He might be Kentucky basketball’s biggest star. And he has his mom to thank for it.

Justin Edwards grabbed a long rebound, put the basketball on the floor and took off.

The 6-foot-8 freshman dribbled the length of the Rupp Arena court with his left hand, switched the ball to his right as he smoothly stepped around a defender and finished with a layup for his first two points as a Kentucky Wildcat.

Amid the buzz of the crowd, a familiar voice stood out.

“Let’s go, Jus!”

The voice was unmistakable. It belonged to his mother. And it has guided Edwards his entire life.

“If she’s mad at me, she’ll call me Justin,” the 19-year-old said with a grin.

There’s been plenty of that over the years, too.

Edwards entered this season as perhaps the top NBA draft prospect in all of college basketball, a versatile player with incredible skill for his size, a team-first mentality and a toughness that had coaches like John Calipari following his every move on the recruiting trail.

It wasn’t always like that. And it almost didn’t turn out like this.

Wherever he’s drafted next summer, Edwards is almost certain to be on an NBA roster this time next year, lofty expectations surrounding him and a new set of challenges ahead.

If things had gone just a little bit differently, that wouldn’t be the case.

If Edwards had given in — if that voice that’s still guiding him had let him give up — there’s no telling where he’d be.

“I don’t know,” Edwards said. “Probably still be in Philly.”

Justin Edwards finds basketball

Ebony Twiggs can laugh about it now. It wasn’t funny back then.

“Believe it or not — and people see Justin now and say, ‘There’s no way!’ — Justin was bad. Justin was so bad,” Edwards’ mother says. “He was so bad, and I was like, ‘I have to do something.’”

Over the course of kindergarten and first grade, Twiggs said calls from Edwards’ teachers were common. Running out of the classroom. Destroying things in class. Hitting other kids. It got to the point, Twiggs says, that Edwards’ teachers couldn’t deal with it. Something would happen, and they’d just call school security to come take care of whatever her son had done this time.

Strangers come up to Twiggs now and talk about how “sweet” her son is.

“It took a long time to get there,” she says with a big laugh.

Edwards disputes none of this.

“I was just a bad kid at the time,” he said. “I was one of those little hot-head kids. I was just always in the mix. So playing basketball helped with my anger issues and stuff. Calmed me down.”

By second grade, Twiggs knew she had to do something, and that turned out to be something she knew well. Edwards’ mother had been a star basketball player growing up in Philadelphia, good enough to play in college and, briefly, overseas as a professional. She had “behavior issues” as a kid, too. Whenever her dad would threaten to take the game of basketball away, she’d straighten up. She knew she had to get Edwards to channel all that energy into something positive, and basketball turned out to be the answer.

He took to it immediately.

Not long after Edwards started playing the game — strange as it sounds a decade later — he looked up at his mom one day and said something that they both vividly recall.

“Kentucky’s my dream school,” the grade-schooler said. “I want to play there.”

Twiggs still doesn’t know what made him say that. At the time, UK would have been in the middle of an impressive run of Final Four appearances — not far removed from the 2012 national title — but there were no family ties or rooting interests related to the Wildcats.

And there was something else that made it a curious thought.

“When he was saying this, Justin wasn’t even good!” Twiggs exclaimed. “... He wasn’t even that good — to be saying he wanted to play for Kentucky? That’s the crazy part. I always joke with him: ‘You’re a bucket now. But back in the day, you was trash.’”

On that point, Edwards does contest.

“Mom, I wasn’t that bad,” he tells her.

“Ohhh, yes you were,” she shoots back.

But, whatever she thought at the time, she wasn’t about to quash her young son’s dreams.

“If that’s what you want, then you go ahead and work toward it,” she told him, still amazed by what’s transpired since. “I didn’t know that he was going to get like this. Like he is now.”

‘A defining period for Justin’

For a good stretch of Edwards’ childhood, Twiggs worked two jobs to keep the family afloat.

A single mom to Edwards and his two younger siblings — sister Akira, 13, and brother Tymir, 6 — Twiggs would get up in the wee hours for her job at Wal-Mart, which lasted until 3 p.m. Then she’d head to her job at a local hospital from about 4-9 p.m. She did that almost every day.

“I was barely around, because I stayed at work,” Twiggs said.

As a result, she wasn’t able to be in the stands for many of Edwards’ youth basketball games and, once he started getting good enough to play travel ball, she often couldn’t make the trips.

“Just seeing how strong she was and tough she was — like, I know there were days where she didn’t want to work or do anything, but she got up and did it,” Edwards said. “She did it for us.”

By the time Edwards reached high school, he was a pretty good player. Not great, but good enough to play varsity at Imhotep Charter as a freshman. That came with a new set of challenges, however, and the game that had always been a fun outlet for Edwards suddenly became something else.

Imhotep Charter head coach Andre Noble said the transition from middle school to high school was a difficult one for Edwards, who was being asked to do things he’d never done before on a basketball court. There were different expectations for being a team player. A commitment to detail — especially as a defender — that Edwards had never been challenged to show. All of a sudden, coaches were yelling at him, demanding him to do more than he thought he could. Basketball wasn’t fun anymore.

“So he started to get frustrated,” Twiggs said.

He wanted to quit. He tried to quit.

“Oh, I know,” Noble says, his tone illustrating how difficult that process was for Edwards to navigate. “It was tough.”

Edwards would go to his mom to complain. She’d hear him out.

“I’ve never let him make excuses,” Twiggs said. “If you want to be a basketball player, you have to take the criticism — you have to take the good and the bad — when it comes to basketball. So when he wanted to quit, I was like, ‘No. What are you wanting to quit for?’”

