Post by tmax on Oct 28, 2021 20:15:18 GMT -8
‘He’s always had a different brain’: Inside Johnny Juzang’s vision quest for UCLA
WESTWOOD, Calif. — Maxie Juzang walked into his son’s room and did a double-take. The boy had taped to his closet door several sheets of paper listing goals, images and positive thoughts. Many were basketball-related — Final Four, lottery pick, NBA champion, NBA All-Star — but many others were devoted to personal development. It’s not common for a 13-year-old to conceive such thoughts, much less write them down, much less put them where he could see them every day, but Maxie had long known his son was not common. The boy didn’t just dream big, he planned big, and he understood that the only way to reach those faraway destinations was through incremental progress.
This type of mindset was standard inside the Juzang household. Maxie and his wife, Hanh, had three children, and like their parents, all of them were bright and motivated. Johnny had an older brother and younger sister, but he was hardly a victim of middle child syndrome. His parents never had to tell him to do his homework or clean his room. He was athletic, smart, and felt emotionally supported. Most of all, he was deeply curious. “He’s always had a different brain,” his sister Lauren says. “He likes to work for things, and he doesn’t get distracted. When he sees something he wants, he goes for it.”
Johnny’s interests started with Legos, cars and the piano. He also liked basketball, but it came too easily at first. He enjoyed the games but not the practices. That changed when he repeated the eighth grade and entered Core Prep Academy, an immersion program for elite athletes in Northridge, Calif. That exposed him to a much higher level of competition. Once basketball became hard, Johnny became interested.
Around this time he saw the movie “The Secret,” which imparts a concept called The Law of Attraction. The idea is that a person’s thoughts generate a frequency that produces corresponding events. If you want good things to happen, you have to think good thoughts. That sent Johnny on a deep dive through YouTube and other sources to find ways to further strengthen his mind. He learned about dedication, manifestation and visualization. He decided that in order to achieve something, he first had to conceive it. So he created “vision boards” itemizing his goals and affirmations, and he put them on his closet so he could see them every day.
Look at him now. Juzang is a 6-foot-7 junior guard at UCLA and a consensus preseason first-team All-American for the No. 2 ranked team in the country. Last March, he led the Bruins on an unlikely journey from the First Four to the Final Four, just as he imagined. When the season was over, he put his name in the NBA Draft and could have been a second-round pick. His sights, however, were set higher than that, so he came back to school. “Johnny’s a macro thinker,” his brother Christian says. “He’s always looking at the big picture rather than asking, what is this going to do for me tomorrow?”
Macro thinker, micro focused, physically gifted, spiritually sound — that is quite the rare combination. Then again, so is Juzang. Maxie was raised by a Creole father (French and Black descent) and Black mother, and his grandmother was part Native American. Hanh was born in Vietnam as were both her parents, and she had grandparents and extended family who were Chinese and French. All of these strains flow side by side through Johnny’s blood, and they manifest on his face. If you look at Juzang — really look at him — it’s hard to tell what he is or where he’s from. That’s OK, though, because he has a clear vision of where he’s going.
It is another sparkling day in Westwood, and as Juzang sits on a patio outside UCLA’s practice court, his demeanor matches the cloudless sky. (“He’s a happy guy, which is big for me,” Bruins coach Mick Cronin says. “I don’t like mopey guys.”) As Juzang discusses his past and his future while living in the present, he manages to be insightful without being weighted down by his thoughts. Nor does he pretend to have all the answers. “There are certain things you can’t explain,” he says. “This is a question I really do ask myself. Like, how do I have all these habits? Where’d I get all this motivation?”
The answer starts with his parents. Maxie, who as the fifth of nine children is also a middle child, was raised by a father who served in the Air Force and a mother who taught science and math. She placed ultimate value on education, which is why all of her children became successful doctors, attorneys and entrepreneurs. Maxie studied mechanical engineering and economics (with a minor in business) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and then moved to Los Angeles, where he started his own medical tech services company. He sold that in 1997, and nine years later he launched a health staffing company that has since grown to more than 800 employees.
