Kyle Lowry isn’t known for being much of a talker. The 29-year-old Raptors guard can be a little reticent with media, but when he joined The Dan Le Batard Show on Friday, he was anything but.
Le Batard kicked things off by calling Lowry fat—or rather, explaining that once he’d seen the slimmed-down version of Lowry who arrived at the start of the season, he realized in hindsight that Lowry “used to be fat.” Lowry laughed, then gently corrected Le Batard. “Big-boned is what us bigger people use,” he said.
When prodded about his off-season transformation, Lowry explained that he’d been disappointed in himself after the Raptors’ swift exit from the playoffs last season. Lowry, who’d been a key factor in the team’s early success, more or less flamed out down the stretch. “We got our ass kicked,” he said of the team’s first-round sweep at the hands of the Washington Wizards. So Lowry wanted to get into better shape—to “prove people wrong again,” and to help him play at an elite level as he gets older.
The secret to his physical transformation, apparently, was all about controlling his sweet tooth rather than banishing it for good. Lowry admitted he’d had a penchant for eating cookies late at night—“I would have probably four to five double-stuffed golden Oreo cookies, about 12:30, 1:00 in the morning,” he said. He’ll still eat a cookie now and then, but he does so earlier in the day. That way, he has all day to burn off those calories.
Dietary tips aside, Lowry also opened up about his North Philadelphia childhood. “We all have our stories,” Lowry offered, before talking candidly about what it was like to grow up in a rough neighbourhood. “You might get jumped, or you might get shot at,” he said. “You wake up early in the morning, you’ve got drug raids going on, you’ve got guys out there selling drugs.”
Lowry spoke about his good fortune at having made it out of the area where he spent his formative years. “Most of the people I grew up with, they’re either dead or in jail, or still on the corner,” he said. He credited his family for helping him along the way, saying: “If it wasn’t for my grandma giving me whippings and giving me talks, and my mom working two jobs to make sure I had the things I needed to have, and my brother making sure that I had an outlet, which was basketball, I wouldn’t be in the position I am today.”
But Lowry didn’t just make it out—he made it spectacularly far. After all that his mother and grandmother had done for him, he was able to buy them a house—which he described as an emotional event.
“Getting my family out of that neighbourhood is one of the better accomplishments in my life.”
