SHOOTING STAR
Patty Mills is reclining on a king-sized bed in a room at the Four Seasons hotel in Denver watching Shark Tank. It’s a frigid minus 8° outside, an early morning blizzard blanketing the mile-high city in snow. Mills, who’s just arrived from Sacramento, is in the middle of a brutal road trip that will see his San Antonio Spurs play six games in nine days ahead of the All-Star break. With another ‘back-to-back’ starting the following day, the Spurs point guard is just happy to get off his feet.
“Take the deal, Lori,” he shouts at the screen. Mills loves Shark Tank. It’s one of the shows he regularly catches in his downtime on the road. Something else he likes to do when he’s got spare time to kill? Dance. “I could do traditional dancing before I could play basketball,” he tells me later on. “The first songs I learned on my guitar were traditional ones.” Music and dance are aspects of his culture he can take anywhere, Mills explains. A way to remember home and even to remind him, if he needed it, exactly where he came from.
The arc of that journey is worth retracing, mainly because of its sheer unlikeliness – it is, after all, a long way from Canberra or indeed, Thursday Island, where Mills’ grandfather made a