Hanh, meanwhile, was the byproduct of an arranged marriage in her native Vietnam. The marriage produced four children but didn’t last. Her mother met a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, and the family moved with him to the States when Hanh was 4. Hanh graduated from VCU and worked for Lucent Technologies, but she set aside her career after her children were born. When the kids got older, Hanh went back to work and is now a wealth management advisor for Morgan Stanley. (And lest anyone think Maxie and Hanh are all work and no play, let the record show they met at 2 a.m. in a Cancun bar called Disco Daddy’s.)
Maxie says his children’s hunger was “self-created,” but they were only following their parents’ example. He and Hanh told the kids they would get them lessons, pay for trainers, drive them to games and send them to the best schools — but only if they kept their grades up. “There were always high expectations in our house,” Johnny says.
From the start, Johnny had a tendency to get fixated on things that intrigued and challenged him. He and his sister would spend hours together putting together Legos. “One time we got this big Star Wars ship that took so long, I had to opt out,” Lauren says. “But he sat on the steps until he finished it.” Juzang’s passion for cars started with collecting small models that were on sale at Rite Aid. He spent hours watching videos on YouTube, losing himself in the details of craft, design and performance. When his father took him to the L.A. Auto Show every year, Johnny was in heaven.
He was 14 when he decided to start his own clothing company. He called it Special Cloth and figured out how to create a website, manufacture T-shirts, and sell merchandise. He stuck with it for nearly a year and broke even. The company doesn’t exist anymore, but a few of those T-shirts are still floating about.
There are some athletes in Juzang’s family tree — a track athlete here, a basketball player there — but he was blessed with a generous combination of height and agility. When he was 9, he led his AAU team to a national championship. As an eighth-grader at Viewpoint School in Calabasas, Juzang went over to where Christian and his friends were having lunch and, while wearing his school uniform, easily pulled off a 360-degree dunk. Christian was four years older and equally serious about hoops. He and Johnny played a lot together, but they don’t have a trove of stories about brotherly battles. They were more interested in supporting each other than beating each other.
When Johnny reached ninth grade, he entered a pair of top-flight programs — the grassroots Compton Magic and Harvard-Westlake School. “He always had that desire to play with the best,” Maxie says. The following summer, Christian came home from a disappointing freshman year at Harvard, and the two of them went to work. They’d pack the car with clothes and basketballs early in the morning, drive from their home in Tarzana to work with trainers in El Segundo, then run the sand dune in Manhattan Beach, lift weights, and end with a long pickup game in Inglewood. “I cherish that summer more than any other,” Christian says. “It was just pure. Brothers and basketball.”
Johnny carried that vibe into his high school career. He rose each morning at 5 a.m. so he could get in an hourlong workout before class. After he got his driver’s license, he would spend his weekends training and playing. His parents never had to force him to put in the time. If anything, they encouraged him to relax and have a fun once in a while. Juzang also freely picked the brain of Michael Cooper, the longtime Los Angeles Laker who used to be married to one of Maxie’s sisters.
Juzang was in eighth grade when he got his first scholarship offer from Arizona State. He was a three-year starter at Harvard-Westlake, and as a junior he averaged 23.0 points, 8.5 rebounds and 3.4 assists. By the time that season ended, he was in such high demand that he started to consider reclassifying academically so he could go to college a year early. His parents weren’t thrilled with the idea — “I was like, man, you sure you want to miss senior year, graduation, all that stuff?” Maxie says — but they gave him the space to make his own decision. Juzang grew up a UCLA fan, but that program was in transition after Steve Alford was fired on New Year’s Eve. Cronin visited Juzang at Harvard-Westlake the morning after he got hired, but by that time Juzang had all but decided to go to Kentucky.
He was 18 when he alighted in Lexington, and his family did their best to give him a taste of home. Christian mailed his vision boards so he so could still look at them every day. His parents rented an apartment in town so they could stay there on their visits. His maternal grandparents, who live in Virginia, stayed there often as well. Still, Juzang was clearly out of his comfort zone. That was apparent when the Wildcats had their big season opener against Michigan State in Madison Square Garden. His parents flew to New York City for the occasion, only to see Johnny go scoreless in two minutes off the bench. “You could see he was disappointed,” Maxie says. “His expectation for playing time was greater than what he got. From that point on, it was a fight for him.”
