JuJu Watkins Is the Moment

JuJu Watkins is not perfect. Occasionally, near the end of a bruising game, the bun she wears—a little black beehive atop her head—appears to be slightly off-center. As a guard for U.S.C., she scores a lot, but she also shoots a lot, and her shooting can go cold. She can rush under pressure, and she is almost always under pressure. During the four games before a big regular-season matchup against the team’s undefeated crosstown rival, U.C.L.A., in February, she missed twenty-one out of twenty-five three-point-shot attempts. She is not a cyborg built in a basketball-analytics lab; no one who watches her raves about how well she arbitrages efficiency. They’re too busy shrieking in disbelief.

Watkins is nineteen. As soon as she arrived at U.S.C., last season, she established herself as one of the best players in the country. She was quick, smooth, and versatile—skilled in the midrange and fearless from deep. She could block shots like a center and command the floor like a point guard. What stood out most of all, though, was her charisma. And that name. JuJu!

She doesn’t shy away from the big stage or get skittish when faced with failure. Following a poor shooting night that ended in a loss to unranked Washington, as a freshman, she erupted for fifty-one points in the next game, against fourth-ranked Stanford—at Stanford. The crowd was so mesmerized by her performance that they hardly noted that this stunning kid was beating their own team. “Every time I scored all I heard was ‘oooh,’ ” Watkins said afterward. Against U.C.L.A., after that run of poor three-point shooting, Watkins scored thirty-eight points, going six for nine from three—and also threw pinpoint passes out of double-teams, bated defenders into jumping early, and helped so vigorously on the defensive end that she finished the game with eight blocks, a few of them on critical shots in the second half by U.C.L.A.’s best player, Lauren Betts. During the Big Ten championship game, last Sunday, a rematch against U.C.L.A., Watkins struggled in the second half, and U.C.L.A. came back to win. Given how she’s responded to bad stretches in the past, perhaps the loss is actually a good sign for her team’s prospects in the N.C.A.A. tournament. Watkins is one of those players who seems to have an eye on retribution: she hates to lose to you once and refuses to lose to you twice.

The story of March Madness last season was Caitlin Clark, which raised questions about a sequel: Who would draw attention once Clark was in the pros? But the answer was right there in the tournament, in the Elite Eight matchup between U.S.C. and the University of Connecticut, which has its own thrilling star in Paige Bueckers, likely the No. 1 pick in the upcoming W.N.B.A. draft. When the two teams played again, this past December, U.S.C. won by two, with twenty-five points from Watkins. At one point early in the third quarter, Watkins blocked a three-point attempt by Bueckers, then sped down to the other end, with Bueckers racing to stay in front of her. She juked into the lane with a between-the-legs crossover dribble, and spun just as a cluster of players collapsed on her. Somehow she shot out of the scrum and scored. The game, which aired on Fox Sports, averaged 2.23 million viewers—the second-largest audience ever for a women’s college basketball game on the network, and around double the typical audience for a men’s college game on Fox.

Watkins could have gone to a traditional powerhouse like UConn, or South Carolina, or Stanford. But she grew up in Watts, down the road from U.S.C. The Trojans are not without history—Cheryl Miller, one of the best players ever, is an alum—but it had been years since the women’s team had contended for a national title. Watkins has said she liked that. As her high-school coach put it to ESPN, if Watkins was as good as she thought she could be, then she should win anywhere, and so she would win at home. She grew up playing on a “janky court, all concrete,” she recalled, at Ted Watkins Memorial Park, which is named after her great-grandfather, a labor organizer. And she spent summers working as a receptionist at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, the organization he founded. Thanks to JuJu, a savvy new coach, and a host of transfers, the Trojans were transformed overnight. Now celebrities come to sit courtside at the U.S.C.’s Galen Center to watch her, and fans crowd around her after games, asking for pictures and autographs. She is signed by Klutch Sports Group, which represents LeBron James; recently, Nike put her in a Super Bowl commercial with LeBron. She has name, image, and likeness deals with Gatorade, A.T. & T., and Degree, and already has one of the biggest shoe deals in the history of women’s basketball.

Watkins isn’t eligible for the W.N.B.A. draft until 2027. She will arrive in a league that is ready for her: a league with a large audience, a presence on television, a hunger for rivalries. People are drawn to dominance, but they’re also drawn to competition: Magic versus Larry, Jordan versus the world. It’s easy to imagine what Watkins’s impact on professional basketball will be. She is Black, she is SoCal, she is glamorous: her style mixes grit and suavity into a high gloss.

Of course, I’m getting ahead of things, and there’s no reason to. Basketball is hard; Watkins wears a target on her back. In sports, the threat of injury and other setbacks always looms. But I don’t watch Watkins and think in terms of probabilities and possibilities. Her magnetism is generated by nowness, by the way she seems to embody an ever-refreshing present. This tournament, this game, this shot. “Oooooh,” goes the crowd. She’s a star. ♦