SACRAMENTO — The first thing Mick Cronin did was get on the phone with the kid. The kid, in this instance, was Amari Bailey, a long-since anointed Sierra Canyon star who had committed to Cronin’s predecessor, who could go play anywhere for anyone at a moment’s notice, who would now surely be reassessing his options.
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Situations like this do not typically resolve themselves simply. Not when elite, high-profile prospects are involved. The hype machine revs up. Coaches get hooks in. The whole unflattering circus that attends to the existence of talented teenage basketball players erects the tents and sets up another high-flying show. Time to build a new top 10 list, and leak one school strategically once a day for 10 days. Schedule a bunch of new visits, commission 10 new Twitter image edits, maybe start a podcast. Really milk the whole thing for clout.
And if there seemed to be a kid that might be likely to do something like that, well, maybe that kid was Amari Bailey. Cronin wouldn’t have known. Sierra Canyon itself — home of Bronny James, a content mill as well as a basketball operation — had long since acclimated Bailey to bright spotlights. The kid had 500,000-plus followers on Instagram; he got as many comments on his basketball posts as when he wore a cool outfit. Would Cronin, a no-BS Midwesterner heading to UCLA from Cincinnati, and facing immediate questions about his ability to catch the whole Hollywood vibe, find himself at the mercy of a celebrity-oriented re-recruitment? Was this what Cronin had signed up for?
Turned out, not at all.
“Amari Bailey’s recruitment was one of the easiest things I’ve ever done,” Cronin said last week in Sacramento, jovial at the press conference dais. He stops for emphasis. “No, I’m being serious.” Bailey had committed to UCLA early in his high school days, and so he explored his options a little more thoroughly after Steve Alford was fired on New Year’s Eve 2018, but fundamentally he remained set on the Bruins, not least because his family had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago for his basketball career and he didn’t want to make them move again. But also: He and Cronin immediately hit it off.
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“He never even took an official visit,” Cronin said. “We started talking. After a while, he committed, and I didn’t even tell my staff. I was recruiting him myself. One day he committed. He told me, ‘Hey, Coach, is it all right if I commit on my birthday?’ We had a talk about things, his mom and I and him. He goes, ‘I’m going to announce it on my birthday, two weeks later.’ I said, ‘Whatever you want to do, man.’
“So I forgot about it. I’m in the middle of a season. He announced his commitment (in February 2021). I walked in that day and the staff is looking at me, like, ‘What?!'” Cronin holds his arms in an exaggerated shrugging position; even now, two years later, you can get a small sense of the goofy satisfaction that involved showing up to the office that day. “I said, ‘It’d be nice if you guys would do something to help out a little bit. Maybe you could sign somebody.'”
“It was funny, but it was really easy,” Cronin said. “He’s a no-nonsense guy and so am I. Once we got to know each other, the rest was easy.”
Such is the Amari Bailey experience. You could guess it might be one way, but it’s the other way. It turns out, the kid who moved to L.A. to become a star at Sierra Canyon, with a huge presence on social media almost independent of basketball, the kid whose mom appeared in a reality TV show about how to raise a star basketball son and has been publicly linked to dating Drake, is actually just a low-key, straight-ahead basketball junkie. “It’s just my obsession,” Bailey said. “There has been this perception that I’m not focused, or this or that. But I’m really just locked in on ball.” After a fitful but always promising first year in college basketball, Bailey has arrived at the Sweet 16 as perhaps UCLA’s most improved — and maybe even most important — player, a Hollywood-residing testament to the willingness to keep your head down and do the work.
Bailey’s mother, Johanna Leia, remembers his first basketball, part of a little toy hoop she stuck to the inside of the rear passenger window in her car. For a little while there, the car was the only way to get a toddler-age Amari to calm down, but once he discovered the wonders of holding a ball at all hours of the day, childhood began in earnest. He brought a ball everywhere, stuffed or otherwise.
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It was apparent that Bailey had talent from the jump. His mom played basketball in high school, and his father, Aaron Bailey, was an NFL wide receiver, so the natural athletic talent was always there. He was one of those kids you see in the early recreational sports who clearly needs to move up a level; when he was 4, he played with 6-year-olds. “I was like, well, this is great, is there any way we can bump him up?” Leia said. She took him out of what was essentially a recreational program designed for kids to learn the game and make friends, and into more intentionally serious ball, the Small Fry program, which describes itself as “developmental, yet extremely competitive.” It was the first step in a lifetime of upward hoops trajectory.
