NEW YORK — James Bouknight has been walking through midtown Manhattan for half an hour now. Though he’s caught plenty of glares from passers-by, nobody has stopped him yet.
But as he makes the final turn to his hotel, a group of police officers posted up on the corner start staring.
“Hey, you played at UConn, right?” one yells as Bouknight nods. The guy barely acknowledges the response, immediately turning to his buddies to say he was right.
No words of encouragement. No congrats on making his NBA dream come true. Not even a thank you for answering their awkward question. This is New York after all.
“This is still surreal to me,” the new Hornets guard says with a laugh. “The position I’m in, I never thought in a million years I’d be here. It’s crazy.”
The 20-year-old has been part of the tangled masses in New York his whole life. He was always trying to find his hustle, and before it was on the court, it was paying people to wait in line at sneaker drops so he could flip them on StockX.
“I’m not someone that grew up with a lot of money, so I had to find different ways to save my money and then at the same time get what I wanted,” he says. “So I’m already smart with how I spend my money. But when I left New York, I had to find a different hustle.”
That got him by, but when he was a junior at La Salle Academy in Manhattan’s East Village, he started to realize basketball could be his ticket out.
“I grew up on 19th Street at the Fulton Projects,” Bouknight says. “I lived in Brooklyn, Crown Heights.