Juzang shot 40.7 percent from 3-point range against SEC opponents, but he only averaged 2.9 points in 12.3 minutes on the season. He heard the conventional wisdom that it was a mistake for him to reclassify and go to Kentucky, but that struck him as small-minded. “It was hard as competitor, you want to compete, but it was one of the most beneficial experiences I’ve ever had,” Juzang says. “You need those learning experiences where you’re really facing a lot of adversity. If you’re not going to quit, then you’re going to figure out a way to make things work.”
Still, when the season was canceled and campus shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Juzang returned to California and realized how much he missed his friends, his network of trainers, and most of all, his family. He decided to transfer, and this time UCLA was the easy choice. Because of the pandemic, the players did not arrive on campus until late September. Juzang developed a stress reaction in his right foot and had to miss the first four games, but as the weeks went on, he got more comfortable in Cronin’s offense and with his standing on the squad. He averaged a team-best 16.0 points per game and led the Bruins to a fourth-place finish in the Pac-12.
During a practice right before the final game of the regular season against USC, Juzang badly turned his ankle. With the Bruins squarely on the bubble, he wanted to power through. Cronin, in what he calls “maybe the best decision my career,” wouldn’t let him play for fear he would re-injure it and be gone for good. The gamble paid off — barely. UCLA lost to the Trojans and then fell to Oregon State in the quarterfinal of the conference tournament with Juzang back in the lineup. They had to wait until the very end of the Selection Show to hear their name called as a First Four team.
From there, Juzang took the Bruins on a ride for the ages. He was unable to practice and had to sleep with his leg propped vertically against a wall to keep his ankle from swelling up, but come game time, he shined. He put up 23 points in the Bruins’ First Four win over Michigan State and 27 in their first-round win over BYU. During the regional final against Michigan, Juzang had 28 of the team’s 51 points. He had 29 in the Final Four against Gonzaga, none bigger than the bucket he scored with 3.3 seconds left in overtime. With the clock winding down and UCLA trailing by two, Juzang calmly brought the ball up court, drove by his defender, lofted an errant runner, gathered the rebound, and converted to tie the game at 90. It was the ultimate crucible, but there was never a doubt in anyone’s mind, least of all his, who was going to take that shot. “You work for those moments,” he says. “I felt ready to take it.”
We all know what happened next. Gonzaga inbounded the ball to freshman guard Jalen Suggs, who banked in a 37-foot shot at the buzzer to end UCLA’s season. The Zags were still celebrating when Juzang gathered his teammates for an impromptu huddle and encouraged them to be proud of all they had accomplished. It was a painful moment, but fortunately, Juzang was there to help everyone to see the big picture.
After entering the NBA Draft, Juzang was invited to the pre-draft combine, had a pro day and worked out for several teams. His balky ankle, combined with lingering concerns about his playmaking and defense, left him without a first-round guarantee. So he came back to rejoin a high-powered, veteran squad that is returning every other player from last year’s Final Four squad. Juzang was eager to get to work, but first he had to take two months off to allow his body to heal. “That was hard because in the summer a lot of guys are playing pickup,” he says. “That’s the most fun I can have, playing and competing.”
When the healing was done, Juzang began addressing the deficiencies that prevented him from being a higher draft pick. “He can’t get enough of trying to make his body better, trying to learn, trying to improve his skills,” Cronin says. Juzang will also benefit from having a full offseason with his teammates, which was not the case a year ago. Cronin wants him to be more vocal as a leader, and the other players have noticed his burgeoning swagger. “He has a very high level of confidence,” 6-7 junior wing Jaime Jaquez says. “He doesn’t really have a bad day. He’s always in here smiling, having a good time. He’s serious but not too serious.”
Juzang is well-aware that his postseason performance and preseason hype have created high expectations. Some would look at that as an onerous burden, but as usual, Juzang sees things differently. “I don’t ever put pressure on myself like that,” he says. “What drives me at my core isn’t all these big goals. It’s knowing that I’m growing and progressing. It’s asking myself every day, am I getting better? Did I push myself? Am I growing my character? Am I growing my game? So I’m going to give it everything I have, and I’m going to be present. If I do, things will work out.”
