Kareem Maddox is either the world’s coolest audio producer, or the world’s nerdiest professional basketball player.
Plenty of athletes host podcasts, but I can’t think of another one who actually works in the industry on the “radio” side. Maddox not only works in media, but he’s worked in the specific niche of highly crafted, expensive, podcasts that I come from. He’s a public radio guy! He’s a Gimlet guy! And he’s going to the Olympics!
The last time we talked was in 2021, when he hosted a podcast I was producing at the time called The Greatness. At that point, he wasn’t sure he was up to try for the Olympics again. He was a member of the U.S. men’s 3x3 basketball team, which was favored to medal in 2021, the first time the sport was included in the games. The team didn’t qualify, though, and Maddox watched the games from home.
I have this idea about professional athletes, the kinds for whom the phrase “Olympic hopeful” doesn’t sound absurd, that it must be very difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a life outside of their sport. The kind of dedication required, the sort of thing most sports movies and documentaries are made of, is so intense as to overshadow more pedestrian adult milestones, like finding a job you might turn into a career.
That wasn’t true for Maddox, though.
After graduating Princeton with a degree in English, he played professionally in England and the Netherlands for a couple years, then retired from professional basketball in 2013.
“I always listened to NPR,” he told me from Paris. “And I think my brother and I were driving and he told me that they take volunteers at the public radio station. So I went to KCRW and asked if I could just volunteer. And that's when I really fell in love with it. I was supposed to go in a couple of days a week and then I started coming in like four days a week, and they never really stopped me.”
Maddox started producing freelance pieces for the station and eventually became a producer.
“I just kind of fell in love with radio and a lot of the people that I worked with were just so smart, like I really, really liked the culture of public radio, and I could see myself going in every day and chatting it up with these people,” he said.
He went on to work as both a producer and a host at KUNC, Greeley, Colorado’s public radio station. He was a producer at Gimlet, and he’s hosted podcasts for USG Audio (a show I produced and show-ran) and the Los Angeles Times. Now he works with the Timberwolves as a personnel and player development associate.
He didn’t need basketball; he just happens to be really, really good at it.
Good enough that it can become a kind of art form, which Maddox realized by watching Steph Curry play. “It just like occurred to me that shooting the ball is such a craft,” he said on The Greatness. “Steph Curry turns it into a fine art and it was really beautiful to watch. And I think the thing I thought was like, ‘I want to keep creating beauty in that way.’”
So he picked up a ball again and started shooting hoops alone at the gym before work.
“I built a regimen for myself,” he said back in 2021. “I'd start by standing near the basket, then I'd sink 50 shots from up close, and then just keep moving out till I was shooting three-pointers.”
He heard of a showcase in Las Vegas where scouts for international teams would be recruiting players, so he showed up. He ended up signing with a professional 3x3 team in Poland for a season.
He also got a job producing The Pitch at Gimlet, which meant turning around cuts of episodes between international flights and games all over the world. “It started in late 2017, we played our first tournament, and I was like ‘Hey, I kinda gotta go to Korea for the weekend. I’ll be gone Thursday and Friday but I’ll be working on the plane.’ And our editor and host were like ‘All right, that’s fine. A deadline’s a deadline, so as long as you hit it, we really don’t care.’”
That same year, the IOC announced 3x3 would be introduced as a sport at the Tokyo Olympics, and Maddox knew he wanted to try for the team. He’d grown up watching his dad volunteer at every Olympics. “Yeah, he goes to all of them,” he told me. “He loves that it's a big international party.”
Maddox made the team, and heading into the 2020 Olympics, Team USA was considered the best 3x3 team in the world. They went undefeated for seven games and felt confident as they entered the qualifying process. They lost to the Netherlands in the quarterfinals in a disappointing defeat, though.
When we recorded the last episode of The Greatness, Maddox was still working out the consequences of that loss. You can hear him puzzling out whether trying again would be worth it: “I just don't know,” he said. “Three more years of building my life around basketball and travel and training is daunting. I now find myself asking a question that a lot of athletes eventually have to face: How long should you pursue the Olympic dream? When do you keep going? And when do you stop?”
It didn’t take long for him to make up his mind. “Sometime during the Olympics, I just reflected and thought about it, and ultimately just decided to go for it again,” he told me. “I was like, all right, we'll just keep it up and see what happens.” He’d come so close, and he thought he’d regret it if he didn’t try once more. By the end of the year, Maddox was offered a spot on the AmeriCup team, where they won gold.
Maddox kept playing, but he also kept his day jobs. That meant that when he got a knee injury in 2022, he wasn’t able to dedicate all of his time to recovery the way an NBA player might. “My recovery wasn't as smooth as I would have hoped because I was doing other stuff too,” he said. “So I was good about [my rehab], but not like professional-athlete-good about it. So it's just harder.”
By the end of 2022, he played his first game alongside Dylan Travis, famous son and underhanded free-throw aficionado Canyon Barry, and college megastar turned draft bust turned Chinese league megastar Jimmer Fredette, the players who would go on to make up the 2024 Olympic team. The team qualified this time, so Maddox is not only going to the Olympics, he’s also representing the first American men’s 3x3 basketball team at the Games ever.
This has put Maddox in surprising proximity to the most famous basketball players on the planet in the weeks leading up to Paris. If the men’s 5x5 team is an athletic and cultural phenomenon made up of household names like LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant, the men’s 3x3 team is a bit like its kid brother ready to prove itself after a disappointing disqualification in 2021.
Watching Curry play was one of the reasons Maddox decided to return to basketball. Now he’s staying in the same hotel as these guys, sitting next to them at galas, and eating with them. The 5x5 team played an exhibition match in Las Vegas, and they brought in the 3x3 team to play at halftime.
During the opening ceremony, Maddox and the rest of the 3x3 team will sail along the Seine with the 5x5 team; I asked him what it was like to literally be in the same boat as his heroes. “I don't know if I'm quite prepared to say that I'm on the same level as Steph yet, nor will I ever quite get there, but it's cool to be eating in the same room, you know? I might as well be an archer in the Olympics, as it relates to 5x5 basketball’s experience and level,” he said. “But being able to play for the same organization under USA Basketball is definitely something I'm trying to wrap my head around. It's really cool.”
Whether the 3x3 team makes good on the expectations and takes gold during the Games or not, Maddox will have plenty to do when he returns home. I asked him if he had any future podcast plans for when he gets back. “I've always wanted to do a nightly show, you know. There's The Daily, but there's no late-night podcast out there.”
