JAVALE MCGEE, you could say, has an aura about him. When he arrives at a mid-week training session for the Illawarra Hawks in the Wollongong suburb of Figtree, it’s with a McCafé cup in hand. “Two hash browns and a coffee,” he later tells me, when I ask about his choice of pre-workout meal. “Breakfast of champions,” he says with a sardonic laugh, though I doubt anyone is going to press McGee on his diet.
As we enter the Hawks’ gym, a pair of kids walk by who aren’t even knee high on McGee. At a towering seven feet (213cm) tall, the center is already an imposing presence, but he also carries himself like the superstar he knows he is. McGee is the only member of the Hawks to go shirtless during the session. Perhaps he’s playing it up for the Men’s Health cameras, or perhaps that’s just who he is. His watch, a glittering Rolex President Day-Date, stays on throughout the workout. “I’m not planning on selling it,” he says, when I ask if he’s worried about it getting scratched.
But despite his air of greatness, McGee isn’t used to playing the role of the superstar. In the NBA, he was an elite-level role player who provided an injection of defence, rebounding ability and athleticism for teams that weren’t built around him. He helped the Golden State Warriors win two championships and the LA Lakers secure one, while also winning an Olympic gold medal with Team USA, but he’s never been the centrepiece of a team. For the Hawks, he’s exactly that, and he’s become an unstoppable force of nature.
McGee is averaging 22 points, 10 rebounds and 2 blocks per game in the NBL – leading the league in the latter two categories. On offence, he is inevitable. He can muscle his way into the paint and score with ease, or create enough space through his mere presence that it opens up opportunities for his teammates. On defence, he’s a black hole. The NBL does not have a defensive three-second rule, allowing McGee to camp in the paint and shut down any shots near the rim. Inexplicably, he’s also started shooting – and making – threes. After only hitting 15 threes throughout his 16-year NBA career, McGee has already hit six threes in 15 games for the Hawks, shooting above 30 per cent from deep. It’s like if prime Shaq developed a three-point shot.
Later, when we’re driving from the gym to the Hawks’ scheduled on-court training session nearby, McGee speaks on how it feels to be the star of a team for the first time in his career. “It’s not much of an adjustment, really. If anything, it’s a pleasure,” he says. “Because it’s not that hard to be a role player. You know your role and you get it done as a professional. As a role player, the game becomes more of a job. But when you’re the star, the game is a lot more fun and intentional.”
As for why he’s started shooting threes, McGee says it’s something he’s always had in his bag. There just hasn’t been room in the gameplan for him to let loose. “You know, it’s funny. I’ve always had it. I just wasn’t able to do it,” he says. “You guys are just seeing what JaVale McGee with a green light looks like.
“When I’m on a team like the Golden State Warriors or Team USA, they don’t need me to shoot threes,” McGee continues. “I’ve always been put into the position of a role player. As an NBA player, you don’t fight those notions. If that’s your role, you play your role, you collect your pay cheque and you win. So that’s what I did. But now I have more space to play how I want.”
McGee may be dominating the NBL, but it doesn’t come easy, especially at his age. McGee is now 37 and will be 38 in January. He’s still catching lobs and slamming home dunks with force, but it takes more effort than what it did a decade ago. Plus, the physicality of the NBL is something to be reckoned with, according to McGee. “It’s not quite as physical as the NBA, but some of these guys are tough, man, they’ll bruise you,” he says. “Almost everyone on the court has been close to the NBA and a lot of them have been to the league. Especially the young guys who are starting to get more looks. They’ve really impressed me.”
McGee is also being asked to do more than ever before. He played 38 out of 40 minutes in a game against the South East Melbourne Phoenix a few days before our interview. The extra time on the court certainly takes a toll on him physically, he says, but a simple mindset shift can put things into perspective. “You know what’s funny?” McGee asks. “When I was younger, I never got the opportunity to play that many minutes. So it kind of puts you in an appreciative state, because I’m still able to play basketball at a high level for that many minutes at this age.”
Of course, to be able to play high-level basketball at McGee’s age, he can’t just show up on game day – he has to work for it. At seven feet tall, McGee acknowledges that he has a natural advantage over the average person. “I’m not naive to the fact that in the lottery of the genetic pool, I won,” he says. But as he says, he wouldn’t have made it to the NBA if he didn’t have a good work ethic. “There’s plenty of guys who are my height that didn’t make it in the league, so it’s not all luck.”
McGee and the Hawks train three times per week during the NBL season. “We try to do one lower body, one upper body and core and then one full-body workout,” says Alex Moore, the Hawks’ strength and conditioning coach. Each player has individualised workouts that cater to their specific needs. For McGee, that means exercises designed to prevent injury, reduce age-related wear and tear, and even out his seven foot frame.
“He’s an older player, so we’ve got to take into account 20 plus years of grinding on the court,” Moore says. “A lot of his stuff is focused on hip strength and making sure his knees are well looked after through quadriceps and hamstring strength. The other one is because he’s seven foot, there’s some unique characteristics that come with that, like making sure his trunk is really strong. So we do a lot of stabilisation work.”
