Welcome to the Paige Bueckers Era of March Madness
To understand how Bueckers became one of the most famous athletes in America, search “Paige Bueckers” on social media and watch your algorithm transform into a digital shrine to the basketball player’s magnetism. Her complete and total ease with herself emanates from the videos she’s made dancing with teammates KK Arnold and Ice Brady and from the fan edits of her on-court highlights and off-court antics.
It’s even more pronounced in person. Her teammate Azzi Fudd says she’s “never met anyone so confident,” and within moments of first meeting Bueckers at UConn’s Storrs, Connecticut, campus last October, I’m positive that I haven’t either. She walks with a relaxed, self-assured stride. Asked to describe herself as a basketball player, she tells me, matter-of-factly: “A competitor who can score at all three levels, defends, plays both sides of the court, very versatile, can really do anything that the game calls for and the team needs.” She looks everyone dead in the eye: coaches, teammates, reporters, fans, and the refs she is happy to argue with. When Bueckers appeared on LSU standout Flau’jae Johnson’s podcast, Johnson asked which one of them had “more rizz.” Without hesitation, Bueckers said, “I got top rizz in the world.”
No wonder people travel from all over to watch her play. No wonder Brooklyn’s Barclays Center feels like a home game when UConn plays Louisville the day after Bueckers’s Nike launch, with countless girls wearing her jersey, their hair in Paige braids.
“You can’t really be great unless you’re confident,” Bueckers says. Still, spending time with her, you’d be hard-pressed to clock an air of pretension. When she says she is humble, you believe her. “You don’t have to be exclusively one or the other,” she tells me. “In no way, shape, or form have I gotten here by myself—I’ve had so many people invest in me. That definitely keeps you humble as well.”
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