Anyone who’s ever guarded DeMar DeRozan knows just how untrustworthy the six-time NBA All-Star can be. His legendary pump fake is so convincing the Cleveland Cavaliers front office instituted a $100 fine to any player who fell for it during their 2018 playoff battle with the Raptors. 

But off the court, the former Raptor is as genuine as they come. When I receive his call to discuss his new book, Above The Noise: My Story of Chasing Calm, DeRozan’s warm voice greets me in such a relaxed manner it’s as though he’s stretched out on his couch at home. It’s a reassuring image given some of the heavy subject matter of the newly released book, which covers his impoverished upbringing in Compton, California – where he lost family and friends to gang violence – through to his NBA career and emergence as a mental health advocate. 

For the NBA star, penning the book helped him reframe the trauma he had experienced growing up.  

“You learn why you have such a high drive,” the 35-year-old explains of the writing process. “A lot of trauma I went through, a lot of the pain was my biggest motivation to just make it out and have more for myself and for my family. A lot of stuff I went through, I wouldn’t wish that upon nobody. But in the same token, I wouldn’t change anything because everything I went through shaped the person I am today.” 

Coming up in the ‘90s, DeRozan’s childhood was about survival. The Crips and Bloods street gangs had been at war for decades in the city, but with the introduction of crack to the masses in the 1980s, the violence only intensified. For DeRozan, who was raised in a neighbourhood controlled by the Corner Poccet Crips – one of over 200 Crip sets in L.A. – navigating Compton safely meant knowing where each gang held territory and understanding the consequences of wearing the wrong colour. 

But beyond any street-savvy code, it took a village of multigenerational influences to keep DeRozan on the “clean path,” as he calls it in his book.

“I had a protective circle around me, placed there by my mom and dad,” DeRozan writes.

It wasn’t just that he grew up in close proximity to the gang violence that continues to plague Compton. Parts of his family were deeply entrenched in it. In fact, it was at his mother’s behest that he was sheltered from any gang involvement – an order local gang members followed only because her brother was a high-ranking Crip himself. 

Still, DeRozan recalls the cycle of violence that marked his upbringing and the confusion that came with every loss. 

“I couldn’t explain why people I loved were dying around me and why my parents and I attended funerals as often as other families went to the movies,” he writes in the book. “I couldn’t explain why everybody had to act so goddamn tough all the time and why it seemed like danger lurked around damn near every corner.

“All of it made me angry,” he continues. “That anger became my motivation – to run faster, jump higher, stay in the gym an hour longer no matter how tired I was.” 

DeRozan’s father, Frank (a.k.a Big Dog) had instilled in his son a resilience that was necessary for his survival in Compton, yet longterm, it was unsustainable.

“I was raised to push through. Whatever it is, you need to push through. That was life in Compton. You find something to push you forward,” he writes. “I was naive to think that just because I had moved on to bigger and better, I was suddenly better myself. Naive to think growing up in that cycle of pain, fear and forging onward hadn’t left scars, and that I didn’t carry the weight and consequences every day. In truth it was crushing me.”

The Catalyst

Fittingly, the book begins with the tweet that began his mental health journey, a moment some of the pain he had been channelling into basketball finally burst to the surface. 

“This depression get the best of me…,” the post read.  

He explains that it was that night, on the eve of his fourth All-Star appearance in 2018 – when to the outside world he was at the height of his career – that he was finally able to put a name to this feeling he had been carrying with him for as long as he could remember. 

Today, he looks back on the tweet as an important catalyst, not only for himself, but for other NBA players who had felt excluded from the recent generational shift that had made it OK to open up about mental health.

“It means everything,” he says of the tweet. “I doubt if I didn’t tweet what I tweeted I’d be coming out with a book now. I wouldn’t be in the midst of doing something bigger than basketball.”

What followed was a steady stream of interviews and television appearances that saw DeRozan elaborate on his battle with depression, from a candid talk with Raptors analyst Doug Smith soon after the tweet to an appearance on The Me You Can’t See – a 2021 Apple TV mini-series helmed by Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey where celebrities, musicians and professional athletes engaged in honest discussions about their mental health struggles. 

Today, it’s grown into a passion project outside his demanding NBA schedule. 

This year, he launched Dinners With DeMar, a Youtube interview series where he sits down for a meal with former and current NBA players to talk about everything from the pressures of fame to their struggles with mental health – a project that earned him the NBA Cares Bob Lanier Community Assist Award for the month of March for his mental health advocacy.  

For DeMar, his off-court impact is an important part of his NBA legacy. 

“Sports is a gateway to do something even greater,” he says. “I could be the hope and inspiration for anybody who comes from the same walks of [life as] me. That’s what it’s all about – just trying to give that empowerment and understanding and knowledge of what it is that we go through and how we get through it.”

Life Lessons

DeRozan – who’s made sure to return to Compton for youth basketball camps and other community events regularly throughout his career – knows all too well how the positive forces in his life worked to counteract the turmoil of his youth.

“It’s always easy to point out the tough things, but [there’s] so much that happened in between it that’s positive,” he says. 

