Rondo: Master of Connect 4

The Globe's Charlie Pierce has an epic piece (7 web pages!) on Rajon Rondo.

He recaps Rondo's childhood and athletic career. I didn't learn a whole lot, but I did pull out some of the interesting tidbits. Here are some excerpts:

On Rondo's defensive genius:

And throughout, he has become unquestionably the most vividly athletic player on the team. Garnett is an emotional cyclone and Allen has his spun-gold jump shot. Pierce has a dozen ways to score he hasn’t tried yet. But it is Rondo who brings people out of their seats. Defensively, he appears to be possessed of the same kind of athletic clairvoyance -- in reality, a kind of hyperattuned anticipation -- that Bird once had on offense.

As a child Rondo was extremely competitive, especially during games of Connect 4.

And central to everything was Connect Four, a Milton Bradley game from 1974, an upright version of checkers in which the first player to get four of his pieces in a row -- vertically, horizontally, or diagonally -- is the winner. The sessions went on for hours. If Rajon was losing, they went on ever longer. “Connect Four, I was pretty much the man,” he says today. “I ran a couple guys here. You can ask Mr. Allen -- talking about Ray there. You can ask a couple of kids. They came to watch practice, and they ended up getting beat.”

On Rondo's love for football:

When they all hit Meyzeek Middle School, it was Bentley who was the basketball star. Rondo’s heart was in football. He lived for the contact, and he loved how, as the quarterback, he was the focal point of any team on which he played. However, when Bentley began to play basketball in an open gym program run at Eastern High School by Doug Bibby, the school’s coach, Rondo tagged along. “The first time I saw him,” Bibby says, “I knew he could be an incredible ballplayer, because it was open gym, and he was in eighth grade, and he was pretty much dominating the game against young adults.”

On playing at Oak Hill Academy:

“When he came to us,” recalls Steve Smith, the longtime coach at Oak Hill, “he was probably borderline Top 100. After about a month, I thought, ‘This guy’s really good.’ He had those huge hands and that long wingspan.” During that season, Smith took Oak Hill to Barcelona to play against some Spanish teams. In one game, with Josh Smith in foul trouble, Rondo put up 55 points, many of them against Sergio Rodriguez, a Spanish star who now plays for Portland in the NBA.

“You try to go into a game figuring any guy can embarrass you,” Rondo explains. “He can be better than you on a single night if he’s on. You don’t want that to happen to you.”

On playing at Kentucky:

In 2004, Rondo was recruited by the University of Kentucky, and he played two seasons there, chafing under the patterned offensive system favored by then-coach Tubby Smith. Rondo wanted to run, and Smith didn’t want him to, and the two clashed regularly, with Smith benching Rondo for six games. It was here that Rondo’s reputation for stubbornness, and for uncoachability, was born, even as he led the Southeastern Conference in assists as a sophomore. (Now at the University of Minnesota, Smith declined to return phone calls for this story.) When Rondo decided to declare for the 2006 NBA draft, more than a few people at Kentucky were not sad to see him leave.