MURRAY — During his NBA playing career, Carlos Boozer was a fierce competitor known for ferocious dunks and physicality in the paint.
The 42 year old Boozer has softened up just a bit since his retirement, now spending his days having tea parties with his preschool-aged daughter.
“All you girl dads know what I’m talking about!” Boozer bellowed to the audience gathered at Hillcrest Junior High in Murray Wednesday night to hear him speak as part of the ‘Voices’ program, which bills itself as “conversations with some of today’s most inspirational and influential voices.”
The charismatic former Utah Jazz star spoke on parenting, his newly released memoir and much more in his 90 minutes onstage with KSL-TV anchor Debbie Worthen, who acted as moderator for the event. Fans were able to submit questions to ask Boozer and could pay to have their photo taken with him as well.
Aside from spoiling his young daughter, Boozer spends plenty of time watching his twin sons Cameron and Cayden ball out on the court, with the pair of juniors ranking among the top basketball prospects in the class of 2025. Cameron, a power forward like his All-Star father, is the nation’s No. 2 overall recruit, while point guard Cayden checks in at No. 17, per 247 Sports.
“I really had 20 NBA scouts at most of my (high school) games,” Boozer said. “But now, to come full circle, my kids have 20 scouts at every one of their games. They’re being scouted at a similar pace that I was …
“… I just tell them to stay true to who you are, stay humble, keep grinding, go hard and listen,” Boozer continued. “One of the biggest things in this generation is that there are so many young athletes that think as an older person if you give them advice, you’re ‘hating on them,’ so the advice I give my kids is to be coachable … don’t think that people are telling you something because they’re not a fan of you or don’t like what you do, they’re just trying to help make you even better.”
While he does serve as a commentator for ESPN and the ACC Network, along with a number of other business ventures, being a full-time parent is keeping Boozer the busiest in retirement, he shared. It’s also the main reason why he chose to hang it up after a 15-year professional career.
“I wanted to spend more time with my kids, and that outweighed all my other questions,” Boozer said. “Being in the NBA was incredible, but I missed a lot of stuff when they were little … so when I retired, I got to be there, and for me that outweighed everything else. I thought about playing to jump on somebody’s roster to win a championship, and that was on my mind, but when I came back to my kids, it wasn’t even a question.”
Boozer, who played for the Jazz from 2004-10 alongside teammates such as Deron Williams and Andrei Kirilenko, grew to love Utah as a player, still visiting a few times a year to snowboard and “sneak into” the Delta Center to catch a game or two. The Alaska native shared his willingness to be an ambassador for his adopted state to help erase its perceived “stigma.”
“If you never spend time here you really don’t know what you’re missing,” Boozer said. “There’s so much that Utah offers, and I think a lot of people just don’t come here to check it out. Last year during All-Star weekend you had everybody here, we had so much going on downtown and there was all the love being shown by celebrities and entertainers, I got a chance to show some friends of mine what the state had to offer, and they ended up staying an extra week to go snowboarding and camping, it was pretty cool.”
The Duke alum and 2001 National Champion averaged 19.3 points and 10.5 rebounds with the Jazz — good for two All-Star nods — but still finds himself in awe of the current state of the NBA, with so many dynamic talents catching his attention across the league.
“The guys are so skilled,” Boozer said. “Seeing what these centers are doing, they’re shooting threes and bringing the ball up, they’re running the offense through (Nikola) Jokic or (Joel) Embiid. Imagine having Mehmet Okur in this era, picking and popping and shooting threes, this would be perfect for Mehmet. Seeing what Lauri Markkanen is doing for our team, that’s what Mehmet was doing for us in the early 2000s.”
Boozer continued: “The game is in really good hands, these guys are pushing the limits of what you can do with a basketball. But some of these moves are travels, though!” He comically exclaimed, igniting a laughter-ridden ovation from the crowd.
A teammate of both Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, Boozer dove into what set each of them apart as all-time legends in the sport. “Kobe was very isolated off the court, very driven, and he kind of kept his stuff behind closed doors. LeBron was the opposite, he was very extroverted, he would invite everybody to everything, he was just very, very friendly. Kobe would just, like, take your heart out and eat it. Kobe didn’t want to make any friends on the court, and LeBron wants to be friends with everybody.”
While he never reached an NBA Finals in Utah, Boozer said he was proud to represent the Jazz in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where he was part of the gold medal-winning Team USA squad alongside Bryant, James and Williams, an experience he felt was the absolute highlight of his career.
However, there was nothing quite like playing for the legendary Jerry Sloan, who coached Boozer for his entire Jazz tenure.
“When he brought me in and recruited me here to Utah in 2004, it changed my world,” Boozer said of Sloan. “He immediately got me in touch with Karl Malone who came on my visit, so I had a chance to meet the Mailman and learn from someone I had idolized since I was a 15 years old. Playing for him, he obviously knew what it took to be great since he was an All-Star, and for us to have a coach who played in the NBA, he was just great, he knew the nonsense to stay away from, he knew what to stick to in practice … and he was a great guy, off the court we talked about tons of stuff outside of the game, like my family, how to be a good father, marriage and what that’s like. Jerry, may he rest in peace, was one of the first coaches I had in the NBA that I really, really loved.”
Boozer, whose memoir “Every Shot Counts” was released this past October, peppered the evening with messages of resilience and inspiration, hoping his experiences could inspire and motivate the audience to seek the things that they treasure the most.
“What I wanted to do was inspire people to know that when you reach that turbulence, don’t pivot and go another direction, just keep going for your dream,” Boozer said. “That’s what I did, I could have stopped three or four different times, and then you guys would never know who I was. But I decided to keep going, and now I’m sitting in front of you guys tonight. I just wanted to encourage people to go after their dreams, even when it gets a little rocky or bumpy, and just keep going.
“… I think a lot of us run into roadblocks, it’s not easy to be what you want, but if you find your trial, find your mentors and keep going after it, it can happen,” he continued. “It happened for me, and it can happen for you too.”
