Troy Thompson couldn’t be reached. He didn’t want to be reached.
The father of prodigious twin basketball players, Thompson’s voicemail warned interested parties not to leave messages on his personal line throughout the spring of 2021 — no matter the blue bloods or prestigious prep schools seeking his identical marvels, Amen and Ausar. After two weeks of evading calls, the elder Thompson even told the man tasked with recruiting an initial class for the upstart, deeply funded Overtime Elite he was taking his boys on a family vacation. They were unavailable for any chat, let alone any type of face-to-face.
Troy Thompson believed his own eyes, that his twins flashed such elite talent during youth camps they could shape into top-10 picks in the 2023 NBA Draft. After claiming Florida’s Class 4A state championship as juniors the previous winter, they hungered for one final gauntlet before breaking down the league’s front door. They could have stayed in state and joined Leonard Hamilton’s Seminoles. Or flocked to Kentucky for John Calipari’s fabled one-and-done routine. Overtime Elite? “At first, the boys were like, ‘No …,’” Thompson told Yahoo Sports.
That vacation wasn’t merely time in the Arizona sun, but a visit to powerhouse Hillcrest Prep in Phoenix, a clandestine itinerary Overtime’s fearless recruiter uncovered from his contacts dotting basketball’s winding grapevine. Sand was slipping through his hourglass. The man punched another dial into Thompson’s cell and persuaded the boys’ father to meet for lunch when the family returned home to Fort Lauderdale.
At first, Troy Thompson left the twins at home, a king coming to the table with only his queen, his wife, Maya. Overtime Elite’s head of basketball operations, Brandon Williams, made the trip alongside this shadow, this voice that had been promising the twins the world. The man, now 46, dressed in a designer sweatsuit from a collection so vast he could wear a different set every day for two months. He sported one of his 250 pairs of collectable sneakers, from a closet that used to boast over 1,000 soles. He does not play video games. He does not lurk in the evenings, texting teenagers how they have next. He relates to these phenoms through fashion, and, in turn, has helped many like Jordan Clarkson morph from unknowns in Tulsa to draft picks out of Missouri.
“I can help your sons,” he preached to Troy Thompson. “Let me tell you my story.”
This is the story of Tim Fuller.
Dave Odom kicked Fuller out of his Wake Forest open gyms four times during August 1996. No matter Fuller’s consistency as a starter at Woodbridge High School, a do-it-all glue guy representing Lake Ridge, Virginia, during four consecutive district titles, the then-Wake Forest head coach deemed the 6-foot-4 scrapper not good enough for his Demon Deacons. It didn’t matter Fuller once went toe-to-toe against Bethel High School superstar Allen Iverson. Odom called him The Fuller Brush Man, a clumsy sanitation worker fired from his street-cleaning gig at the center of a 1948 film.
Fuller had spurned interest from Princeton, Lehigh and Bucknell to pursue a walk-on spot in the ACC. Four ounces of resistance wouldn’t prevent his 190 pounds from chasing a roster that tall and talented senior Tim Duncan could lead to another conference championship, then deep into the Big Dance. With open gyms closed, Fuller mirrored the basketball team while they sprinted Wake Forest’s turf football field, and he raced up and down the stadium’s stairs.
Come September, Duncan returned from a summer serving on Team USA’s college select lineup that scrimmaged against the ’96 Olympic outfit still starring Charles Barkley. Duncan, the 7-footer destined to be the top NBA selection that June, hadn’t witnessed Fuller’s failed efforts to join his own squad. And Fuller had snuck back into the gym the day junior guard Jerry Braswell suffered a foot injury during their latest open run.
Duncan’s five needed a fifth. He called over the kid lingering on the sidelines.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Tim.”
The big man with the big fundamentals scrunched his brow. “That’s my name …”
Seven or eight possessions went by. Fuller set a back screen for Duncan. He skipped a rock into the post and cut seamlessly through the lane. Duncan soon kicked it back out to Fuller for a triple. They combined for a game-winning sequence, as Fuller recalled driving and dishing to Duncan for a victorious jam. The giant slapped Fuller on the rear. And unbeknownst to the hopeful walk-on, Duncan marched into Odom’s office to tell his coach of his fifth man with the same first name whom Wake Forest needed next practice.
