Honoring the Gift: Russell Westbrook

Words // Juno Kelly

Producer // Daniele Carettoni at Espresso Productions | Photographer // Michael Schwartz at Copious Management | Stylist // Mark Paul Barro | Groomer // Tasha Brown at The Wall Group using Chanel | Digital Tech // Rich Coughran | Photography Assistant // Danya Morrison | Post Production // Petteri Lamula for Ego Studios

NBA All Star Russell Westbrook is renowned for his aggression on the court; his ruthless dunks extolled by fans in a slate of compilation videos across the internet.

It's a characteristic that has been both lauded and disparaged. When Kobe Bryant was asked in a post-game interview how many similarities he saw between him and Westbrook, he answered without hesitation, “a ton.” “I didn’t smile much on the court either. He plays a game with such an energy and such an aggressiveness, and it needs to be appreciated.”

Off the court, Westbrook is a markedly gentle interviewee; especially considering he has good reason to be wary of the media, who doesn’t always give him a fair shake. He speaks gently and slowly, taking his time to articulate what he wants to say, often attempting to tie each answer into a neat bow. We speak on a Thursday morning towards the end of January, a few days after the LA Clippers point guard scored 13 assists in a game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. Although the Clippers lost the game (by a mere 4 points), Westbrook is in good spirits. This is perhaps by dint of the fact that his insatiable ambition extends well beyond game days; moonlighting as an entrepreneur, creative director, and bona-fide philanthropist.

Westbrook grew up in inner-city LA. An academic teenager, he had a scholarly 3.9 GPA, but when it came to basketball, was a late bloomer.

A diminutive 5ft.8 (for basketball anyway) he didn’t play on his high school’s varsity team until senior year, but after a saving-grace growth spurt took up his rightful place on the court. It was during high school that his childhood best friend Khelcey Barrs III passed away after collapsing during a game, and since, Westbrook has played in his honor, sporting a “KB3” on his wrist and sneakers, with his peers and the media surmising that part of his strength lies in the fact that he's playing for Barrs too. By the end of senior year, Westbrook was awarded a coveted basketball scholarship to UCLA, leaving after 2 years when he was drafted to play for Oklahoma City Thunder, where he was first selected as an NBA All-star. He went on to play for the Houston Rockets, Washington Wizards, LA Lakers, and in February 2023 was signed by the LA Clippers, where he now resides. Westbrook’s legacy (so far) is his penchant for triple doubles (securing a double-digit number in three of the following categories: assists, blocks, points, rebounds, and steals, over the course of a game), of which he holds the record, 198.

But today, it's not basketball that Westbrook is eager to discuss (although he does answer with a resounding “shoot!” when I say we’re ready to start). “GOD has blessed me with the platform to play basketball and to use the platform to do other things,” he says. After all, basketball is a fickle industry, and at 35, with likely only a handful of playing years left, Westbrook is aware that the NBA gravy-train won’t last forever. So, he has his mind on more abiding things— becoming a billionaire, for one. It's a goal seemingly shrouded in ruthless ambition, yet when you do some digging into Westbrook’s investments and various businesses— his means of reaching that elusive 9 zero mark — they’re connected by a common thread: empowering the disadvantaged. Take Russell Westbrook Enterprises (RWE), a multi-pronged venture centered on uplifting underserved communities through investments and partnerships. “It’s where I'm from. I'm very connected to the underserved at risk community, especially here in Los Angeles,” he says of the philosophy underscoring his business acumen.

“And anything that we do and I do as an enterprise, that's my core value and core component. If it doesn't reach those components, then more than likely I'm not interested in doing it.”

I note that for an aspiring billionaire, Westbrook’s philosophy is markedly noble. After all, there's some hefty discourse circulating at the moment debating the possibility, or impossibility, of ethical billionaires. “You can do both,” he retorts, resolute. “You can do good and [other] people can make a lot of money, but you can also make a lot of money. But the same amount of effort that I put into wanting to be a billionaire is the same amount of effort I will put into make sure that my community and the communities across the world are built up to the utmost and the highest,” he explains.

As a child, Westbrook’s family moved around South Central LA. “There were so many different distractions and different ways you could have veered off growing up in the inner city and figuring out other things to get myself in trouble,” he explains. With parents determined to keep him and his brother on the straight and narrow, education was prized above all else in the Westbrook household. “Sports was an afterthought, something that we would do after school,” he tells me. His adolescent years were also shaped by a resolve to set a good example for his brother Raynard, three years his junior. “I was big on setting an example for my little brother because he was obviously somebody that looked up to me, and I wanted to make sure that I set the table and set an example for him in a way that he knew and understood how a school education could be helpful for him in the long run.” (Today, Raynard is the Chief Content Officer at RWE).

When Westbrook talks about where he grew up, he’s matter-of-fact; he acknowledges the injustices plaguing the area, but doesn’t let them eclipse his fierce loyalty to his community.

“When I was younger you don't know what you're in because that's the only thing I knew. I was blessed to be able to understand and it taught me so much about myself—taught me so much about the world. It's made me the person I am today and I'm grateful for that.” For now, the only thing standing in the way of his philanthropy is practicality. “You want to do good so fast. I want to help so many people, but I have to be patient in understanding the process of like, listen, this may take years to turn around. These are decades or decades of time where this has been the same system for so long.”

NBA players are renowned for their philanthropic endeavors, their efforts to elevate the neighborhoods they came from once they make it big, and education is Westbrook’s cause celebre, as despite reaping its benefits, he’s hyper-aware of the flaws in the system: of the fact that with so many distractions on offer, school doesn’t always feel like “fun” in the inner city. In 2012, he launched The Russell Westbrook Why Not? Foundation (a moniker named after his own motto, “why not?”), which works closely with non-profits to create opportunities for underserved inner-city youth, particularly in the Black community. The endeavor later snowballed into The Russell Westbrook Why Not? High School in South LA, a charter school in partnership with The LA Promise Fund that places an onus on values traditional schooling often bypasses: emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, creativity in media and film, and financial literacy.

