TULSA, Okla. — Cory Joseph’s mother did not have to persuade him to shovel snow. The basketball goal was part of the driveway in their Major Oaks neighborhood in Toronto. So Joseph, a freshman guard for Texas, and his brother, Devoe, shoveled and chipped ice without threat and then left their gloves on to play ball.
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Toronto native, Cory Joseph, during Texas' victory against Oakland on Friday.
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Texas forward, Tristan Thompson, also grew up in the Toronto area.
“It was hard playing in that your hands would get cold, so you couldn’t play too long, maybe two games up to 10, go back in the house and get some hot chocolate and then come back out and play again,” Joseph said.
“My mom liked it because we shoveled the driveway for her.”
Tristan Thompson, a Texas post player who is from the Toronto area, also learned to work with a shovel and play basketball in gloves.
“I was sweating in my coat when I played,” Thompson said. “It’s what you did.”
Joseph and Thompson overcame most obstacles trying to play basketball in a place where hockey is the national sport, but the one hurdle they could not clear was finding a game to challenge them. At 13 and 14 years old, they would face 23- and 24-year-old players at neighborhood playgrounds and gyms, but that was still not enough.
So they left Canada. Thompson and Joseph honed their skills at Findlay Prep in Nevada and are now starters for Texas, which will play Arizona here Sunday in an N.C.A.A. tournament third-round game.
“Canada has a lot of raw talent, it just hasn’t been discovered yet,” Thompson said. “Coaches get paid to coach high school basketball in the states, and the coaches in Canada, it’s more a volunteer thing. A lot of guys play basketball, but it’s kind of like a hobby; they never see themselves on CBS.
“Me, Cory and a bunch of other guys had that dream.”
Texas was the first to offer Thompson, a 6-foot-8 forward, a scholarship, and he committed to the Longhorns his sophomore year in high school. That opened a pipeline from Toronto to Texas.
Joseph was the next to commit. The Longhorns have also signed the 6-foot-2 guard Myck Kabongo, a Toronto native who is playing this season at Findlay Prep. Texas has also received a commitment for next season from the Toronto native Kevin Thomas, a power forward who is playing at a prep school in North Carolina.
“I started recruiting Toronto when I was at U.N.C.-Wilmington, where we always tried to tap into areas we felt weren’t as tapped as much,” the Texas assistant coach Rodney Terry said. “We found a niche. We missed on a couple of good guys, and then when I got to Texas I went back again.”
Thompson, who is averaging 13.4 points and 7.9 rebounds a game for the Longhorns (28-7), said one of the reasons he was able to contribute as a freshman was because he got out of Canada and into a bigger pool of talent.
“I wanted to be more college-ready,” Thompson said. “I knew if I stayed in Toronto I would have gone Division I, but I wanted to actually be ready to come in and contribute. So going down to the States to play against guys who were going to be in Division I programs was going to make me ready to play.”
Joseph, who is 6-3, also came prepared. He has started all 35 games and averages 10.5 points and 3 assists a game.
Sitting in the Texas locker room Saturday afternoon, Joseph had a cut above his upper lip and a bump on his chin. There was an ice bag on his left forearm, and his lip looked puffy from a blow.
It looked as if he had just come off the ice after a hockey game.
Every bump and bruise, though, came from a cherished victory over Oakland on Friday. At one point during the game, Joseph came back on the floor with gauze taped to his top lip to stop the bleeding. For Joseph, it was worth it.
“Some people up there didn’t understand our passion for basketball, but that was because they were into hockey,” Joseph said. “In our neighborhood, we focused on basketball because we wanted to get here.”
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