Torrey Craig is guaranteed an NBA title ring. His small SC hometown is watching
It might not surprise you that most of the conversations Kelton Talford has had with his Pops while watching this year’s NBA Finals have been about one player in particular.
“They’re mostly about Torrey,” Talford said, a bit of pride shining through in his voice in a phone conversation last week.
Talford was referring to the Phoenix Suns’ reserve guard, Torrey Craig — a hometown hero he’s looked up to for years and an NBA player who will earn an NBA championship ring this summer no matter what happens the rest of this NBA finals series. That’s because he played a bulk of the 2020-21 season for both the Phoenix Suns (current team) and the Milwaukee Bucks (former team).
“Someone from 1A basketball,” Talford continued, “from South Carolina, from our school, is really two games away from winning an NBA championship.”
Craig’s career has been defined by defying odds. It makes sense that Talford would look up to Craig.
After all, Talford — like so many other kids with their own hometown heroes — probably sees a bit of himself and his own story in Craig.
Talford and Craig are both natives of Great Falls, South Carolina, the 2,000-person, basketball-loving town in rural Chester County. Both are alumni of Great Falls High School. Both earned scholarships at mid-major basketball teams in public South Carolina universities — Craig at USC Upstate and Talford at Winthrop (where as a freshman he was a contributor on a Big South championship team who played in last year’s NCAA tournament).
And both have similar styles of play: They’re known as tenacious, long, positionless players with an edge that Talford says “has a lot” to do with their Great Falls roots.
“Since middle school, that’s who you watched,” Talford said of Craig, appearing to speak on behalf of his generation of Great Falls hoopers. “You’ve either seen him play in a state championship game, go to college, play overseas and stuff like that. We just followed him throughout his career.”
The fact that Talford sees himself in Craig would probably bring a smile to Craig’s face. The NBA star said as much when he visited home in February 2020, after defending LeBron James for four quarters and catching a red-eye flight from Denver the next night to see his high school alma mater’s senior night. (That night, before having his jersey honored and pressed into a frame, and after speaking a few words into his microphone for a whole bunch of Torrey Craig-jersey-wearing kids, he saw Talford catch and flush away an alley-oop.)
“No one is expecting you to make it out of a small city, small town, small school,” Craig told a few local reporters after that game. “I just want to be an inspiration for those guys.”
NBA fans in Phoenix and Milwaukee and elsewhere look at Craig and probably see a 30-year-old forward who has averaged 5.3 points and 3.5 rebounds a game in his three-year NBA career. (Those numbers are very close to his season average in 2020-21: 5.5 points, 3.9 rebounds.)
But Talford and others who knew him while in Great Falls see more.
Stories they’d later learn of Craig, the player, undeniably mix with Craig, the person: They include stories about Craig writing letters detailing his NBA dreams to his mother, who was incarcerated for parts of his childhood, or ones about Craig’s high school coach and his neighbors carpooling Craig from Augusta to Charlotte to Camden so his hoop dreams could have a chance of getting off the ground.
“If you come from Great Falls, we’re just a small town that people don’t really know about,” Talford said. “But when it comes to basketball and things like that, that’s something we take pride in. We have the community behind us, and it’s just something ingrained in us at a young age.”
Craig has added value off the bench for the Suns in his first NBA Finals appearance: The guard played 16 minutes and notched two points and three rebounds in Game One. In Game Two, he made a pair of three-pointers in eight minutes of play before leaving the game with a knee contusion. He played 15 minutes in the Suns’ loss in Game Three on Sunday, providing a defensive spark in a game when the Suns badly needed one.
His team is up 2-1 over the Bucks, two wins away from an NBA championship.
But no matter what happens the rest of the series, he’ll win.
And so will Great Falls.
They already have.
NBA Finals Game 4 schedule
9 p.m. Wednesday, ABC. Suns lead series 2-1
This story was originally published July 12, 2021 at 9:00 AM.
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