Listed as 6-foot-5, Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton has the size of an NFL quarterback, or even a really tall wide receiver. Now established as one of the promising young talents in the NBA, we’ll never find out how good he could’ve been at football. But it was a path he nearly explored as a result of a bet that could have dramatically shifted the trajectory of his life.
Luckily for Haliburton, he won.
“My freshman or sophomore year of high school, I hadn’t got a Division I offer yet, I hadn’t got a scholarship offer yet. And everybody was just sweating me to play football, along with our football coach at the time,” Haliburton told For The Win in an interview about his partnership with Cheribundi. “So I made a bet with him that if I didn’t have a scholarship offer in the next two months that I would go play football — and I did not want to play football at all. I really didn’t know if I was going to get a scholarship offer, and then I got one.”
That first offer, Haliburton said, was from IUPUI—a school located just down the road from his NBA team’s facilities. As we know now, he finished his high school career at Oshkosh North in Wisconsin as a three-star recruit with several more schools chasing him. He chose Iowa State, where he played two years before the Sacramento Kings drafted him 12th overall in 2020.
It’s probably safe to say that push for him to play football wouldn’t have existed if everyone could see what was in his future. Haliburton called it “maybe the most confident bet that I ever made.”
“So it just I guess shows the confidence that I had at the time that I’d get an offer, and then it actually ends up working out,” Haliburton said. “But man, if I had to play football – because I did it in front of the whole football team, whole basketball team. ‘Coach, if I don’t get an offer, I will play.’ – I did not want to do that. So I’m really glad that I didn’t have to do that.”