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It was also not really his neighborhood. “He was light-skinned, and we lived downtown,” his mother said. He started playing in different parts of the city, playing everywhere, against everyone, at some of the harder parks and gyms on the south and west side, places like Foster Park. “It was the ‘hood,” Leia said. “I’m a single mother. I’m like, is this really what I should be doing? But the competition was exactly what he needed.”
It created a dynamic where Bailey felt like he was constantly proving himself to people. “It’s like, here’s this little light-skinned boy hooping in the middle of the night, under the street lights,” Bailey said. Was he tough? Where was he from? These were the pertinent questions for a while, though they were eventually subsided under the simplest and most important one: Was he good? Yes. He was very good.
Still, the way he grew up, he said, he “didn’t have a part of the city that could really claim me,” that embraced him as its own. “For him, where he was playing, it was like, if you didn’t come from the south or the west side, you couldn’t play. Or at least you were judged more harshly,” Leai said. “He has always been challenged in a way lots of other kids weren’t.” The lack of a basketball home, a place that he fully identified with (or it with him), maybe helped develop him into the kind of player coaches love — a talented kid with a quiet edge.
In any case, he was always one of the best young players in his age group anywhere. He wasn’t a late bloomer, or the beneficiary of a growth spurt; he was always just good. At age 13, he committed to DePaul, which, OK, maybe a little overenthusiastic there; he decommitted before his freshman year of high school began. (It was worth a shot, DePaul.) It is around this same time that Leia, both a real estate professional and a model (and now the owner of a marketing and management company) was offered an opportunity to participate in a Lifetime show called “Bringing Up Ballers.”
Leia says it was pitched as a celebration of strong female role models, a look at entrepreneurial mothers using their business skills to help their sons reach their basketball goals. Leia had worked hard to be flexible and successful as a single mom; she was happy to showcase that on a TV show. But the whole thing pretty quickly revealed itself as your standard reality-show fare, with the producers interested most of all in making sure the women fought fiercely and frequently.
“I thought it was magical in this sense that it’s shining light on women who are juggling busy schedules and kids in sports and there’s a lot of time and dedication involved — and then it just turned into this catty space,” Leia said. “And I’m like, all right, if this is going to turn catty, it’s going to turn catty. And, to be quite honest, Amari hated it.”
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There are plenty of coaches who would have viewed the reality show thing as, well — if not a bright red stop light, then at least a flashing yellow. Is this where the focus really ought to be? What else is going on here? Then, Bailey and his family made one more big move, to Chatsworth, California, where Bailey enrolled at Sierra Canyon. It was already a high-profile, national-brand hoops program when Bailey arrived as a freshman. By his sophomore season, when Bronny James, son of LeBron James and very large celebrity in his own right enrolled, everything went to 11. Elite hoops prospects have a lot of eyeballs on them already; the Bronny James thing is non pareil. There is a reticence among coaches to take James on as a player when he is eligible as a college freshman next year, such was the size of the storm around him in high school. Bailey was in the eye of that storm. Suddenly, Floyd Mayweather and Drake and Chief Keef and the Kardashians and you-name-it-based-on-the-night were showing up to his high school basketball games, where as a junior he was always the best, most dominant guy on the court, arguably the best high school basketball player in the country.
He amassed a big Instagram following of his own. His mom became a minor tabloid personality. He bought her a car with his name, image and likeness earnings. Bailey began to see himself from the outside, to understand why others might have a certain idea about him and his family, or even just, like, the stuff he posts alone; he began to understand what others might assume his life was like. It is the kind of inside-out surreality that could cause even a particularly solid young person to lose their way.
“I can’t control everything else that goes on around me,” he said. “I can’t control the tension that comes with it. All I can do is go out and be Amari every day.”
What he could control was how he responded to all of it, and his response usually was: go to the gym. He was always in the gym. “He never had to be told to get in,” his coach at Sierra Canyon, Andre Chevalier, said. Some guys do. Plenty of elite college players don’t love the work as much as they maybe should; plenty do it out of obligation. It is the select, elite few who are incredibly talented and want to spend all night putting balls into the Shoot-A-Way machine. Bailey is, by all accounts, one of the latter.
“He has goals and aspirations that he wants to achieve,” Chevalier said, “and he is locked into that at a very high level.”
This is why he ended up at UCLA in the first place. “The first conversations I had with Coach Cronin, it was like, ‘I don’t care who you are or what you bring to the table, if you don’t play defense, you’re not going to play for me,'” Bailey said. “And I was like, ‘Now that’s a guy I would love to play for.'”
