In the name of the father: How the dad of a $500m NBA star made the ’Gong great again

The Illawarra Hawks had just returned home from another loss when Justin Tatum was summoned to a meeting with the bosses. It was late 2023 and Tatum was nine games into his new gig as an assistant coach of the Hawks.

The team was in a death spiral. At 2-7, another season like the last one looked darkly predictable. And given the last one delivered the club’s worst ever season – three wins, 25 losses and a wooden spoon – that was not going to stand.

And so a meeting. Tatum, who’d been recruited from a successful high school coaching career in the US, arrived at the Novotel across the road from North Wollongong Beach and found billionaire Hawks owner Jared Novelly and chief executive Stu Taggart waiting “with serious faces”.

“I walked in and said ‘what’s going on?’” Tatum says. “We’d just lost to Cairns on the road and I was pissed about that, and they said ‘we want to make a change’. Next year? ‘No, now’.”

Tatum was crestfallen.

“Wait … I have to leave? I just got here,” he replied.

The answer came back: “No, no, we are going to change the head coach.

“And we want you to take over.”

A famous basketball name

You’ve probably heard the name. Or the surname anyway.

Tatum.

Any basketball fan worth their vintage Jordans will know Jayson Tatum.

The 27-year-old is one of the best basketballers on the planet, and a bona fide household name in the States after leading the Boston Celtics to an 18th NBA title last year, and then following that with an Olympic gold medalin Paris.

Somewhere in there, too, Jayson Tatum found time to sign the largest contract in NBA history, extending with Boston for an eye-popping $A494m over five years.

Justin Tatum is Jayson’s dad, and the coaching journey that has globetrotted him all the way to Wollongong began 20 years ago when Tatum ended his own playing career to mentor a young, prodigiously talented son.

Theirs was a complex relationship, with Tatum’s unforgiving “tough love” approach a key factor in Jayson becoming a megastar who earns squillions and is onto version three of his own Nike shoe: the Tatum Jordan.

But the journey also left scars, and the son later revealed how he struggled emotionally with a father who was more a hard-ass coach than a caring dad.

Now, the relationship is strong. Tatum was courtside as Jayson and the Celtics won the NBA finals last year, and the pair speak regularly. Jayson expresses pride in his father’s coaching feats and will shoot off a message grilling him about why the Hawks lost a random midweeker to a mob called the Taipans.

Those sorts of texts haven’t been all that common recently, though, because these days, the Tatum-led Hawks don’t lose very often.

In a remarkable 16-month turnaround that started with Tatum saying “yes” to replacing Jacob Jackomas at that Novotel meeting, and then lifting the Hawks to one win away from the championship series in the same season, Illawarra are now the NBL’s best team.

In the just completed 2024-25 regular season, the Hawks (20-9) finished top of the NBL ladder for the first time. And that’s no cheap stat, given Illawarra are the only club to have played in every NBL season since 1979.

After being a nominee last season, Tatum was recognised as the NBL’s coach of the year.

The Hawks will host South-East Melbourne Phoenix in Wollongong on Friday night and it will be another sell-out; their seventh of the season. The soaring-again Hawks are the pride of the region and Wollongong is awash with basketball fever.

Success usually has a thousand fathers, and a humming front office and a deep Hawks squad led by the likes of Sam Froling, Tyler Harvey and Trey Kell III all deserve their flowers.

But most of Wollongong credits the Hawks’ success to one father in particular – Tatum – and it’s not uncommon for the popular coach to now set aside an hour to get to and from the shops when buying milk. Or get louder cheers than the players when teams are introduced at the start of the game.

“I’ve had calls for him to be made Lord Mayor,” City of Wollongong mayor Tania Brown says.

“I said ‘I just got the job’, but I’ll let him share it for a day if they win. We’re very proud of him.”

The road to the NBL

Justin Tatum was born and raised in St Louis, Missouri, in the US midwest, and after only picking up basketball in his early teens, went onto play college ball for the St Louis University Billikens.

At 201cm and with a football background, Tatum was a defence-oriented forward, and a new father, too. At the age of 18 and about to start college, he and then-partner Brandy Cole had Jayson.

Some of Tatum’s peers progressed to the NBA, but he moved to the Netherlands to play professionally for Leeuwarden. After a few years, though, Tatum returned to St Louis when it had become apparent young Jayson was a gifted basketballer.

“I had a ton of people calling me saying I want to coach your kid. His mum was calling me saying ‘Justin, I don’t know where to send him, I have people pulling me left and right’,” Tatum said.