Below, you’ll find a breakdown of McGee’s workout routine.
Day 1: Lower body
Prehab
- Farmer’s walks
- Sandbag marching A walks
- Standing knee drive and barbell press
- Leg extensions
Strength and power
- Single-arm kettlebell swings
- Plate skater rotations
- Trap bar deadlifts
- Nordic lowers
- Single-arm dumbbell step up and press
- Single-arm barbell Romanian deadlifts
- Seated calf raises
Day 2: Upper body and core
- Banded hip external rotations
- Terminal knee extensions
- Smith machine bench press throw
- Lat pulldowns
- Medicine ball slams
- Medicine ball scoop toss
- Kneeling cable rotations
- Hanging overhead straight leg raise
- Dumbbell prone reverse flys
Day 3: Full body
Prehab
- Leg extensions
- Sandbag marching A walks
- Lateral band walks
- Heavy band slow woodchop
- Reverse sit-ups
Strength and power
- Medicine ball rotational slams
- Trap bar deadlifts
- Trap bar squat jumps
- Banded medicine ball step-ups and overhead press
- Medicine ball squat and overhead throws
- Nordic lowers
- Single-leg dumbbell calf raises
McGee works hard in the gym (he’s the last one to leave the Hawks’ session), but he also has fun. Between sets, he sings lines from Olivia Dean’s ‘Man I Need’, not worrying too much about pitch. If a particular move is pushing him, he’ll let his trainer know. “That one really makes you sweat,” he says at one stage. He’s at home in the gym now, but that wasn’t always the case.
“Earlier in my career I really wasn’t a hard worker in the gym, I loved being the skinny guy,” he says. “You think you’re working hard until you get older and you’ve been in situations where you’re really battling against guys and you’re like, Okay, I’m not working hard enough. When you get in weight rooms with guys like Dwight Howard and you see how hard he’s working to keep his body in shape and you’re on teams with perennial all-stars and guys like LeBron, you see what hard work really is. It’s a total difference.”
Pushing himself in the gym isn’t the only thing McGee struggled with earlier in his career. His stint with the team that drafted him, the Washington Wizards, made him feel rudderless, without any clear direction on how to develop as a player. “I was drafted to the Washington Wizards and we weren’t good my first, well, my whole three years that I was there,” McGee says. “I didn’t have those examples to show me what I should’ve been doing. I feel like if I would have been drafted to Kobe’s Lakers or one of those teams that had that winning culture, Boston Celtics-type energy, I probably would have had a different trajectory.”
It was during this period that McGee became a regular target of criticism on Shaqtin’ a Fool, a segment on TNT’s Inside the NBA that collated a given week’s lowlights. McGee doesn’t feel like he was playing particularly badly – or that he had more lowlights than the next guy – but he was a frequent subject of ridicule. He was named as the inaugural Shaqtin’ a Fool MVP in 2013, and again in 2014 – note that LeBron James is the most recent recipient, and former MVP Russell Westbrook has won the award more than any other player, so it doesn’t necessarily connote bad play.
McGee was always quick to shoulder the criticism and not take it to heart, but it began to impact the way he was perceived around the league. “It wasn’t that it made me feel any way as a player, it was that it made other people feel a certain way about me,” he says. “That was the beginning of seeing what social media can do to your career. Because when that stuff started, social media was just starting. I was like the beginning of things going viral in a bad way.”
When McGee became a key contributor on a championship team, it was vindication, but he didn’t let it get to his head. “It felt good to be appreciated in that sense, but I was also being appreciated as a role player. So I didn’t let too much pride get to me,” he says.
He was able to parlay that success into selection for the US Olympic team in 2021, a move that surprised many. “There was a lot of behind the scenes work on that,” McGee explains. “I had information that Kevin Love was going to drop out of the team, and I was working out and I was in shape and I’ve always wanted to go to the Olympics. So I made some calls and said, ‘Hey, I’m available, if you guys need me I’ll be there the next day’. The opportunity came and I jumped on a plane immediately.”
Team USA and McGee would go on to win gold, echoing an achievement his mother accomplished as a member of the American women’s team at the 1984 Olympics. McGee’s mother Pamela, who at 34 years old was the second pick in the first WNBA college draft, has always been his inspiration.
“She inspires me every day because I’m 37 now, and she retired at 37, so I told myself I can’t stop playing until I’ve at least played longer than she played,” McGee says. “She played in a different era where she wasn’t making millions of dollars. She didn’t have her own PT and physical therapy people.”
Does that mean McGee, who turns 38 on January 19, is on the verge of retirement? Not likely. “When I can’t do it no more,” he says, when I ask when he’s planning on calling it quits. “I still got a lot of energy. I still feel very healthy. I’m going to keep squeezing this orange until I get all the juice out.” After a day spent shadowing McGee between an intense workout and all-out on-court drills, I can confidently say there’s plenty of juice left in that orange.
