LEXINGTON, Ky. — Roni Toppin knows that her baby boy, Jacob, is a deep thinker, a big feeler and a cut-up who needs both parts and equal measures of the tough-love approach. She understands how much pressure comes with being the similarly athletic kid brother of Obi, who was national player of the year at Dayton in 2020, a top-10 draft pick that same year and NBA Slam Dunk champion last season. She sees how much more pressure there is for Jacob to be that guy in this place, Kentucky, where the level of expectation, fan fervor and scrutiny is unmatched. Roni has spent hours on the phone talking with Jacob about the “dark place” he was in earlier this season, when the weight of it all was crushing him.
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So, yes, there were tears flowing Saturday when Jacob delivered the most impactful performance of his four-year college career in what was likely his final regular-season game. The Wildcats went to Arkansas without a point guard, so Toppin, a 6-foot-9 forward, brought the ball up the floor. Kentucky had been lit up by five-star guard Anthony Black in their first meeting, so John Calipari stuck Toppin on him this time, and Black made just 3 of 10 shots. Toppin, meanwhile, dropped 21 points on only nine field goal attempts, added four rebounds, three assists, a block and a steal in a wire-to-wire road win that might’ve been the team’s most unexpected and impressive outcome of the season.
It served as an emphatic reminder that Toppin’s rise and Kentucky’s return from the brink are inextricably linked. The team is 12-2 this season when he scores at least 13 points, 8-0 when he scores 17-plus. Whatever the 23rd-ranked Wildcats do from here, Toppin will be a major part of it. And whatever comes next for Toppin, the lessons learned in Lexington have prepared him to handle it.
“Oh my God, I cry when I watch him,” Roni says. “Sometimes I’m driving to work and thinking about what he’s overcome and how far he’s come and how good he’s doing, mentally and physically, his work ethic on the court and off the court, the fact that he’s graduating from the University of Kentucky, which is a success in itself, and I just cry. I thank Cal every time I see him. Every time. ‘Thank you.’ His support has helped Jacob become the person he wanted to be.”
It’s no coincidence that as Toppin has grown up, his game has blown up. He arrived at Rhode Island as a baby-faced, three-star recruit and 185-pound freshman in the summer of 2019. When he showed up the next year on Kentucky’s campus, still barely needing to shave and eagerly playing the part of class clown, Calipari felt like he had a middle-school student (with a 40-inch vertical) on his hands. When star center Oscar Tshiebwe transferred in midseason, in January 2020, the coach prepared him for meeting Toppin.
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“Coach says, ‘We got a 12-year-old kid on the team. You’re going to need to help him so he can grow,’” Tshiebwe recalled recently, cracking up at the thought. “He introduced me to Jacob, and I say, ‘He’s not 12!’ But Jacob has changed a lot. Now he’s become mature. He understands we need him. He has done a lot of great things this year to help us, and I’m so proud of him to see how he always works hard, he’s always in the gym, and now he’s taking the leadership to lead all these younger boys.”
Toppin started just nine of his first 83 college games, averaging 17.8 minutes, 5.5 points and 3.6 rebounds. He shot 27.6 percent from 3-point range those first three seasons. Nothing about that screamed impact player in college — and certainly not pro prospect. But then Toppin worked out for a few NBA teams last summer and spent a month in California training with Obi and other pros, and he came back to Kentucky with an important message from all those people: You’re good enough. It flipped a switch in his mind and his approach, and he got more serious about basketball than he’d ever been in his life. That showed up in a dazzling four-game exhibition tour with the Wildcats this summer in the Bahamas.
Toppin, like his preseason top-five team, now 22 and a chiseled 210 pounds, entered the fall with sky-high expectations. Like his team, he quickly face-planted. Then spiraled.
“Obi could always just go out and play — not think about anything out there — but Jacob always overthinks it,” Roni says. “I don’t know if it was because he was the younger brother and just trying so hard to catch up; he was always playing catch-up with Obi. I don’t know if that’s what made him such a thinker, but I know he’s always been in his own head. At the beginning of the season, he’s saying, ‘I have to make this shot. I have to make this free throw. I have to do this. I have to.’ And your mind, like he says, is a muscle. He had to learn to train it and control it.”
Toppin’s crisis of confidence hit “rock bottom,” he says, during a miserable four-game stretch in December, which included losses to UCLA and Missouri that raised big questions about Kentucky, when he scored a total of 13 points on 5-of-20 shooting. Calipari briefly pulled him from the starting lineup, but he did something else important: On that trip to Columbia, Mo., he called Toppin to his hotel room and reassured him that big things were coming. That he still believed in him. Then, after Toppin scored zero points against the Tigers, Calipari backed that up by starting him the next game against rival Louisville. Toppin scored a career-high 24 points against the Cardinals, then 21 the next game against LSU.
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“I didn’t know Cal was like that. I didn’t know Cal was embracing them,” Roni says. “I thought Cal was just hard-nosed and tough on them and maybe the assistant coaches were more compassionate. But the head coach being that way, it’s so amazing for the men that they’re becoming. And that’s why they all come back. A lot of his teams started off rough — that’s kind of a trend now — but as long as they know he believes in them, it’s easy for them to overcome it. That’s what happened for Jacob. He had a really hard time early on, and I believed Cal was part of the hard stuff, like maybe he was being too hard on him. But knowing how he embraced him and supported him and talked to him and was there for him personally, that’s what helped him overcome it and be as good as he is right now.”
