Hoop dreams don’t come easy in Baltimore. When the ball is out on the hardwood for a pickup game and a player delivers an indelible amalgamation of handles before spraying a fadeaway three-pointer from near half court in one of Charm City’s immortal sanctums, it’s not sweet. Instead, the mind-boggling play is fused with trash talk and bragging rights that ignite fierce competition.
The battles provoke the inner beast and desire for respect. Earning fortuity on the court demands the optimum degree of belief in self. Ignore the height and bypass the size and stature. Measure the tenacity and the will to succeed. When it comes to basketball in the heart of Baltimore—a city submerged within the country’s top five metropolises for homicides, along with drug addiction and a massive legion of crime—nothing is given and everything is earned. That credence was instilled into LSU star Angel Reese.
In the summer of 2016 as a freshman at St. Frances Academy—the oldest self-sustaining Black Catholic high school in the country, not far from the Baltimore Juvenile Detention Center and the Baltimore City Correctional Facility—Reese quickly realized the value of being bold and standing up for herself and her teammates. At 14 years old, she was playing in a game at “The Dome,” one of the vaunted courts in east Baltimore, where basketball is woven together with passion and life lessons. “Every game was a dog fight for them,” says the elder Angel, Reese’s mother. “They were top dogs, and there was pressure to win.” The acclaimed semi-indoor court is enclosed by a series of gates. As Reese remembers it, there were fiery exchanges with the opposition. “You have to be who you are and not be apologetic about it,” she says. The crowded venue included droves of fans endlessly banging on the fences, forcing officials to stop the game.
Reese, who had skyrocketed to 6’3'' after two growth spurts ahead of her freshman year, didn’t have a problem with boasting her talent on the court. But she also didn’t see any issues with meshing her ingenuity on the hardwood with trash talk and banter. After all, her little brother, Julian—who is 13 months younger but towers over her as a 6'9'' forward and one of four players who averages double-figure point totals at Maryland—can do it. “I don’t let anybody dictate how and who I am,” Reese says. “I never wanted to think I can’t do what Julian does. The trash talk, he kind of put that in me.”
Seven years later, it all serves as motive in the brewing of a Baltimore prodigy—infused with an animated personality and brassy core—as a powerful force of nature, running the baselines in front of more than 13,200 discordant fans inside the Pete Maravich Center, or as longtime ESPN college basketball broadcaster Dick Vitale once named “The Deaf Dome.” She’s LSU’s Bayou Barbie in a Baton Rouge battleground that has quickly become the “City of Angel.” She stands out on the court—and not just because of her long flowing hair, bold eyelashes and one-leg sleeve. She is a She’s constantly surveying the ball, completing acrobatic finishes and putbacks around the rim, vaulting over her defender for rebounds like former Tigers great and WNBA legend Sylvia Fowles did for her teammates. She’s patrolling the paint with authority, snatching ferocious blocks in mid air like another LSU star and Naismith Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal, the WNBA’s Margo Dydek or Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo.
Instead of using the iconic Mutombo finger wag, Reese has her own gestures—she dances, motions the “finger lickin’ good” tag or stares you down while delivering spicy on-court vernacular that might result in a technical foul, like it did after she swatted Arkansas’s Samara Spencer layup attempt while holding her shoe in her hand back in January. It sent fans inside the PMAC into a frenzy but struck a chord across social media after the undefeated Tigers’ 19th win of the season. “[The block] wasn’t intended to be anything,” she adds. But after asking the official to wait to put her shoe on, the game kept flowing, business as usual, and she protected her sovereign territory. “She’s very unapologetic, and sometimes it works in your favor and sometimes it doesn’t,” Reese’s mom says. “She can come off a little abrasive but she’s really a sensitive gentle giant.”
While some loathe Reese’s audacious character, LSU has been the ideal place for the gifted forward to thrive, especially with a fearless and brazen chief like second-year coach Kim Mulkey, who has decades of experience and a winning pedigree at her disposal. As No. 3 LSU (23–0, 11–0 in SEC) prepares for its biggest assessment of the season, against the reigning national champion No. 1 South Carolina (23-0, 10-0) on Sunday at Colonial Life Arena, Reese’s 23 straight double-double performances this season along with the play of her teammates will be in a prime-time spotlight ahead of the NFL’s Super Bowl. But to think that just nine months ago, Reese would not have had the chance to embrace this moment had she not pivoted down to the Bayou State.