Long before Paul George emerged as a star forward with the Indiana Pacers, he played countless games of one-on-one in the quiet street outside his family’s home in Palmdale, California. The rules were simple: Each game went to 21 points, and only the most egregious fouls were called. The post was no place for the meek.
George’s opponent was formidable, a player with long arms and a dependable jump shot who went undefeated against him for the first eight years of their rivalry. It was not until George’s junior year of high school that he ended the streak, and he can still remember the moment — the moment he finally defeated his older sister Teiosha.
“Everyone knew me as Teiosha’s little brother,” Paul George said last week. “She was the one who set the standard.”
Teiosha George, 30, who had a fine career as a 6-foot-4 center at Pepperdine before playing briefly overseas, can still detect some of the subtle ways in which she influenced her brother. Their routines at the foul line, for example — same series of dribbles, same crouch, same high release.
“I’ll take credit for that,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in the Los Angeles area.
Most important, she has enjoyed watching her brother’s remarkable comeback after he missed nearly all of last season while recovering from a compound fracture in his right leg, a gruesome injury. Ahead of the Pacers’ game Sunday against the Portland Trail Blazers, he was averaging 23.6 points and 4.2 assists.
If George, 25, has shown toughness — well, that, too, probably has something to do with his sister, who spent years beating up on him on their makeshift court in Palmdale, outside of Los Angeles. She was, by her own account, merciless in her treatment of him. He learned from an early age that nothing was going to come easily.
“I would just swat all of his shots,” she said. “He would get really frustrated, because we’re both very competitive by nature. But, come on, I’m not going to let my little brother — who was shorter than me — beat me. There was a lot of back and forth.”
Barred from shooting in the driveway — “Our parents were always like, ‘Don’t hit the cars!’” Teiosha said — brother and sister would drag their portable hoop into the street in the morning before hauling it back into the driveway at night. Their games together were particularly important to Paul, who described himself as a shy kid.
“For a long time, it was hard for me to step out of that shell and play organized ball in front of people,” he said.
Paul looked up to his sister, he said. She taught him how to accept criticism and how to shoot with proper mechanics, an important lesson given his total inability to match up with her in the post. In the early years, he tended to launch the ball with two hands.
“He used to have the ugliest form ever,” Teiosha said. “He made it look like he was shooting a medicine ball.”
There were other growing pains. She recalled attending his first organized game, when he was 8 or 9. It was a warm day — too warm for the jeans that he was wearing. So he used a pair of scissors to fashion a pair of jean shorts. (Yes, Paul George made his five-on-five debut in self-styled “jorts.”)
Later, when Teiosha was becoming a star at Palmdale High School, Paul often tagged along to her practices so he could shoot on a side basket.
“I became a gym rat because of her,” he said.
He desperately wanted to improve his outside shot, in part because he knew that was the only way he might have a chance of (one day) defeating her. And even as he began to grow into his 6-foot-9 frame, he retained those guard skills — skills that would eventually make him a millionaire.
“I had to try to beat her from the perimeter,” he said. “She was strong, she was tall, and she knew what she could do.”
Teiosha was home visiting from Pepperdine when her brother, then 17, challenged her to a game of one-on-one during an impromptu workout. She found that she no longer had a physical advantage against him.
“I tried posting up, and his arms were super long, and he was blocking my shots,” she said. “And I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, this is what it feels like to be on the other end.’”
Still, the game remained close until Paul scored the game-winner on a drive to the basket.
“As soon as it went in, I was just standing there because I knew I was never going to hear the end of it,” said Teiosha, who immediately asked for a rematch. “He was like, ‘Nope.’”
They played again a couple of years later, when Paul was a freshman at Fresno State.
“And I just killed her,” he said. “That was the last time. She was like, ‘I will not play you again.’”
Yet they have remained close, especially through the grim times. In August 2014, Teiosha was house-sitting for her parents while they attended her brother’s intrasquad scrimmage with the U.S. national team at Nevada-Las Vegas. She had the game on the television, she said, but she missed the sequence when her brother landed on a basket stanchion and fractured his leg. It was not until her phone started buzzing that she realized something had gone wrong, and then she watched the replay.
“I just started bawling,” she recalled.
She ran upstairs to throw some clothes in a bag and jumped in a car with her cousin. Her sister, Portala, and brother-in-law trailed them in another vehicle, and they all arrived at the hospital around 2 a.m. — about the time Paul George was scheduled to get out of surgery.
“When he opened his eyes, he turned over and saw that we were there,” Teiosha said. “I’m sure that made him feel really good to have family around him.”
After a few days in Las Vegas, Teiosha traveled to Indianapolis with Paul and stayed with him at his house for about a week. He was fairly immobile — “Thank God he had an elevator,” she said — and so she cooked his meals, drove him to doctor’s appointments and gave him pep talks.
“Just knowing his personality and his drive and his dedication, I knew he wasn’t going to let this defeat him,” she said. “But at the same time, I could tell that there was a little bit of doubt — that maybe, even if he came back, he wouldn’t be the same. Would he be able to do the same things?”
Paul George’s extraordinary comeback seemed to become official — at least to a national audience — when he scored 41 points this month in the NBA All-Star Game. Gregg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, watched from the opposing bench.
“I’m actually amazed looking at him,” Popovich said. “Every time he runs up and down the floor and jumps up for those dunks and everything, I’m thinking: ‘Wow, the human body must be amazing. It really must be amazing.’ To come back and play at that level athletically, it just stuns me every time I see him out there.”
A fashion designer, Teiosha George has spent the past three years working part-time as her brother’s stylist. It helps that they have similar taste in clothes.
“I love fashion,” Paul said, “but I don’t necessarily have time to be looking stuff up.”
Teiosha said she would be taking a trip to Indianapolis to assist Paul on a couple of photoshoots with sponsors. Long gone are fashion emergencies involving jorts. After all these years, and after so many hard lessons on the hoop in front of their house, she just wants to make sure her little brother looks good.
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