We always knew that Klay Thompson was a bit different from the rest of the guys on the team. He’s got this bizarre personality that plays out well on social media, through media interviews and through just about everything he does in China.
Thompson didn’t just become this way overnight, however. It appears he was Klay Thompson before we were even introduced to him in college. In an oral history put together by The Athletic’s Jayson Jenks, we get a feel for who Thompson was during his recruiting trip to Washington State and how those idiosyncracies played out during his college years.
One of the wildest stories — and there are quite a few — has Thompson copying video games in real life.
Klay would definitely make his own fun. Hence the bow and arrow. He loved to go and do donuts with his car when it was snowing out. Or drift on turns. We played a lot of “Mario Kart,” so on turns he would pretend his car was “Mario Kart” and drift around the turns. Every video game was for a naked lap. So if you lost, you had to strip all the way down and run around the house. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one that ever paid up for that.
For anyone who came of age during the Nintendo 64 era, Mario Kart was one of the most fun games you could play with your friends. Whether it was the races or the battle mode, Mario Kart provided hours of entertainment for that era of young gamers.
However, it’s hard to imagine a large percentage of us deciding that we needed to take our cars out into the real world and try to drift like Yoshi on Toad’s Turnpike. Only Klay.