That desire to work has also made the initial transition to college ball smoother than it often is for freshmen. Not unlike classmate Adem Bona, Bailey arrived on campus having worked physically hard enough to compete with college athletes. This is the first step, and it’s a major one, especially given the kind of comprehensive, muscular defense Cronin wants his teams to play.
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“(He and Adem) are really unique,” Cronin said. “A lot of freshmen, they’re delusional, because other people have told them that it’s going to be easy. It’s not the kid’s fault. They get to college and they’re playing against 22-, 23-, 24-year-olds. It’s way harder than they thought. They can’t play hard enough. The game is too physical. The game is too fast. They’re not tough enough yet. It just takes some time. That’s 98 percent of ’em. Amari and Adem physically could compete and play hard enough to be able to play from day one.”
With the physical piece already there, Bailey could focus on elevating his game to the college level, and to the specificities of Cronin’s needs. This has been a more gradual, occasionally frustrating process. Bailey’s start to the season was fine; he played well more often than not. But against top competition, like UCLA’s losses to Illinois and Baylor one November weekend in Las Vegas, he had just six combined points in 49 total minutes. Then, in late December, he injured his foot, causing him to miss seven games, including Jan. 21’s offensively ugly road loss to Arizona.
Lots of kids with Bailey’s recruiting bona fides might have been irreversibly disappointed by the relatively slow start to the season. His shooting numbers have never been bad, but his 23.4 percent turnover rate has killed his efficiency, and generally speaking, with the way UCLA plays a) pretty slow and b) through its two elite seniors, there aren’t always a ton of shots to go around. Even someone able to intellectualize the situation — when you show up to play with Tyger Campbell, Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Jaylen Clark, you can’t expect to take 20 shots a night — might have found themselves viscerally frustrated by the situation. The NBA has always been the goal. That first humbling hits hard, and the portal is always there for you.
For Bailey, sure, the frustration crept in. But his belief in Cronin also allowed him to keep his head down and trust the work. “That’s my guy,” Bailey said. “Since I got here, he has done absolutely nothing except hold me accountable. I’m not looking for my behind to be kissed, I’m looking to work.” And so he worked, already knowing the work does pay off eventually. Come back from the injury, get healthy, get all the way there defensively, get a feel for playing with Jaquez and Campbell, the way they can feel each other, having played and grown together for the past four years.
“Amidst all of the stuff,” Leia said, “he just, you know, really loves basketball.”
Then, of course, came Jaylen Clark’s season-ending injury, and what was ostensibly a disaster for UCLA has instead not been all that damaging after all — the mitigating factor being Bailey. In the five games since Clark suffered his season-ending Achilles injury, Bailey has averaged 17 points, up from the 9.6 he was averaging in the regular season. He had 26 points against Colorado in the Pac-12 tournament and 19 in the Pac-12 tournament title game, when he officially emerged as the third pillar to Jaquez and Campbell that UCLA desperately needs.
He remained as much during UCLA’s first two NCAA Tournament games in Sacramento. It was startling to watch, frankly. Whereas Bailey had occasionally looked awkward and off the pace early in the season, against UNC Asheville he effortlessly cruised, and against Northwestern he often looked like the best player on the floor. Meanwhile, his defensive acumen is way up. He shut Northwestern guard Boo Buie down in the first half; Bailey looked like a pro. UCLA is obsessed with deflections, like most great defenses, and Bailey and Jaquez have taken it upon themselves to pick up the deflection slack — and maybe even win UCLA’s “deflection bone,” awarded to players who have the most tracked deflections each, so as to signify those with the most dog in them. When Clark, the best defender in the country, was hurt, he was way out ahead of the rest of the team on the season. Bailey and Jaquez have led the way since.
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Such is the state of things for UCLA’s trip to the Sweet 16, where it will meet Gonzaga Thursday night in Las Vegas. Alongside Campbell and Jaquez, no UCLA player will be more important to the Bruins’ chances of advancing than Bailey. This is exactly the sort of all-important game Bailey dreamed of when he committed in the first place. Now it is here.
“I believe that all good things take time,” Bailey said. It has been a long road for him, and for his family, from Chicago to L.A., from a reality TV show to social media stardom, but all with a fundamental underlying element — a kid who loves the game itself way more than all of the other stuff, and always has.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photo: Jed Jacobsohn / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)