Winning Friends, Influencing People

How JJ Redick has gone from being one of basketball's most hated players to one of its most beloved commentators

- By Eve Peyser

It was close to midnight on a warm night in June, and Kendrick "Perk" Perkins had a confession to make. He was recording an episode of The Old Man and the Three, the wildly popular podcast hosted by JJ Redick, the retired NBA player, and Tommy Alter, a TV producer.

Perkins used to be a center for the Boston Celtics, and, at six feet ten and upwards of 300 pounds, he makes the six-feet-four Redick look petite. Perkins, Redick, and Alter (who, at five feet eleven, would look regular size, if not tall, in virtually any other context) are seated in Alter's living room in Dumbo, sipping on glasses of a 2008 Chambertin grand cru that runs around $4,000 a bottle.

After they finish recording the podcast, Redick, a wine aficionado, tells me it was just okay, nothing special.

Right before the podcast recording, Perkins had been at the Barclays Center rehearsing for the live 2022 NBA draft, which would air the following evening on ESPN, where he and Redick are both analysts. In a full suit and tie, he looked ready for prime time. Redick was dressed down in a backward Old Man and the Three cap, gray skinny jeans, and a white tee, revealing his bevy of Christian tattoos. His left arm features a sleeve of the four authors of the Gospels: Matthew, winged and haloed, and below that, Mark, Luke, and John, in the forms of various flying animals.