Before the millions, before the viral dunks, the USA Basketball gold medals, and the thunderous roar of college recruiters storming the Flagg household, Cooper Flagg was just an 11-year-old kid in Maine who couldn’t stop talking about peas. Not sneakers, not points per game, not Instagram highlights. Peas. The kind you pick, shell, and eat straight off the vine if you’re lucky. That’s what lit up his face back then — pea-picking in his grandparents’ backyard garden, a place that may have lacked a hardwood court but quietly cultivated something far more enduring: obsession.
The thing about Cooper Flagg, those who’ve followed his journey will tell you, is that he doesn’t just like things. He throws himself into them, envelops them like oxygen in lungs, until every molecule is his to master. When he discovered basketball, that intense, almost surgical focus locked in on the sport like a laser. But long before basketball consumed his daylight hours, it was the small things — literally — that did. Small, round, green, and growing in rows.
Flagg’s mother, Kelly, remembers it like it was yesterday. “We’d come over to my parents’ house, and the boys would run out to the garden,” she recalls. “But Cooper, he wouldn’t just pick a few and move on. He’d sit there for hours. Picking every last pea. Organizing them. Telling us which ones were the best and why.” There was something in that activity — repetitive, detail-oriented, and low-glamour — that spoke to Cooper’s temperament. It was meditative. It was laborious. And he loved it.
When you examine greatness in its early stages, it often doesn’t look like much. Tiger Woods swinging a plastic club in the living room. Serena Williams practicing serves in a rundown park. And Cooper Flagg, quietly kneeling in the dirt, carefully plucking peas and whispering to himself about which ones were ripe and which ones needed more time. It didn’t scream future NBA lottery pick. But to those paying attention, it told a story.
Because obsession is rarely flashy. It is subtle, quiet, and compulsive. Cooper wasn’t chasing attention when he zoned in on that garden. He was chasing mastery. He needed to know the perfect way to pick a pea. He needed to know the rhythm of it, how the snap of the pod should feel in his hand, and how to spot the exact green that meant optimal sweetness. He talked about it at dinner, brought it up to his teachers, even tried to convince his friends that pea-picking was underrated fun. They rolled their eyes. He didn’t care. He kept picking.
It wasn’t long before that obsessive energy migrated. Around age 12, Cooper’s attention pivoted toward basketball in a way that startled even his own family. They were no strangers to sports — Kelly had played at the collegiate level, and his twin brother, Ace, was a standout in his own right. But what Cooper began to do was different. He stopped just playing basketball. He began studying it.
He’d spend hours in the driveway perfecting the arc on his jumper, experimenting with finger pressure on the release. He’d rewatch NBA games not to enjoy them but to diagram the rotations, pausing and rewinding to analyze help defense and off-ball movement. “He would literally draw out plays from memory,” says his older brother Hunter. “I mean, 12-year-olds don’t do that.”
In that sense, the connection to pea-picking was more than symbolic. Both involved noticing small things that others missed. Both demanded patience and a high tolerance for boredom. And both, ultimately, rewarded those willing to do them for their own sake — not because they were glamorous, but because they were necessary.
It’s that same monastic devotion that later showed up in his game. Watch Flagg now — in high school, in FIBA play, or in the viral summer runs — and it’s not just the athleticism that stuns. It’s his anticipation, his off-ball intelligence, the way he times his rotations like a veteran NBA wing. He moves like someone who’s been watching film since he was in elementary school, because — well — he kind of has.
The garden trained his eyes, his fingers, his patience. Basketball gave him the tools to apply that framework to something explosive. It was never just about physical gifts. There are hundreds of athletic kids. What sets Flagg apart is how early he learned to focus, how obsessively he began sharpening every edge of his identity. Like the peas, he sorted through each piece of his game until he understood it inside and out.
Flagg’s coaches noticed the difference early. They would joke that they never needed to remind him to do extra work. He was the kid texting them at 6 a.m. for keys to the gym, the one who wanted to stay late after a blowout win to fix the two possessions that bugged him. He’d review his own mistakes with a brutal honesty that was rare, even among elite prospects.
There’s a kind of hunger that can’t be coached — the kind that’s fed by curiosity more than glory. And Cooper’s origin story isn’t flashy AAU mixtapes or private trainers in L.A. gyms. It’s rural Maine. It’s knees in the soil, fingernails stained green, staring at rows of plants with the same intensity he’d later use to analyze a pick-and-roll. That hunger began in the garden. It was never about peas. It was about getting it right.
And getting it right, to Cooper, means work. Real work. The kind that makes most people bored or tired or both. The kind that doesn’t get you likes on Instagram. But he never cared about that. When peers were focused on rankings and NIL deals, he stayed locked on improvement. He learned how to be ruthless with himself — not in a punishing way, but in a precise way. A video of him missing a free throw once led to an entire weekend of shooting drills, no coach required.
His drive doesn’t come from fear of failure. It comes from a craving for total understanding. Pea-picking didn’t teach him to win. It taught him to fall in love with repetition. And repetition, as any elite athlete will tell you, is the language of greatness.
Now, as Flagg prepares to take the next leap — from preps to Duke to the NBA and beyond — the noise around him is deafening. He’s projected to be a top pick. Scouts rave about his court vision, defensive instincts, and scoring versatility. Endorsements, interviews, national team buzz — it’s all accelerating. Yet those closest to him say he’s still the same kid who once spent a summer afternoon debating with his cousin about whether sugar snap or snow peas were superior.
That’s not just a charming anecdote. It’s a reminder. Because in a sports culture obsessed with flashy beginnings, Flagg’s story is a lesson in roots — both literal and figurative. His growth wasn’t sudden. It was planted, nurtured, and shaped over time. And it bloomed not in the spotlight, but in the stillness of small obsessions.
The difference with Flagg is that he doesn’t just handle pressure — he feeds off it. His brain treats high-stakes moments like puzzles. The more complex, the better. Pea-picking taught him that, too. There are no shortcuts in gardening. You don’t get results by rushing. You get them by showing up every day and caring about the process, no matter how small it seems.
So when you watch Cooper Flagg dominate a game, don’t just see the highlight. See the pea pods, the dirt-streaked fingers, the hours spent mastering something most kids would’ve abandoned in five minutes. That’s where the greatness began. That’s where his NBA drive was quietly born.
And when the millions come — and they will — when the fans scream his name in arenas from Boston to L.A., maybe someone will ask him about it. About the garden. The peas. The obsession. And maybe he’ll smile, that same quiet smile he had at 11, and say, “You have no idea how much that mattered.”
