A Mystery Wrapped Inside An Enigma Shrouded In A Beard

James Hardens brand? Deeply off-kilter. His on-court game? Ugly and aggressively weird. And in no way is any of that an accident.

- Pablo S. Torre

JAMES HARDEN SAYS AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF NONSENSE.

I do not mean this figuratively. Whole swaths of his vocabulary are, like the 26-year-old himself, self-made, and conspicuously weird, and inexplicable to everyone but the four friends he’s trusted since he was a middle schooler growing up in Compton, California. “Our language evolves,” says Camilo Valencia, Harden’s point guard at Artesia High and the longest-tenured member of his inner circle. “It’s what happens when you play video games and listen to rap music all day.”

In their vernacular, for instance, the noun chug means woman. (“We gonna invite some chugs?” is a typical question.) The adjective ’falo, meaning excessively flashy, derives from Buffalo, as in Buffalo wings, as in heat. The expression sah dah-tay, signifying agreement, is actually just a catchphrase from the 2001 film Pootie Tang. That this all sounds impossible for some outsider to decode on the fly is, in fact, the point. “I don’t even try, man,” says Akili Roberson, Harden’s older brother. And for a famously hirsute NBA superstar who cannot plausibly disguise his identity—or his swelling affection for public life—the benefit of a secret language seems self-evident.