WESTWOOD, Calif. — Maxie Juzang walked into his son’s room and did a double-take. The boy had taped to his closet door several sheets of paper listing goals, images and positive thoughts. Many were basketball-related — Final Four, lottery pick, NBA champion, NBA All-Star — but many others were devoted to personal development. It’s not common for a 13-year-old to conceive such thoughts, much less write them down, much less put them where he could see them every day, but Maxie had long known his son was not common. The boy didn’t just dream big, he planned big, and he understood that the only way to reach those faraway destinations was through incremental progress.
This type of mindset was standard inside the Juzang household. Maxie and his wife, Hanh, had three children, and like their parents, all of them were bright and motivated. Johnny had an older brother and younger sister, but he was hardly a victim of middle child syndrome. His parents never had to tell him to do his homework or clean his room. He was athletic, smart, and felt emotionally supported. Most of all, he was deeply curious. “He’s always had a different brain,” his sister Lauren says. “He likes to work for things, and he doesn’t get distracted. When he sees something he wants, he goes for it.”
Johnny’s interests started with Legos, cars and the piano. He also liked basketball, but it came too easily at first. He enjoyed the games but not the practices. That changed when he repeated the eighth grade and entered Core Prep Academy, an immersion program for elite athletes in Northridge, Calif. That exposed him to a much higher level of competition. Once basketball became hard, Johnny became interested.
Around this time he saw the movie “The Secret,” which imparts a concept called The Law of Attraction. The idea is that a person’s thoughts generate a frequency that produces corresponding events. If you want good things to happen, you have to think good thoughts. That sent Johnny on a deep dive through YouTube and other sources to find ways to further strengthen his mind. He learned about dedication, manifestation and visualization. He decided that in order to achieve something, he first had to conceive it. So he created “vision boards” itemizing his goals and affirmations, and he put them on his closet so he could see them every day.
Look at him now. Juzang is a 6-foot-7 junior guard at UCLA and a consensus preseason first-team All-American for the No. 2 ranked team in the country. Last March, he led the Bruins on an unlikely journey from the First Four to the Final Four, just as he imagined. When the season was over, he put his name in the NBA Draft and could have been a second-round pick. His sights, however, were set higher than that, so he came back to school. “Johnny’s a macro thinker,” his brother Christian says. “He’s always looking at the big picture rather than asking, what is this going to do for me tomorrow?”
Macro thinker, micro focused, physically gifted, spiritually sound — that is quite the rare combination. Then again, so is Juzang. Maxie was raised by a Creole father (French and Black descent) and Black mother, and his grandmother was part Native American. Hanh was born in Vietnam as were both her parents, and she had grandparents and extended family who were Chinese and French. All of these strains flow side by side through Johnny’s blood, and they manifest on his face. If you look at Juzang — really look at him — it’s hard to tell what he is or where he’s from. That’s OK, though, because he has a clear vision of where he’s going.
It is another sparkling day in Westwood, and as Juzang sits on a patio outside UCLA’s practice court, his demeanor matches the cloudless sky. (“He’s a happy guy, which is big for me,” Bruins coach Mick Cronin says. “I don’t like mopey guys.”) As Juzang discusses his past and his future while living in the present, he manages to be insightful without being weighted down by his thoughts. Nor does he pretend to have all the answers. “There are certain things you can’t explain,” he says. “This is a question I really do ask myself. Like, how do I have all these habits? Where’d I get all this motivation?”
The answer starts with his parents. Maxie, who as the fifth of nine children is also a middle child, was raised by a father who served in the Air Force and a mother who taught science and math. She placed ultimate value on education, which is why all of her children became successful doctors, attorneys and entrepreneurs. Maxie studied mechanical engineering and economics (with a minor in business) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and then moved to Los Angeles, where he started his own medical tech services company. He sold that in 1997, and nine years later he launched a health staffing company that has since grown to more than 800 employees.