That night, there was a call for Fuller on his dormitory’s landline. Meet the basketball players at 6 a.m., he was told, for their daily three-mile run through the school’s Winston-Salem campus. Fuller thought he’d gasped his last breath before that first distance finished. He’d never run that far. Incorrect shoes blistered his feet. After three weeks of three-mile bursts, another call to Fuller’s dorm informed the freshman to report to the locker room at 9 p.m. on the evening of that October’s Midnight Madness. The stalls were ordered sequentially. A wide-eyed Fuller found his chair and his jersey — No. 23 — next to Duncan’s No. 21.
“Welcome to the team, young fella,” Wake Forest’s superstar told Fuller before they ran out to a sea of screams.
That season and the three that followed introduced Fuller to his capacity for exhortation. His role posed no threat to teammates enjoying full rides, teammates for whom Fuller helped translate Odom’s messaging. He called certain guys making sure they were awake for those three-mile runs and called others making sure they were in bed before curfew. “The ability to see into people and see the things that they need and give it to ’em,” Fuller told Yahoo Sports. “Wake Forest squeezed it out of me.”
After graduation, Fuller trekked across town to West Forsyth High School. The junior varsity head coach resigned, and Fuller submitted an application. He’d soon bring his new youngsters to run pickup in that same Wake Forest open gym where his own story began. And his sophomore point guard left the opposite impression Fuller first gave Odom. The tiny ball-handler named Chris Paul flashed a feel and vision that outright schooled college veterans.
Skip Prosser, by then Wake Forest’s head coach, recruited Paul throughout the next winter as the junior floor general blossomed into the country’s No. 2 point guard. Paul would sign with the Deacons. And before Paul’s second and final campaign on campus, when there was an opening on Prosser’s staff, Paul rang the JV coach who helped guide him onto the national radar.
“I told Coach [Prosser] nobody’s ever been harder on me than you,” Paul said to Fuller. “I don’t know if that’s gonna help or hurt you.”
The walk-on-turned-mentor had since served as an assistant at North Carolina A&T and Elon University. He was set to join the Hurricanes’ staff at Miami, but inclement weather and the call from Paul changed Fuller’s path forever. He joined Prosser’s bench in 2004. While Nike personnel pitched Paul on endorsing the brand as a premier NBA prospect, the company first found Fuller. By 2007, after Fuller spent a year coaching at Fairfield, Paul aided Fuller’s interview process to join the ranks of the Swoosh as a marketing director under legendary vice president Lynn Merritt.
“The General,” as LeBron James affectionately calls Merritt, labeled his division the Nike Hoop Seals. Nico Harrison ranked as Merritt’s top lieutenant. Harrison once held a mission to not just know Fuller, but develop a rapport with the Wake assistant who held Paul’s ear. “Everybody that’s touching the athlete, you make it your business to know who they are,” Harrison told Yahoo Sports.
Over the next three years within Nike, Harrison detailed Fuller every page of his playbook that not only extended Nike’s basketball empire beyond James, but allowed Harrison to later earn the role of running the Mavericks’ basketball operations — and morph into one of the most respected lead NBA executives, who’s since shaped Dallas into a bona fide Finals contender around Luka Dončić. The job wasn’t about recruiting, it was about knowing and understanding all the players. “I don’t mean basketball players,” Harrison said. “It could be the coaches, it could be the street dudes, parents, just being an integral part of this basketball community.”
“Nico taught me everything I know about the game within the game,” said Fuller.
Harrison dubbed the greatest lesson “squeezing a city.” If Fuller visited Atlanta or Boston, Toronto or Philadelphia, his task was not to simply watch the AAU tournament or college games that prompted the plane ticket, but “turn every stone over while you’re in town,” said Harrison. Fuller began scheduling sit-downs with grassroots coaches and visits to college practices in between lunches and dinners. Before long, Harrison would have Fuller send him scrupulous reports of every minute of his jet-setting. Harrison noted how constructively Fuller received criticism. “And he can give constructive criticism,” Fuller laughed. “He would tell you, straight up.”
Nike became more than a job, his role primarily expanding his Rolodex. Eastern luminaries soon stamped Fuller as Nike’s East Coast guy. He steered rising NBA players Rajon Rondo and Andre Iguodala through an offseason venture to China, explained the global business of basketball and boosted both on their way to becoming All-Stars. “You’re supposed to make sure guys have the right sneakers on,” Fuller said. “We went way beyond that.”
