Is Pete Hegseth a Real Hooper?
a TR investigation
I confess I never heard of Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth until a week ago; everything I know, I learned from his Wikipedia page and this
post. From what I gather he is a classic Trumpworld character, a TV host who owes his career to inflammatory rabble-rousing, an unabashed Christian nationalist, a serial predator who pays off victims with giant settlements. There’s concern that his chronic philandering makes him susceptible to blackmail. Although he volunteered to serve with the National Guard at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration, Hegseth was pulled from duty when officers learned of his white-supremacist tattoos.
His nomination is scandalous not because of what he’d do in a position of power1, but the brazenness with which he’d do it. With Hegseth in charge of the U.S. military, you can no longer maintain the fantasy of a peacekeeping force. Anti-terrorist occupation is revealed as the Islamophobic slaughter it’s always been. In Democratic administrations you get four-star generals who dispense of their mistresses quietly, and Palestinians are none the wiser. Hegseth wants to remove women from combat roles; whatever, pull the men while you’re at it. Spend half a century embroiled in forever-war, and these are the people who’ll seek leadership posts.
Hegseth is more feature than bug; all this, I’m afraid, is pretty cut-and-dry. Which leaves me with one question: Is Pete Hegseth a Real Hooper?
Hegseth appeared in 42 games over four seasons with Princeton’s basketball team between 1999 and 2003. In a vacuum, this would put him in the top percentile of high school players his age. Leaked pics of his tattoos reveal he’s pretty yolked for a guy in his mid-forties, although between his Fox gig and previous roles at Koch-funded nonprofits I don’t suppose he’s ever worked more than two hours a day. Thing is, Ivy League basketball is the furthest thing from a vacuum — anomalous by NCAA Division I standards — and as a New Haven native I’ve consumed more than any physician would deem advisable.
The Ivy League is the sole non-scholarship basketball conference in Division I — a bit of a red herring given the financial aid Ivies dole out these days. There’s considerable disparity in talent among the eight programs; every decade or so a standout like Jeremy Lin works his way onto an NBA roster. When I was in sixth grade Penn had this British-Nigerian tower named Ugonna Onyekwe, who dropped the most unassuming twenty points a game, and might’ve torn up the G League had it existed back then2.
Ivy hoopers look and move vaguely like their Division I counterparts, albeit with palpable flaws: they’re short, slow, can’t jump, can’t shoot, or some combination thereof. They’re basketball players, not necessarily athletes. Given low field-goal percentages, offenses seek high-percentage shots, resulting in long possessions, slow pace, and low-scoring contests. Subs enter in hockey-style shifts, or not at all. In 2019 I attended the Ivy League Tournament3 at Yale, and Penn’s point guard Antonio Woods never left the floor. He was a solid if unremarkable backcourt presence, decent defender, didn’t turn the ball over, but always seemed to be moving at three-quarters speed — ostensibly because he never got a play off.
By the time I reached high school I noticed some of the players I competed with and against were significantly better than Ivy League ballers. My senior year, the New Haven Register All-State MVP was B.J. Monteiro. Monteiro was a monster, the total package, six-foot-five, a dominant ball-handler and off-ball slasher. Crosby High games that winter were like camp revivals, always getting moved to armories or college gyms to accommodate ticket demand. He played collegiately at Duquesne, where he had a nice career and probably received a fine Catholic education, but like, do you think the tenth man at Dartmouth is better than Monteiro? Come on, he’d have averaged 40 a game in the Ivy League — except Ivies favor, shall we say, a different type of ballplayer. See above photo for reference.
Okay, New Haven isn’t Chicago, but it’s not Bozeman either. My sister was in the pep band at Brown, who (sorry, sis) had the sorriest D1 lineup I’ve seen, pasty beanpoles who weighed a buck-fifty. The rationale — that Ivy League competitors are held to rigorous academic standards — is kinda bullshit, and at the schools’ discretion besides. It’s no secret that Ivy admissions departments make huge exceptions for athletic recruits4. At my (decidedly non-Ivy) college, each recruiting class had two spots reserved for exceptional players who were not subject to the (already lowered) admissions standards of their teammates. Once enrolled, athletes were entitled to “Athletic Academic Services,” admins who ensured they took easy classes with professors who’d pass them. The team’s arbitrary GPA minimum was buoyed by walk-ons and benchwarmers.