“I said you know what, I’m gonna come home, and stop my career and come home, and get him together because I don’t want nobody teaching him and giving him bad habits.”

Jayson lived with his mother but Tatum began daily work-outs with his son. He also embarked on a 16-year stint as a title-winning high school coach, first at Soldan High and then with his old school, Christian Brothers College (CBC).

“We didn’t know he [Jayson] would get to 6′9 [203cm] but I taught him how to play outside in, instead of inside out,” he said.

“The way I learned was dunking the ball and setting screens. But where I saw the game transitioning to, that’s where he is at right now.”

In the pursuit of instilling resilience and sanding off any hint of a soft edge, Tatum acknowledges he was always – always – tough on his son.

“I taught him like a drill sergeant,” he said.

”I always made him play two or three years up, I had him playing and practising against my high school players. It was drilled into him [that] he had to have a work ethic, and to dominate. There were no easy days.“

In Tatum’s mind, hardness was a non-negotiable. He’d learned where the bar for greatness was set when travelling in the NBA off-season with his best friend (and 15-year NBA pro) Larry Hughes, who would play in private pick-up games with other stars to stay fit.

“We got a chance to go to Chicago and work with guys like Michael Jordan, and Antoine Walker. So I got a chance to watch those guys play pick-up and just see their mannerisms and their competitiveness, everything,” Tatum said.

“I was like, my kid, if he wants to be here, he has to approach it different. I can’t just have nice shoes and a jumpshot. I got to fight through this screen, I gotta dive on this floor. It was what I had seen and heard, being around those high-calibre players. Those are the attributes I tried to instil in him.”

The size of a forward but with the touch of a guard, Jayson became one of the best teenagers in the country, played for the prestigious Duke University and was taken by Boston as the third pick in the 2017 NBA draft.

He was an instant millionaire – but superstardom came at a cost. Jayson would later do interviews about the complicated relationship with his father, and feeling like he could never please him.

“I felt like he didn’t like me as a kid, because he was so mean to me,” Jayson said in a 2023 interview. “Of course he did, but as a kid I couldn’t separate coach from dad.”

Jayson revealed Tatum would publicly abuse him to toughen him up. He also aggressively confronted him at halftime in a game when he wasn’t dominating. Jayson said was he “scared” of his father but acknowledges, too, he benefited from being pushed.

“It was fun coaching him, but it was tough as well. You have probably heard in some interviews we butted heads a lot,” Tatum said.

“But he always calls and says ‘I would not be here if I did not go through that journey with you. No matter what people think, or how it may sound’.”

Did Tatum find it a wrench, being so hard on his boy?

“Probably not then, because I didn’t know what I was, internally, maybe causing,” Tatum says.

“But hearing it since about what I was causing, its like ‘oh man, I coulda eased off a bit’, or whatever. But also, he says if I had have eased off he would have been pissed.

“But as a grown man now … [I was] not really thinking that your 9/10/11-year old son is emotionally fighting through everything to make you happy. Now he is able to express that, and he’s not mad it happened because of the success. But I am like ‘ahh, I coulda done better’.

“But people don’t understand we had a son at 18-years-old. I was still a young man.”

As Jayson’s NBA career launched, Tatum built a name as a successful high school coach at Soldan and CBC. He’d catch up once a year for lunch in St Louis with his old school friend Jared, who – in 2020 – casually mentioned he’d bought a professional basketball team on the other side of the world.

The friend is Jared Novelly, whose family own Apex Oil and have a net worth over $2 billion. Novelly – who was last month tapped by Donald Trump to become ambassador to New Zealand – had helped rescue the Illawarra Hawks from potential collapse and in late 2022, invited Tatum to visit Australia to consult, and then help scout players back in the States.

But a cruise on Sydney Harbour and a visit to some Wollongong beaches later, Novelly asked Tatum to leave St Louis and join the Hawks staff.

“When a billionaire owner wants something, they know how to find a way to entice you,” Tatum said.

With aspirations to coach at college and NBA level, the 45-year-old agreed to move to Australia as a CV builder, at least. Four months later, Tatum walked into a beachfront hotel and walked out as an NBL head coach.

Becoming part of the Hawks – and the city of Wollongong

The very first season of the NBL, in 1979, started with 10 teams. Some had familiar names and others with weird ones that have long been forgotten, like the City of Sydney Astronauts, the West Adelaide Bearcats, the Canterbury-Bankstown Bruins and the Glenelg Tigers.

The Illawarra Hawks were there, and so were the Brisbane Bullets, the Canberra Cannons and the Newcastle Falcons. But of that original class, only the Hawks have survived without missing a season.