Fuller’s contacts blossomed to the point even Rick Pitino, heading an Adidas school at Louisville, enlisted him to leave Nike and join the Cardinals’ coaching staff in 2010. And when Fuller departed the program to join Missouri one year later, several of his Louisville recruits followed Fuller to the Tigers out of unwavering loyalty. “He’s put in the sweat equity,” Harrison told Yahoo Sports. “People trust him. He can get to anybody with one phone call.”
Phil Pressey, a Missouri guard who’d later make the Celtics’ roster, was always struck by the coach who dropped as many gems as his kicks. “Don’t step over dollars to pick up pennies,” Fuller once explained, hoping to assist the small point guard who reminded him of Paul to not trip over little details on his own road to the NBA. “His ability to connect is special,” Pressey told Yahoo Sports.
Gary Harris, the Orlando Magic wing, was ready to commit to Louisville, but chose Michigan State instead of Missouri to remain closer to his home state of Indiana. “I rely on Fuller all the time to this day,” Harris told Yahoo Sports. When the 2014 lottery pick struggled to adapt during his first NBA season, he turned to Fuller, who organized a bounceback summer. Fuller constructed a workout plan, linking Harris with certain trainers. They still talk after games. “Tim’s really been a right-hand man,” Harris said, “a jack of all trades.”
Which made Fuller the perfect person to stock Overtime Elite’s program with fresh talent.
Fullers’ story impressed. The afternoon sit-down during early May 2021 went well. Troy Thompson invited Fuller and Williams to his family’s home to meet Amen and Ausar. “I’ve always believed God paves the path,” Troy Thompson told Yahoo Sports. “And this man was on our path.”
Overtime Elite’s building didn’t even exist. It was nothing more than a parking lot. “There wasn’t even a cinderblock on the ground,” Fuller said. This former Hoop Seal was merely armed with an iPad loaded with charts and imaging of the facility’s future design, hoping to persuade Thompson he wasn’t pitching another Fyre Fest. Yet here Fuller was, pitching Amen and Ausar out by the dark Fort Lauderdale Intracoastal Waterway.
The boys were intrigued, yet Troy Thompson still told Fuller to give him another week.
“All right, Troy,” Fuller said, “Let’s you and me get to know each other then.”
He called Troy Thompson all hours of the day, toeing the line of persistence and pestering. Knowing the father was a night owl, Fuller would set his alarm for 10:30 p.m. and often talked with Thompson well into the next morning.
He framed Overtime Elite as anything the twins needed it to be, “a blank canvas,” Fuller said, where Thompson and his boys could paint with any color and brush they deemed necessary. Not to produce a pair of top-10 picks, but two prospects who’d hear their names called in the top five.
Fuller would be an extension of the elder Thompson. And sure enough, after he landed their commitments, after a glitzy news conference, Fuller made good on his word throughout a terrific two seasons with the Atlanta-based program that saw Amen drafted No. 4 to Houston and Ausar No. 5 to Detroit. “You could always rely on Tim to help solve a problem,” said Troy Thompson, “even if it wasn’t a hat he was wearing.”
Behind the twins, Fuller went on to sign “a hellacious recruiting class,” in Thompson’s words, for Overtime Elite. The group included Alex Sarr, the No. 2 pick to Washington in this past June’s draft, along with Rob Dillingham, the No. 8 pick whom Minnesota traded two years of future first-round draft capital to acquire. Tyler Smith was selected No. 33 by Milwaukee. Dominick Barlow has signed with Atlanta, and others like Jazian Gortman are in NBA training camps and firmly on the league bubble.
When Kim English, a former Missouri player who overlapped with Fuller for three seasons as a member of the Tigers, leaped from George Mason’s head coaching job to lead Providence in 2023, he brought Fuller with him. Recent Friars lottery pick Devin Carter, who went No. 13 in 2024 to Sacramento, marveled at how Fuller would work with injured players on the sidelines with the same care as when Fuller works with his three teenage sons.
“If you can’t jump, he’ll have you stand on one leg doing ball-handling. He’ll have you sit down doing ball-handling. He’ll have you lay down doing ball-handling,” Carter told Yahoo Sports.
Fuller’s relationships are only running deeper, utilizing his network to become what English anointed “the most feared recruiter in basketball.” Providence is now building into a Big East threat.
He and Harrison remain close, talking every week. “He gives me valuable nuggets,” said Dallas’ general manager.
A man with this story is full of them.