I haven’t found any reference to Hegseth walking on at Princeton, which is something he’d brag about — a Rudy Ruettiger bootstraps narrative, proof that Princeton did not make academic exceptions for him. (Ron DeSantis, for instance, was recruited by Yale to play first base.) A Daily Princetonian article cites Hegseth as a “recruiting afterthought,” suggesting he was nonetheless recruited in some capacity. A press release from Princeton’s athletic department references contributions in a 2003 win over Columbia, but his stats complicate the narrative: Hegseth averaged 2.7 minutes per game over his career. Appearing in 42 of Princeton’s 102 contests between 1999 and 2003, he shot 32% from the field for a total of 36 points.
So I sought game footage. YouTube has the first half of a 2002 Princeton home game against Rutgers, but the box score on Princeton’s athletics site confirms Hegseth never checked in. There’s full video of a Princeton-Xavier matchup from 2000; ESPN confirms Hegseth did not appear. I was intrigued to learn Hegseth played one minute in a 2001 home loss to Final Four-bound Kansas — a game which featured future NBA stars Drew Gooden, Kirk Hinrich, and Nick Collison — but highlights have disappeared from ESPN’s website.
Finally I found tape of a Penn-Princeton tipoff, a game which determined the 2001 Ivy League championship. It’s a lovely time capsule, featuring numerous stars-by-association. Princeton center Nate Walton — son of Bill, brother of Luke, currently Head of Private Equity Secondaries at Ames Management — is honored in senior night festivities. John Thompson III — son of the legendary Georgetown coach, and later head coach at Georgetown himself — faces off against Penn coach Fran Dunphy, who would go on to coach at Temple and La Salle.
Ugonna Onyekwe fouls out with 2:06 to play, at which point Princeton’s up nineteen and Thompson empties his bench. Hegseth, wearing number twelve, enters the game with 1:08 remaining; the announcer mentions his name at 1:42:00 in the video. On the inbound possession, Hegseth touches the ball twice, does a little pass-cut-fill, and never puts it on the floor. After a change-of-possession, he boxes out for a rebound on a Penn three-point attempt, but the shot rattles home.
Princeton dribbles out the clock in their final possession. Hegseth gets two touches, dribbles once, and fires two chest-passes to teammates. He gets the ball one last time and calls timeout with eighteen seconds left. As both teams retreat to their benches, the announcer offers some local color (1:44:02 in the video):
Timeout taken by Pete Hegseth. Quick story about him, I think the Tigers were in good shape Saturday. In warmups, he accidentally collided with the Brown Bear mascot, and sent him about six feet into the air! I think you had a hunch then it was gonna be Princeton’s night Saturday, and Princeton’s night tonight.
Classic Hegseth! At 1:46:20, he celebrates with fans who’ve stormed the floor.
All valuable context, but I still haven’t seen Hegseth shoot a basketball. Luckily, Fox & Friends staged a three-point contest on set in 2022. Hegseth — wearing a Chris Mullin Warriors jersey over his shirt and tie, for some reason — sinks eight of ten, but the camerawork’s jerky, and this being Fox News it could well have been spliced together. There’s one frame where you can assess his spot-up form:
Dog, that follow-through. What is that?
Verdict: not a Real Hooper.
Genocide? Proxy wars? Turning the National Guard on non-violent protestors? Indiscriminate bombing of Muslim-majority countries? Buddy.
The National Basketball Development League, precursor to today’s G League, was in its third season when Onyekwe graduated from Penn in 2003 — but it was a pretty sad experiment back then, with no direct affiliation or pipeline into the NBA. Onyekwe played eight professional seasons in Spain and Israel.
Prior to 2017, the regular-season champion received an automatic NCAA tournament bid; the Ivy League was the last Division I conference without a postseason tournament.
“We do not discuss the intricacies of the recruiting process with media outlets,” a Columbia spokesperson told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016.
this is the kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism substack needs
This is great! The Arne Duncan erasure though...