Here Are The Craziest Things We Learned About Shabazz Muhammad’s Father From Today’s LA Times Feature

LA Times Report: Shabazz Muhammad Has Overbearing, Controlling Father. You all know the type. The dad who lives vicariously through his athletic son and pushes him extremely hard. There's an excellent book exploring exactly how much parents like that suck. Shabazz is obviously one of the success stories, a likely NBA lottery pick at the least. But his dad, Ron Holmes, is crazy, as today's terrific LA Times feature shows. You should read it here. Here are the five craziest things that Shabazz's father said. It was hard to narrow them down.

In the early 1980s, Holmes was a 6-foot-5 standout guard for USC. He never made it to the pros. But he was already thinking far into the future.

As a student, Holmes said, he found himself fascinated by the careful breeding of thoroughbreds, the way that two fast, powerful horses could be crossed to create an even faster, more powerful colt.

Around that time he met Faye Paige, a point guard, sprinter and hurdler at Cal State Long Beach. Spotting her at a summer league game, Holmes recalled saying to a friend: "See that No. 10? She's going to be my wife, and we're going to make some All-Americans."

"If you're a doctor, your kid is going to med school. If you're a lawyer, he's going to law school," Holmes said. "I was an athlete. That's what I could do for my kids."

He even picked their names based on what "would sound good and be marketable worldwide," he said in one of several interviews with the Los Angeles Times.

Their first child, a daughter named Asia, was born in 1991. At Holmes' urging she took up tennis at age 7, landed an endorsement contract with Adidas at 17 and went pro. Now 21, she still labors in the sport's lower rungs.

But a copy of Shabazz Nagee Muhammad's birth certificate on file with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health shows that he was born at Long Beach Memorial Hospital exactly one year earlier, making him 20 years old — not 19 as widely reported.

Holmes expressed concern about disclosure of his son's true age and his own criminal record and questioned whether either was newsworthy. He followed up with a text message.

"Bazz is going to blow up in the NBA lets team up and blow this thing up!!!" Holmes wrote to this reporter. "I'm going to need a publicist anyway why shouldn't it be you. We can do some big things together."

Holmes praised UCLA's hiring of Mathews as a clever tactic, what he called "part of the game." But in the end, he said, the family's choice of UCLA "was strictly a business decision…"

Also, expectations were low. "If Shabazz takes UCLA past the first round of the tournament, that's a success," Holmes said. "It shows that he's a winner."