There have been a few more bumps in the road since his breakthrough, and there have been others on Kentucky’s staff who’ve helped Toppin power through the hard parts. When he missed 9 of 10 shots and scored three points in a blowout loss at Alabama, then sat out the next game (that abysmal loss to South Carolina) with an injury, then scored just five points in his return at Tennessee, Toppin found comfort in a bible study group that graduate assistant Kevin Gallagher introduced him to. When UK’s director of player development gave him a copy of “Letters to a Young Athlete,” the book by former NBA star Chris Bosh, Toppin read it cover to cover in two days. In it, Bosh writes: “Criticism is a tax you pay. Better to accept that now … than to act shocked every time you see the bill.”
That’s crucial advice for someone playing at Kentucky, for those fans and that coach. Calipari has been unrelenting in his insistence that Toppin be the best version of himself, which Toppin (mostly) loves, “because he’s not letting me off the hook.”
“I just slapped him and said, ‘I’m not letting you back up, just know,’ ” the coach said. (To be clear, it does not appear Calipari literally slapped Toppin.) “I’m on him in the game, because he’ll try to take his foot off the gas … and he’s playing so well, I’m just saying, ‘Why would you want to be that other guy?’ This guy, he’s one of the best players in the country.”
Toppin has scored in double figures 13 times in the last 14 games, averaging 36 minutes, 14.2 points, 7.4 rebounds and 2.7 assists while shooting 52 percent from the field and 45.8 percent from 3 in that stretch. Kentucky won 10 of those 14 games, including all five in which he recorded a double-double. He’s played so well — and is such a natural on camera — that Toppin landed a national ad campaign with a major brand that will air throughout March Madness. ESPN’s most famous screamer, Stephen A. Smith, is tweeting about him. to a following of almost 6 million people.
Okay! Okay! I’m looking @obitoppin1’s little brother, Jacob, do his thing for @KentuckyMBB right now. Two Bigtime 3’s vs @RazorbackMBB. I like what I’m seeing from the kid. I like it.
— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) March 4, 2023
“It’s just unbelievable, first watching Obi and then Jacob realizing from that, ‘All I have to do is put in the work.’ And he wanted the biggest challenge, and that’s why he chose Kentucky,” Roni says. “I think Cal has pushed him to his limit, working him hard mentally and physically, helping him grow.”
But personal growth is not always linear. People grow not like beanstalks, ever upward, but like stocks on Wall Street — even the steepest long-term climbs are frequently interrupted by small dips along the way. Senior Night at Rupp Arena was a dip for Toppin.
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After a couple of blown assignments late in the first half against Vanderbilt, he and Calipari got into a screaming match on the sideline and Toppin told his coach to just take him out of the game. Calipari did, UK’s lead disappeared, and the Wildcats ultimately lost by a bucket — their only defeat in the last six games. This is why, if you ask Toppin’s mother when she knew her son had officially turned the corner, she hesitates.
“Every day, I pray,” Roni says. “It’s just a long road. I don’t think it’s a corner. He has to work hard every single day. He’s at Kentucky. He’s not at a school where he can just play and hope he has a good game. He has to work at it every day. It’s just going to be a long, windy road. I don’t think there’s one corner he’s going to go around and suddenly everything’s going to be great.”
Toppin made just one of his seven shots against Vanderbilt, the only game in the last six weeks that he failed to score in double figures — but he grabbed 10 rebounds, hit all four of his free throws in the second half, and ultimately helped give UK a chance at the end. When it wasn’t enough, Toppin apologized to his team in the locker room and, unprompted, confessed during postgame interviews to losing his cool.
“My attitude at the end of the first half is what sparked their run. So just put this loss on me. You can,” he said. “Coach came at me (and) I let my emotions get the best of me and I argued back and I told him to take me out of the game. That was selfish of me. I let my teammates down. I gotta be better, especially as a leader. I felt the need to bring it up, because there were a lot of guys in the locker room after the game who were saying, ‘My fault, my fault, my fault.’ That’s why I made sure guys understood that it wasn’t on them, it was on me.
“I gotta be better. It’s a learning experience. Rather it be now than in the NCAA Tournament.”
Blowing up at your coach this late in the season could be viewed as alarming. But in Toppin’s case, his reaction to it is another sign of progress. Before this season, “I would’ve been immature about the situation,” he says. “I probably still would be mad. So I’ve definitely grown a lot.” And Calipari’s reaction to it, building his plan for the next game around Toppin, putting enormous responsibility on him in a pressure-packed situation, tells us something too.
“Cal believes in my son, and that’s a big deal,” Roni says. “Now I can say that, basketball or no basketball, Jacob is going to be successful. I’ve seen him grow into such a great man there at Kentucky. I see the way he communicates. I see the way he leads his team. It’s not about him shining. He doesn’t need to be the highest scorer. He doesn’t need to be ‘the man’ on his team. He doesn’t need the ball every play. He’s a team player. That’s character. That’s not just basketball.”
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Obi Toppin plays for the New York Knicks now, and a day after Jacob’s clutch performance at Arkansas, Obi’s team won a double-overtime thriller at Boston — led by two former Wildcats, Julius Randle and Immanuel Quickley. Randle is now a two-time All-Star and Quickley a contender for Sixth Man of the Year.
“I told him, ‘You’re next,’ ” Roni says. “We were talking about that game and how Quick and Julius worked so hard to get to that moment. I said, ‘You’re next.’ I’m telling you, it’s just something about them Kentucky boys.”
(Top photo: James Gilbert / Getty Images)