Last March, J. J. Redick, a guard for the Los Angeles Clippers, confessed some of the worst financial mistakes he had made as a professional athlete. Shortly after being drafted by the Magic, in 2006, for instance, Redick purchased a house in Orlando, which he eventually sold at a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later, he splurged on a Porsche, which caused him back problems, before selling it two months later. And, at a charity auction, he bought a custom yellow golf cart with chrome rims, which didn’t have space to hold golf clubs. (He got rid of that, too.) “I think youth may have something to do with these bad decisions,” he said. “God, I was stupid.”
Redick, who is now thirty-two, revealed these bad decisions on a podcast—his own. “The Vertical Podcast with JJ Redick” grew out of a conversation that Redick had in 2015 with the sportswriter Adrian Wojnarowski, who was launching a new basketball publication for Yahoo. Wojnarowski asked Redick if he was interested in writing blog posts about life as a pro athlete, which could be published periodically throughout the season. “I started getting anxiety thinking back to my college term papers and having a deadline,” Redick told me recently. Besides, the idea seemed a little too similar to The Players’ Tribune, a digital outlet that also publishes personal essays written by athletes. “I have no issue with The Players’ Tribune,” Redick said. “But if we're going to do it, let’s do something different.”
Since débuting his podcast, last February, Redick has recorded forty episodes, each running about an hour in length. He told me that he usually spends a couple of hours preparing for an interview—and he books the guests himself, calling on the network of teammates, opponents, and coaches he has built over his playing career. (He’s also brought in guests from other fields, such as Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers' M.V.P. quarterback, and William C. Rhoden, a former sports columnist for the Times.) In the first episode, Redick and his former teammate Jared Dudley, who now plays for the Phoenix Suns, talked about everything from pregame shoot-around habits to the merits of the Beatles. (Redick thinks that they’re overrated. “Their music doesn’t seem as timeless to me as some other popular bands,” he said.)
The line between sports and media has been blurring for a while. The Players’ Tribune was founded, in 2014, by the former New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter; Uninterrupted, which gives athletes a platform for posting short videos about their lives, was started, that same year, by the Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James. Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat have given pro athletes ways to speak directly to their fans. Redick’s decision to become a member of the media in the middle of his professional prime—and in the middle of the N.B.A. season—was just another step in that evolution. (Redick is paid, not by Yahoo but by DGital Media, which produces the podcast and handles sales.)
Even though several of the early guests were friends and teammates of his, Redick was still anxious enough before taping the first dozen interviews that he had to drink a Shiner Bock to settle down. “I wasn't drinking during the episode,” he clarified, “but I would be, like, ‘Oh, God, I'm nervous,’ so I'd chug a beer real quick just to calm the nerves.”
At its best, the podcast provides a frank athlete’s perspective on subjects that may get overlooked amid game recaps and hot takes. In an episode from August, Redick’s teammate Blake Griffin talked about his experiences doing standup comedy, before launching into a routine mocking postgame interviews. “You exercise for two straight hours and then somebody puts a microphone in your face thirty seconds after you’re done,” Griffin said. “Did you not think it was a bad idea to ask somebody who’s spent their entire life lifting weights and cheating their way through school questions on live TV?”
A decade ago, Redick would’ve seemed an unlikely choice to emerge as a media trendsetter. At Duke University, where he celebrated his three-pointers, talked trash, and became the school’s all-time leading scorer, opposing fans generally hated him. (In 2013, Redick told Grantland, “I probably deserved it. I was sort of a prick.”) But when he reached the N.B.A. Redick at first struggled to earn meaningful playing time. Orlando eventually traded him to Milwaukee; then Milwaukee shipped him to Los Angeles, five months later. Along the way, his reputation evolved from cocky shooter to intelligent, hardworking veteran. While in Los Angeles, he’s had a front-row seat for some of the N.B.A.’s biggest stories, from the scandal surrounding ex-Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was eventually banned from the league for racist remarks that were leaked to the press, to the more lighthearted free-agent saga of Clippers center DeAndre Jordan, who almost joined the Dallas Mavericks, in the summer of 2015, before shocking the league by changing his mind, amid a flurry of cryptic emoji-filled tweets from his teammates.
Redick released one episode at the beginning of this season, in October, but after that decided to take a brief hiatus to focus on his game. “I will be at the arena shooting before the game, or at dinner, and people will come up to me and be, like, ‘Hey, man. I love the podcast,’ and I'm like, ‘That's great. I appreciate it, but I'm a basketball player. I'm at work right now shooting threes, and you're talking about a podcast.’ It's just funny to me because I care so much about this job.”
Redick expects to return with new episodes later this season, but he made it clear that he doesn’t want to be a media personality when he retires. He may pursue an M.B.A., he said. Still, he has big short-term goals for his off-court career: “I've got to get Bill Murray on the podcast.”