Dari Arrington

Dari Arrington never made his high school basketball team. He went on to play professional basketball in Australia.

Arrington came into the McBastard Studios for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast after an earlier booking fell through, and he said up front that sharing his story is what he believes he was put here to do. He is a kid from the south side of Chicago who spent time in Oakland and Seattle and now lives in Atlanta, which is where he first picked up a basketball. He wanted to know what the goat on the wall was about. Brad told him it stands for independence.

He trains athletes now and puts on open run pickup games around Atlanta under his company, Life and Basketball. On the court he is not looking for a particular talent. He wants a blank canvas, and he wants the athlete to draw themselves on it rather than copy the player he used to be. The other half of the job is branding, a word he uses for search engines and avoids everywhere else. He tells athletes that the one thing nobody else owns is their own story, and that most of them freeze when he asks who they are. He also tells them that telling it will not make them famous, and that fame is the wrong thing to aim at. LinkedIn has named him a top voice, which he values for the reach it gives him.

He tried out for his high school team four years running and never made it, so he never played a high school game. A stretch of depression followed and he put the ball down before picking it back up. Nobody was going to speak for him, so he and his cousin filmed themselves, posted the tapes to YouTube as a series called Team Arrington Elite, and wrote each other's player bios after the Chicago news outlets would not write them. Two small colleges answered. One of those became a scholarship. In 2018, living in Seattle, he quit his jobs and stood outside the Warriors practice facility in downtown Oakland eight hours a day for thirty one days with a sign. Security ran him off the property as a trespasser for three days. People walking past took him for homeless.

The head of security was the one who called the others off. She asked what he was actually doing out there, heard the answer, and told him she was not going to get in between somebody's dream. A radio host called. ABC7 ran the story. Kevin Durant invited him to sit in his Tesla and talk it through. He never got signed. One stranger messaged to say that seeing it had stopped them taking their own life. He still answers the young athletes who write to him and gives them fifteen or twenty minutes, because someone once said yes to him.