PONTIAC, Mich. — As the older sibling, part of Justin Ishbia’s job wasn’t just to look out for his younger brother, Mat, growing up in suburban Detroit. It was also to put him in his place, even as he showed him the way.
Yet the way Mat Ishbia persisted as a teenager, that wasn’t easy. Especially when it came to basketball, and those rough-and-tumble games of 1-on-1 at the backyard hoop in Birmingham, where Justin would pretend to be Larry Bird and Mat played the role of Isiah Thomas, or sometimes Magic Johnson.
“We pushed each other, and we fought back and forth,” Justin recalled with a laugh last week in Phoenix, where the two brothers traded elbows on a different stage and assumed new titles, as Mat, now the president and CEO of Pontiac-based United Wholesale Mortgage, was introduced as the majority owner of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.
