward, instinctively demonstrates otherwise.
“When your arms are so much longer, you can really cover a lot more ground,” Thiero says. “When you’re 5-10, a lot of those passes you’re just deflecting or barely missing because you can’t get a hand on them. When you’re 6-6, you’re stealing that ball and getting to the end to finish above the rim. I definitely have those moments where I don’t think I can do something and then realize, oh yeah, I can now.”
The downside is those growing pains his father predicted. They are here and they’re intense. Sharp pains in his knees and back, not to mention a nagging groin injury, were enough to keep him out of several practices and workouts this summer. “We told him, ‘Just manage it,’” Almamy says. “You can’t fall behind at Kentucky. You’ve just got to find a way to tolerate it. With all of his growth spurts, we always worked through the pains.”
Dad knows his old coach too well. He asked Calipari not to go easy on Thiero, rather to push him beyond his comfort zone and pull every ounce of potential out of whatever body the kid ends up with. To that end, this was Calipari’s assessment of Thiero at the beginning of UK’s recent week in the Bahamas to play four exhibition games: “You can’t make the club in the tub. You can’t tell me your groin hurts, your little toe. Fine, you’re our 11th man then. You shouldn’t be, but that’s your choice.”
Thiero chose differently on that trip. He was so nervous the night before his debut, against a Dominican team with multiple pros and an average age of 24 ½, that he asked roommate Oscar Tshiebwe how to block out the crippling fear of failure. The national player of the year’s advice — predictably, just to play hard — worked well. In Thiero’s first five minutes wearing a Kentucky uniform, he had five points, two blocks, two assists, a steal and a 3-pointer. He had a cat-quick steal and slam within seconds of entering the game.
He was just getting started. Thiero turned into the biggest surprise of the week. Considered a long-term project, a zero-star recruit this time last year, he ended up averaging the eighth-most minutes and points on the team in four exhibition games. He even earned a start. In 57 total minutes, he produced 25 points, 12 rebounds, seven assists, seven steals, five blocks and just two turnovers. He hit 10 of 17 shots and 3 of 6 from 3-point range. He says he’s been retraining his giant hands to shoot better. Teammates and coaches alike were about as stunned as a parent would be putting a 3-year-old to bed and finding a 6-year-old in the morning.
“Adou surprised me,” Calipari admits.
“Um, uh, ah, nah, I didn’t see this coming, honestly,” Livingston says, wide-eyed and laughing. “He really impressed me. He played great, jumping in passing lanes, knowing what to do now that he’s so long and athletic.”
“Adou is better than I thought,” assistant Chin Coleman says.
“I feel like that boy is going to end up being a superstar in this place some day,” Tshiebwe says. “He might be 8 feet tall, but he’ll have that handle, that jump shot. He might be Anthony Davis.”
That’s the most famous growth spurt in Kentucky basketball history. The average-sized guard from Chicago who nearly committed to Cleveland State, then shot up to almost 7 feet and became the best player in America. A boy can dream. Thiero’s parents have been dreaming for a long time. Dad is a former top-100 recruit, mom a WNBA Draft pick, and even when Adou entered his senior high school season without a single high-major scholarship offer, they believed something big was just around the corner.
“What people don’t understand with Adou is that we predetermined every aspect of this process up to college,” Almamy says. “We knew he would grow. We knew he’d been in the gym since 3 years old. We knew he would be a very good player at the end of this process. So to keep him humble, we kept him away from all the attention, all the rankings. Not a single day did we travel to get him seen at a recruiting event, a ranking event, just so he would be ranked whatever in the country. We wanted people to find out about him in college. Plenty of guys hear, ‘You’re so good! You’re so good!’ when they’re young and then bust in college because of false confidence. We wanted to make sure he was not in the public eye until it was time, and now is that time.”
Adou Thiero’s jump shot was working in the Bahamas, making three of his six 3-point attempts.
Thiero actually ended up a four-star prospect and earned other quality offers this spring — Maryland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Xavier among them — but the appeal of playing for Calipari and Kentucky only increased when the coach shared his vision for what he might become.
“He said he wanted me to be a defensive player of the year and no other coach said that. That really caught my eye,” Thiero says. “People don’t really find defense as important. They always want to get the people who can score a whole bunch, when defense is really important in this game.”
When he arrived in Lexington, most assumed Thiero was a long-term project, a futures bet that was certainly worth taking based on genetics and might pay off in two or three years. By the time he left the Bahamas, Thiero had already outgrown that expectation.
“I came in thinking everyone gets their chance, so when I get mine, I’m going to show my skills,” he says. “I was always confident, because from a young age I’ve been working to get here. Now that I have that chance, I’m not just going to come in and think, ‘Oh, everyone is better than me. Let me just do a little bit.’ I’m going to come here and do what I’ve always been doing.”
Thiero’s parents and three sisters were on a trip to Africa while Kentucky was in the Bahamas, so they watched Adou’s first college games via a wonky connection in the wee hours. The feed cut in and out frequently, but they saw enough to know that a lot more people were going to know his name after that trip.
“He knows he belongs,” Almamy says. “But it was a time to show a lot of people who didn’t understand him being recruited by Kentucky, who were just thinking it was a coach doing a favor to his former player. No, he earned his right to be there. You don’t think a Hall of Fame coach like Cal knows what a good player looks like? Some people didn’t understand that, and now they do. He showed people who wondered why he was there: This is why. It was a great feeling.”
And to think, those four exhibition games were just the rehearsal. With more than two months until the real show starts, Thiero might be an even bigger deal by then.
(Photos: Chet White / UK Athletics)