While talking about the school, Westbrook’s passion is clear. Referring to the students as “our kids,” he’s cognizant of their unique family set ups, and works with the LA Promise fund to make sure each child’s experience is tailored to whatever’s going on at home. “They create this community, this family aspect at the school. I want to make sure that is implemented because there's a lot of, whether it's single moms, single dads, there's a lot of kids that live with their grandparents, or there's a lot of kids that are away from their siblings, there's so many different things. There's so many different things these kids are going through,” he says. Westbrook Academy is also focused on setting the kids up beyond school, helping them secure the kind of opportunities that don’t always sprout from grades alone, yet are ample in upper-class circles, like job connections and internships.

Another of the school’s principal missions is to endow its students with financial literacy, playing into a wider (if torpid) movement to annex the life skill onto the American curriculum (financial illiteracy was recently declared an epidemic in the U.S.). “I think it teaches you not just about finances, but it teaches you life lessons. I think, bluntly speaking, a lot of people in the world, money kind of rules their world…But a lot of people don't actually understand.” (I’m aware that this is ironic coming from an aspiring billionaire, but Westbrook’s intentions are so pure I let it slide.) “There's no programs or things that are in place in the inner city that teach you how to open a bank account or how to save money, or any aspects of it. And I think it's important that we continue to try to find ways to implement that. That's why it's so important at my school, because I want to make sure that the kids at least have some knowledge of it if they're not being taught at home by their parents…And it's not their parents fault at all. It's just how things kind of lay out sometimes.”

As well as Westbrook Academy’s students, Westbrook and his wife Nina have three at home. The couple met in 2007, while they were both studying at UCLA. A certified marriage and family therapist, Nina also shares her husband’s entrepreneurial streak, having founded digital mental health and wellness community Bene, as well Do Tell, a conversational card game designed to help friends and families connect, with a bonus spicer version for couples. (Westbrook and Nina played a few rounds of the latter in an amusing video on Nina’s YouTube account, The Relationship Chronicles.) Westbrook's Voice softens at the mention of the couples’ children, a boy, five, and three-year-old twin girls. Last year, at a post-game interview, Westbrook donned a sweater embroidered with a drawing by his son, making sure he could see his handiwork on the TV at home. “My son is very artistic. He likes to do things and draw. That's why that sweater was so important, because he drew it himself.” He explains that all three kids love sports, but that one of his daughters, like her dad, has a particular affinity for basketball, chuckling proudly when I suggest she takes after him.

When he’s not in his Clippers jersey, Westbrook is quite the sartorialist. Over the past decade, the NBA tunnel-walk (when the players walk the passage from locker room to arena entrance) has become a catwalk in its own right, with players' ensembles becoming fodder for the media and a spate of streetwear-centric Instagram accounts: Westbrook, with his zany, dont-give-a-shit style, has been widely dubbed “the Kate Moss of the NBA.'' He goes against the grain when it comes to the unwritten gender codes usually strictly adhered to by male athletes; to the 2022 MET Gala, he wore a top hat and tails Thom Browne suit, complete with a full-length skirt. Westbrook hesitates when I ask how he would define his fashion philosophy, “Ooph! Fashion philosophy. Ooph.” But when he gathers his thoughts, it’s clear that his approach to fashion is as preternaturally well-meaning as his approach to everything else. “It's a confidence builder. It's something that allows people to be themselves, and they can dress and wear whatever they want and feel comfortable and confident in it.”

It was the traction his personal style was gathering that placed Westbrook in a unique position to launch his own fashion brand, Honor The Gift, in 2017. When I bring it up, it's clear that the venture is more than a vanity project, or a mere means to a (billionaire) end. As the creative director, Westbrook is intricately involved in the enterprise. “There’s not a thing that I'm not part of,” he says, laughing, perhaps recalling a recent Forbes profile, which declared that “his attention to detail borders on obsessive.” The brand’s office space is in LA, where his kids often visit him, (“I take them to work sometimes. They know now that I design clothes, so they know, like, ‘daddy designed this sweater for me.”)

When conceptualizing Honor The Gift, Westbrook made sure that affordability was one of its central tenets, noting that today, the pressure to break the bank to buy high-end clothes is “too much.” He conjures up an image of a mum shopping for clothes for her kid to wear to school, or someone picking out an outfit for a date. “Accessibility is very important because I want to make sure that people can look nice and not feel like they have to wear super high end clothing,…You can dress nice and not spend $3000, $4000” he says, crediting his mum with teaching him how to bargain shop. A natural next step would be to show as part of the fashion week calendar, I suggest? But perhaps that would cut into his accessible philosophy.“I can have a fashion week show and not be high fashion. I can do both,” he insists. “I want to be able to have a show, but have it for the people.”

Although Westbrook’s adage has long been, “why not?” he seems increasingly steered by the motto, “you can do both.” He can become a billionaire while lifting up others, he can go into high fashion while keeping it accessible. But when it comes down to it, Westbrook’s bottom line is clear; his place in his community takes precedence over his business ambitions, fashion, and even his triple doubles. “Regardless of what I'm doing, business, fashion, basketball, my foundation, any partners I have…I want to be the face, globally, of the underrepresented, underserved communities across the world, especially our african american community…That’s the most important part of everything I do.” As I wrap up this article, a news story pops up, “NBA’s Westbrook Joins Group Taking Over Bankrupt Arizona Sports Park,” and it’s clear that he's well on his way to getting there.