Making ends meet in the NBL has always been a tough gig, and it’s seen more grisly deaths than Game of Thrones. The NBL’s Wikipedia page lists 24 clubs in 45 years who are now “defunct”.

The Hawks came close to joining the list, several times. After winning their only NBL title in 2000-01, the cash-strapped outfit was almost cut out of a revamped league in 2009 – before a local campaign raised enough money to keep the Hawks afloat.

The community-run club mostly struggled to balance the books, though, and almost collapsed in 2015. It entered voluntary administration and was close to handing in the licence to new NBL owner Larry Kestelman, but new backers were found and the Hawks stayed alive.

Even the star cameo season of future NBA star LaMelo Ball couldn’t stop the club from going into VA again in 2019, but after Ball contemplated buying into the franchise, a new ownership group – led by Novelly – eventually took over in 2020.

They had defied death again but the NBL rebranded the team “the Hawks” to try and extend the fan base as far as Canberra.

But under local pressure, the NBL agreed it would restore Illawarra to the name in 2021 – but only if the club could sell 4379 non-ticket memberships, as proof of the town’s connection. The fans, again, dug deep and hit the target.

The city’s passion for the Hawks is clear on a nondescript Monday night in late January, when a clash with the struggling Brisbane Bullets pulls a near sell-out crowd at WIN Entertainment Centre, just two nights after a sell-out on Saturday.

Of the 15 biggest Hawks crowds in Wollongong, seven have been this season – so far. The season motto is plastered everywhere: “We rise together.”

The Hawks are a class above an injury-hit Brisbane, and it’s over by the end of the first quarter. But that doesn’t stop a stern-faced Tatum pacing the court for every second; pointing, shouting and holding up fingers to signal plays.

On this night, the strength of a Tatum-led Hawks team is plain to see: the team itself.

There is almost no clearing space for a star to dazzle with solo magic; the ‘iso’ strategy of teams with one big name and not much else. Instead, like high school teams he once coached, Tatum has his players sharing the work, the possession and the points. The win sees the Hawks break a club record for most assists (37).

“For us to have 37 assists and two of my top players barely scored in double-figures, but had 11 assists and seven assists that’s just what this team is about – unselfish characteristic type of guys,” he said post-match.

Everyone has bought into the Tatum way. When he first took over in 2023, the famous surname gave Tatum a shortcut to swiftly winning the trust and belief of his players. And he admits he used it.

“But the guys also learned quick I got a great feel for the game, and for them as players,” he said.

Standing in the infamous “Snakepit”, the team’s former home court that now serves as sweltering practice facility, Froling – the Hawks star centre – nods in agreement. The novelty was fleeting.

“There’s a track record there but even if you didn’t know who his son was, and you come into a practice, and you see the way he runs it – it’s pretty clear, very quickly that he’s a very, very good coach and has the respect of the guys,” Froling says.

“Even without that, now, he’s proven himself far and beyond.”

Wearing bucket hats and hoodies doesn’t offer much anonymity at Woolies for a 201cm guy from St Louis, Tatum jokes. And his reluctant celebrity wasn’t helped by Drake wearing his old Billikens jersey a few weeks ago in Perth.

But Tatum says apart from boasting to people back home about the natural beauty of the Illawarra coast, he will often talk about the working-class connection between the region and its team.

“This is the longest surviving team in the league. It has not dropped out one time. That shows you the support of the town. They used their own money, they wanted this team to survive,” he says.

“That connection is huge, and I like to think we resemble how they live and what they believe out here: you show up for work, you work your tail off, no excuses, be consistent.”

Mayor Brown: “We share the St George Illawarra Dragons and we get a few home games, and there’s always a contingent that clings to the [Illawarra] Steelers legend, that was our team.

“But the Hawks are ours – home-grown and the only club to have remained in the NBL for that 40-plus years. And that means something to our community. They’re ours and we back them 100 per cent.”

Tatum’s chest swelled watching his son join Bill Russell and Larry Bird in taking the Celtics to an NBA title last year. It was emotional for all the obvious reasons, but he also experienced what the Celtics’ first win in 16 seasons meant to Bostonians.

“It pushes me. You see the impact of that success in Boston. And I want the same thing for Illawarra, and for the people here,” Tatum said.

Plus, he now has to catch up. Ever-competitive, Jayson told his dad before the Celtics’ triumph that “if I win a chip, you have to win a chip”.

“He’s done his part – we talked about that again the other day,” Tatum grins.

“He goes ‘it’s your turn now’. I said ‘hey man, I am on it’.

“‘I am working on it’.”