Hanh, meanwhile, was the byproduct of an arranged marriage in her native Vietnam. The marriage produced four children but didn’t last. Her mother met a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, and the family moved with him to the States when Hanh was 4. Hanh graduated from VCU and worked for Lucent Technologies, but she set aside her career after her children were born. When the kids got older, Hanh went back to work and is now a wealth management advisor for Morgan Stanley. (And lest anyone think Maxie and Hanh are all work and no play, let the record show they met at 2 a.m. in a Cancun bar called Disco Daddy’s.)
Maxie says his children’s hunger was “self-created,” but they were only following their parents’ example. He and Hanh told the kids they would get them lessons, pay for trainers, drive them to games and send them to the best schools — but only if they kept their grades up. “There were always high expectations in our house,” Johnny says.
From the start, Johnny had a tendency to get fixated on things that intrigued and challenged him. He and his sister would spend hours together putting together Legos. “One time we got this big Star Wars ship that took so long, I had to opt out,” Lauren says. “But he sat on the steps until he finished it.” Juzang’s passion for cars started with collecting small models that were on sale at Rite Aid. He spent hours watching videos on YouTube, losing himself in the details of craft, design and performance. When his father took him to the L.A. Auto Show every year, Johnny was in heaven.
He was 14 when he decided to start his own clothing company. He called it Special Cloth and figured out how to create a website, manufacture T-shirts, and sell merchandise. He stuck with it for nearly a year and broke even. The company doesn’t exist anymore, but a few of those T-shirts are still floating about.
There are some athletes in Juzang’s family tree — a track athlete here, a basketball player there — but he was blessed with a generous combination of height and agility. When he was 9, he led his AAU team to a national championship. As an eighth-grader at Viewpoint School in Calabasas, Juzang went over to where Christian and his friends were having lunch and, while wearing his school uniform, easily pulled off a 360-degree dunk. Christian was four years older and equally serious about hoops. He and Johnny played a lot together, but they don’t have a trove of stories about brotherly battles. They were more interested in supporting each other than beating each other.
When Johnny reached ninth grade, he entered a pair of top-flight programs — the grassroots Compton Magic and Harvard-Westlake School. “He always had that desire to play with the best,” Maxie says. The following summer, Christian came home from a disappointing freshman year at Harvard, and the two of them went to work. They’d pack the car with clothes and basketballs early in the morning, drive from their home in Tarzana to work with trainers in El Segundo, then run the sand dune in Manhattan Beach, lift weights, and end with a long pickup game in Inglewood. “I cherish that summer more than any other,” Christian says. “It was just pure. Brothers and basketball.”
Johnny carried that vibe into his high school career. He rose each morning at 5 a.m. so he could get in an hourlong workout before class. After he got his driver’s license, he would spend his weekends training and playing. His parents never had to force him to put in the time. If anything, they encouraged him to relax and have a fun once in a while. Juzang also freely picked the brain of Michael Cooper, the longtime Los Angeles Laker who used to be married to one of Maxie’s sisters.
Juzang was in eighth grade when he got his first scholarship offer from Arizona State. He was a three-year starter at Harvard-Westlake, and as a junior he averaged 23.0 points, 8.5 rebounds and 3.4 assists. By the time that season ended, he was in such high demand that he started to consider reclassifying academically so he could go to college a year early. His parents weren’t thrilled with the idea — “I was like, man, you sure you want to miss senior year, graduation, all that stuff?” Maxie says — but they gave him the space to make his own decision. Juzang grew up a UCLA fan, but that program was in transition after Steve Alford was fired on New Year’s Eve. Cronin visited Juzang at Harvard-Westlake the morning after he got hired, but by that time Juzang had all but decided to go to Kentucky.
He was 18 when he alighted in Lexington, and his family did their best to give him a taste of home. Christian mailed his vision boards so he so could still look at them every day. His parents rented an apartment in town so they could stay there on their visits. His maternal grandparents, who live in Virginia, stayed there often as well. Still, Juzang was clearly out of his comfort zone. That was apparent when the Wildcats had their big season opener against Michigan State in Madison Square Garden. His parents flew to New York City for the occasion, only to see Johnny go scoreless in two minutes off the bench. “You could see he was disappointed,” Maxie says. “His expectation for playing time was greater than what he got. From that point on, it was a fight for him.”
