Amen Thompson and his twin brother Ausar sat side by side amid a crowd of tourists at Carmine’s Restaurant in Times Square around 8 p.m. Monday. They had flown to New York this morning for the NBA draft at the Barclays Center and are now trying to decide which dishes to share with their family. Her father, Troy, who is also her agent, ordered sautéed chicken, spaghetti with shrimp, and a side of a Caesar salad with anchovies.
Ausar tasted an anchovy for the first time while contemplating the week ahead.
“It’s going to be a bittersweet moment when we get drafted,” he said. “We’ve prepared our whole lives for this, but it means we’re going to be apart for the first time in our lives.
“We continue to pretend everything is normal, and we will stay like this together forever, but it will be over” — he picked up his phone from the white tablecloth and looked at an app — “in two days and 23 hours and.” 18 minutes.”
The Twins’ preparation for the NBA began more than a decade before the Houston Rockets picked Amen and the Detroit Pistons picked Ausar in Thursday night’s first round of the draft. They grew up with Troy in Oakland, California; her mother Maya; and her older brother, Troy Jr., who played college basketball for Prairie View A&M. When the twins were 9 years old, they created a vision board to motivate them on their journey. It had handwritten goals like “Become the greatest NBA player of all time,” “Become a multi-billionaire,” and “Be 6ft 9in.” This included a child’s idea of concrete steps to make the NBA, like “run two miles and dribble with your left hand” and “eat vitamins, healthy foods, and milk every day.”
Before dinner on Monday, they saw their vision board on a Times Square billboard.
Amen now jokes that the only goal he regrets writing is altitude. Last month, he and his brother measured 6ft 5.75″ at the NBA draft combine in Chicago. “I should have said I want to be 7 feet tall,” he said. “Then I really would be 6-9 now.”
Their preparation picked up steam in 2021 when they were among the first players to sign with Overtime Elite, a semi-professional basketball league based in Atlanta. And it became a daily obsession last June when Ausar and Amen attended an NBA draft party for boyfriend Josh Minott, who was picked in the second round by the Charlotte Hornets. On the way home, Ausar decided to know exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds it would be before he too would become an NBA player.
He also wanted to know exactly how much time he had left to be with his brother.
Then he went in search of a countdown timer for his iPhone. He downloaded one and agreed to pay the $9.99 annual subscription fee. He scrolled through the photos on his phone and selected a shot of himself and Amen partying on the OTE basketball court to use as the timer background. Then he entered the date and time of the next draft: June 22, 2023, 8 p.m. There were 364 days left.
When Ausar first started the countdown to the draft, time seemed to tick by. At the time, the brothers were 19 years old, and when the OTE season started on October 20, it was 245 days away.
For the past year, Ausar has checked the app once a day, but at least once a week. When he needed a little extra motivation to get up early, he opened the app. He nudged his brother and held the phone open for him when they considered staying on after another exercise.
They were part of OTE’s second-class draft, but they were the first players in the league likely to be included in the top 14 picks, a segment known as the “lottery” that’s a sign of top talent. And so, the twins’ draft status was not just a matter of personal pride, but also a KPI for OTE’s half-billion-dollar business.
When the OTE season came to a close – the twins’ team, City Reapers, won the league title on March 7th – there were only 107 days left. Arriving in New York on Monday, they knew this could be their last chance to be together for a while. “The longest we’ve ever been apart was two days,” Ausar said. “I went to Florida last year and he stayed in Atlanta. He called me about 30 times!”
On Tuesday, they went to the Empire State Building for a tour and photo shoot. They are both afraid of heights and had to make sure the railing was higher than them. Even then, they had concerns about climbing the ladder to an observation deck that isn’t open to the public. They then went to a courthouse to film part of the “Today” show, went to two brand photo shoots and capped off the day with a workout with popular NBA coach Chris Brickley.
On Wednesday, they conducted a series of interviews arranged by the NBA and then attended a meeting with the NBA players’ union before heading to Brooklyn for an OTE draft party. In an art storage facility that had been converted into a content studio with a fenced-in basketball court, the Thompsons conducted five interviews in 90 minutes. They eagerly answered a question about what they were working on in their games (“shooting,” they both said) and tolerated another question about whether they had twin telepathy (“no,” was their curt reply). After Ausar hit a deep threesome over the fence, they returned to their hotel to try on their suits. There were still 21 hours.
On Thursday, draft day, they got up at 9 a.m. to have a barber do their hair in their hotel room, then invited four camera crews — including one from their designer and one from The New York Times — to watch them prepare. They joked that designer Waraire Boswell had swapped out their matching double-breasted suits at the last minute. When they were chosen, they also teased the idea of swapping places with each other to see if anyone noticed. But in the end, Amen wore the cream suit and Ausar stuck with the navy blue.
About 30 minutes into the countdown timer, Amen was sitting with his family at a long table in the Barclays Center when he received a call from the Rockets to let him know they were picking him with the fourth pick. Ausar jumped up from his seat to celebrate.
“My heart was beating so fast,” Ausar said. “I was more worried about where he would be drafted than I was about where I would be. And I think I was happier for him than for myself.”
When Amen took the stage to shake hands with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, Ausar’s phone didn’t ring. Troy hadn’t heard either. Ausar was about to open Twitter on his phone to see if any of the NBA insiders had the next tip when he noticed that none of the TV cameras had moved from his table. As he watched Silver return to the podium, he felt that he would be picked by the 5th place Pistons.
Hearing his name, he stood and paused, almost instinctively searching for his brother, but Amen was already gone. Instead he hugged his mother. Nearby, Amen was hooked into a microphone for an interview and banged his fist in the air when he heard his brother’s name. They didn’t find each other until a few minutes later, but only had enough time for a high-five before being pulled in opposite directions for interviews.
After leaving Barclays, they went to another OTE party. “If I ever have a son who enlists, I’ll tell him to put up a sign at every party that says ‘No Pictures Please’,” Ausar said with a laugh. “I feel like we just went in, took pictures for an hour and a half and then left.”
Finally, at 2am, they dropped into Ausar’s room and had a moment to celebrate together. The moment they had been counting on since the draft party a year and a day earlier had come, and it had gone better than they had originally imagined. “We didn’t just make the top 10,” Amen later said. “We made it into the top five.”
The next morning, en route to a live performance on “Today,” they received more good news from their father: The Rockets would first fly Amen to Detroit to stay with Ausar through Sunday, and the Pistons allowed es Ausar flies to Houston to return the favor for Amen. The countdown timer expired 13 hours ago and time seemed to be slowing down again. The Thompson twins would be together for at least a few more days.