At the centre of many of those moments is Big Dog, the NBA star’s first – and perhaps toughest – basketball coach. While DeRozan recalls his father pushing him to tears on the court, he also credits him for his deep appreciation for the history of the game.

“Dad and I used to sit on the floor of our living room and watch videotapes of decades old NBA games,” he writes. “You know the grainy eighties footage, where you could barely make out who was who and the arena lights would leave bright streaks across the screen? 

“By the time I was eight or nine, the stacks of VHS tapes filled our living room, lining each wall from floor to ceiling,” he adds, noting each of the tapes were meticulously labelled.

DeRozan says those first film sessions, during which his dad would break down the intricacies of the game and the signature moves of some of the game’s pioneering stars – from Julius Erving and Magic Johnson to Michael Jordan – taught him “the fundamentals of the game, the hard work, the drive, the love of the game.

“That’s why I appreciate every walk of the game,” he explains. “The beauty of the game is the evolution of it. I would never discredit anything from the game because everything got to start from somewhere.”

The positive inertia in his life didn’t always come from the most conventional sources either. Through a family friend named Leroy “Chico” Brown – a notorious ex-gangster who became an influential community activist in Los Angeles after serving a lengthy prison sentence – a young DeRozan met NBA great Sam Cassell, who gave DeRozan an intense lesson on his now-legendary pump fake.

“You get to your spot, kid, you hit a motherf*cker wit’ this,” DeRozan recalls Cassell saying as he demonstrated the upwards head-and-shoulder fake with an imaginary ball in his hand. “You hit him wit’ it again, they gonna jump. Every time.”

DeRozan’s respect for the history of the game extended to the NBA cohort ahead of him as well, and no star loomed larger for him than Kobe Bryant. Like he had during the grainy film sessions with his father, he wouldn’t just watch the NBA great, he would study him, mimicking everything from his footwork on the court to his hairstyle.

“He was my imagination – the guy I used to pretend to be more than anybody else on the court,” DeRozan pens of the influence Bryant had on him.

At the age of 15, as a top basketball prospect, DeRozan was invited to attend one of Kobe Bryant’s annual camps in L.A. That initial meeting grew into a mentorship thanks to a mutual friend who would let DeRozan know when Bryant was working out at a particular gym in the city. 

“I would show up to watch him work out, and most of the time Kobe would wave for me to join him,” DeRozan recalls in the book. “I don’t know what made him want to allow me into his world and get close. Maybe it was because I was always asking the right questions. With Kobe, you had to be.”

While Bryant had never spoken about mental health during his playing career, DeRozan says the late Laker legend had always pushed him to expand his influence beyond the court. 

“One thing he always expressed was find something you truly believe in and lean into that,” DeRozan says. “So even when I came out about the whole mental health aspect, it was like, lean into that, figure out how you could inspire people to get through whatever it is they’re going through.”

Embracing the Process

Leaning into his mental health work hasn’t always been easy. Bryant, the idol, mentor and friend who gave him that sage advice and shaped his identity on the court, died in 2020.

A little over a year later, in the midst of the pandemic, his father died – a loss, DeRozan admits, he didn’t take enough time to process before returning to the hardwood.

Yet through it all, no matter how much adversity he bounces back from, DeRozan never pretends to have it all figured out. Instead, he sees the discussions he has around mental health as mutually beneficial. 

“I really just try to express what it is that I’m going through and if I could give any type of confidence to help the next person to express what it is that they’re going through, it brightens my day,” he explains. “I love listening to people’s stories and what they may go through because that’s an inspiration to me to keep opening up more and more.”

That collective approach to his advocacy harkens back to something his dad told him when he was young – a quote that bookends each moment of adversity he writes about in his new book:

“The moon will shine again tomorrow.” 

“For me when you see the moon it kind of puts life in perspective to make you realize it’s more to the world than just what you think is going on with you,” he says.

It was that grounding technique that helped him process his emotions the night he learned he had been dealt from Toronto to San Antonio ahead of the 2018-19 season – a move he was blindsided by after he had discussed his future with the franchise that same offseason. Now, as he does in the book, he looks back on the impact he had on the city rather than the circumstances around his exit.

“It took some time, but I got to a point where I’m able to find positivity from it,” he says of Toronto, where he spent his first nine seasons in the NBA. “That place will always be a special place for me. I wanted to be there for my entire career. I was able to be a part of a basketball shift in culture for that city. Not just that city, the whole entire country.”

As for counselling, he’s overcome the skepticism that saw him fake his way through NBA-appointed sessions early in his career.

Likening it to his work on the court, he explains that for him “sometimes the best workout is recovery.”

“So a lot of times I treat therapy the same way. You gotta take what you learn and take a second to live through it and apply it – until you feel you need that help.”

Meanwhile, he’s no longer motivated by anger and pain; he pulls from a much more sustainable source instead.

“When it comes to that, you could dig from any type of angle,” DeRozan, who will suit up for the Sacramento Kings this upcoming season, explains. “You never know who’s watching, whose life you could change by just being an example of loving the game, putting everything you have into the game. 

“Just being able to play going into my 16th year, having that opportunity to still play at a high level, that’s something that drives me and motivates me.”