Juzang shot 40.7 percent from 3-point range against SEC opponents, but he only averaged 2.9 points in 12.3 minutes on the season. He heard the conventional wisdom that it was a mistake for him to reclassify and go to Kentucky, but that struck him as small-minded. “It was hard as competitor, you want to compete, but it was one of the most beneficial experiences I’ve ever had,” Juzang says. “You need those learning experiences where you’re really facing a lot of adversity. If you’re not going to quit, then you’re going to figure out a way to make things work.”
Still, when the season was canceled and campus shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Juzang returned to California and realized how much he missed his friends, his network of trainers, and most of all, his family. He decided to transfer, and this time UCLA was the easy choice. Because of the pandemic, the players did not arrive on campus until late September. Juzang developed a stress reaction in his right foot and had to miss the first four games, but as the weeks went on, he got more comfortable in Cronin’s offense and with his standing on the squad. He averaged a team-best 16.0 points per game and led the Bruins to a fourth-place finish in the Pac-12.
During a practice right before the final game of the regular season against USC, Juzang badly turned his ankle. With the Bruins squarely on the bubble, he wanted to power through. Cronin, in what he calls “maybe the best decision my career,” wouldn’t let him play for fear he would re-injure it and be gone for good. The gamble paid off — barely. UCLA lost to the Trojans and then fell to Oregon State in the quarterfinal of the conference tournament with Juzang back in the lineup. They had to wait until the very end of the Selection Show to hear their name called as a First Four team.
From there, Juzang took the Bruins on a ride for the ages. He was unable to practice and had to sleep with his leg propped vertically against a wall to keep his ankle from swelling up, but come game time, he shined. He put up 23 points in the Bruins’ First Four win over Michigan State and 27 in their first-round win over BYU. During the regional final against Michigan, Juzang had 28 of the team’s 51 points. He had 29 in the Final Four against Gonzaga, none bigger than the bucket he scored with 3.3 seconds left in overtime. With the clock winding down and UCLA trailing by two, Juzang calmly brought the ball up court, drove by his defender, lofted an errant runner, gathered the rebound, and converted to tie the game at 90. It was the ultimate crucible, but there was never a doubt in anyone’s mind, least of all his, who was going to take that shot. “You work for those moments,” he says. “I felt ready to take it.”
We all know what happened next. Gonzaga inbounded the ball to freshman guard Jalen Suggs, who banked in a 37-foot shot at the buzzer to end UCLA’s season. The Zags were still celebrating when Juzang gathered his teammates for an impromptu huddle and encouraged them to be proud of all they had accomplished. It was a painful moment, but fortunately, Juzang was there to help everyone to see the big picture.
After entering the NBA Draft, Juzang was invited to the pre-draft combine, had a pro day and worked out for several teams. His balky ankle, combined with lingering concerns about his playmaking and defense, left him without a first-round guarantee. So he came back to rejoin a high-powered, veteran squad that is returning every other player from last year’s Final Four squad. Juzang was eager to get to work, but first he had to take two months off to allow his body to heal. “That was hard because in the summer a lot of guys are playing pickup,” he says. “That’s the most fun I can have, playing and competing.”
When the healing was done, Juzang began addressing the deficiencies that prevented him from being a higher draft pick. “He can’t get enough of trying to make his body better, trying to learn, trying to improve his skills,” Cronin says. Juzang will also benefit from having a full offseason with his teammates, which was not the case a year ago. Cronin wants him to be more vocal as a leader, and the other players have noticed his burgeoning swagger. “He has a very high level of confidence,” 6-7 junior wing Jaime Jaquez says. “He doesn’t really have a bad day. He’s always in here smiling, having a good time. He’s serious but not too serious.”
Juzang is well-aware that his postseason performance and preseason hype have created high expectations. Some would look at that as an onerous burden, but as usual, Juzang sees things differently. “I don’t ever put pressure on myself like that,” he says. “What drives me at my core isn’t all these big goals. It’s knowing that I’m growing and progressing. It’s asking myself every day, am I getting better? Did I push myself? Am I growing my character? Am I growing my game? So I’m going to give it everything I have, and I’m going to be present. If I do, things will work out.”