It was too hard, he told her. The coaches were too tough on him, Edwards would say. He couldn’t do the things they were asking.

“If you have a coach that’s not saying anything to you and not pushing you to be better, you shouldn’t want them to coach you,” Twiggs told him. “The fact that you feel this way — that they’re on you — that means that they see something in you.”

This wasn’t a one-time conversation. Edwards wanted to give up the game. But he listened to his mom, listened to his coaches, and gave it a try.

“I dedicated my life to basketball,” he said. “I stopped doing the little stuff. I stopped going out. I didn’t go to parties or anything. I made my friend group smaller.”

Noble credits Edwards’ mother with keeping him on the right path.

“Just from coaching youth, I see so many times that the response is to coddle,” he said. “In every aspect of life now, we’re coddling. The transfer portal is a coddle. I just feel like we’re making our young people not fight through adversity enough, in all walks of life. And adversity is a great thing. It builds character.

“She would hear him out. Be a mom. And then be like, ‘Yep, but you’re going back tomorrow.’”

And that’s what Edwards did. About midway through his freshman season, he was in the starting five.

“I thought that was a defining period for Justin,” Noble said. “Because once he realized that and matured, his mental state changed. He’s gifted. And he’s a super hard worker. Those things started coming out.

“And by the time he was a 10th grader, he was one of the best players in the city.”

By the end of that sophomore year, he had broken into the top 100 national rankings for his class. Twiggs remembers her excitement when she found out Edwards had been ranked at No. 59 toward the end of the season.

“Well, I feel like I deserve to be top 10,” Edwards said, matter-of-factly.

“OK,” she told him. “Keep working.”

And Twiggs kept on him. She rarely told him he had played a good game. She often pointed out the negatives, explained what he could have done better.

“If you have a thousand people telling you, ‘Oh, Justin, you’re this and you’re that.’ And you don’t have anybody telling you nothing you’ve done wrong, how are you going to fix it?” she said. “So I used to always tell him all the bad stuff. And he used to get so mad. And now he appreciates it. But, back in the day, he didn’t like it.”

By the start of his junior season, Edwards was ranked 11th in his class. By the following summer, some national websites had him at No. 1 overall.

“Her sticking with me through the highs and lows made me the person I am today,” he said.

Coming to Kentucky

While Edwards was in high school, Twiggs’ schedule changed to where she was working more normal hours. That meant getting to see almost all of her son’s games, and — when the recruiting process started heating up — she was along for the ride.

Edwards — now one of the most coveted recruits in the country — took his family on his college visits. And he told the coaches clamoring to get his commitment that wherever he ended up, his family would be coming with him.

His plan — in this era of name, image and likeness opportunities — was to move his mother and siblings with him out of Philadelphia. He wanted his college destination to be somewhere they’d be willing to call home, too. Edwards said that Calipari and the UK coaching staff made them feel comfortable throughout the process, and that made it an easy pick.

“Their family’s really, really tight,” Noble said.

The coach said that if you ask little brother Tymir to name his favorite basketball player, you’ll get a quick reply. “Justin,” the 6-year-old says.

Ask him who’s his best friend.

“Justin’s my best friend,” Tymir will say.

Noble said the family would be in the middle of campus tours, he’d hear a commotion behind him and turn around to see Edwards and Twiggs play-fighting. “Yo!” he would yell at them in a knock-it-off tone. But he laughs at that, too.

“Their mother-and-son bond is just super special to see,” he said. “It is really cool to see their relationship.”

Twiggs said she and her kids have enjoyed their few months in Lexington so far. Things move a lot more slowly than they did back in Philly, and that’s a good thing. The teachers here have been more patient with Tymir, who Twiggs says is showing some of those same unruly traits that Justin did at that age. Twiggs and her two youngest kids get to sit near the floor of Rupp Arena and watch Edwards do his thing on the court. The season opener last week was special.

“To me, it was surreal,” Twiggs said. “Because I’m like, ‘My son is literally living out his dream.’ … To see him with Coach Cal coaching him, with a Kentucky jersey on, and knowing that was his dream? It was just like, ‘Wow.’”

And they get to see Edwards plenty off the court, too.

“He asks me to cook almost every day. So, I see him often,” said Twiggs, who adds that she doesn’t give in to that request. “If it were up to Justin, I would see him every day.”

Sometimes he’ll bring over a teammate to have dinner with his family.

And whenever he talks about his mom’s current circumstances, his face lights up.

“My mom is retired right now. I was able to retire my mom. So her not having to work and knowing that I’m the reason for that, I’m proud of myself.”

A bright basketball future

As good a place as he’s in, things aren’t exactly easy for Edwards these days.

That same transition from middle school to high school that he found so challenging, he’s experiencing again as a college basketball player.

“The stuff that I got away with in high school — I can’t get away with now,” Edwards says.

One-handed rebounds. Losing focus on defense. Making the wrong decisions with the ball. Mistakes happen, especially with freshmen, even the best of them. And Calipari and UK’s other coaches are quick to call Edwards out in practice.

Calipari wants Edwards to be more assertive with the ball, more aggressive in general. Attack the basket. Never let up on defense. All the things that Edwards already thought he did so well, Calipari wants him to do even better.

“I’ve never played like that,” he said. “So just changing the way I play — it’s uncomfortable. And I just have to get comfortable with it.”

He’s been through this before. And the strength he showed the last time around will get him through it this time. He tunes out the talk that he could be the No. 1 pick in next year’s NBA draft. He’s not bothered that opponents this season will probably put a target on his back because of that designation. He acknowledges that it might make them come at him harder. So what?

“I’m used to it,” he says.

Sitting next to Edwards’ mother, sister and brother last Monday night in Rupp Arena was a special guest. Noble made the trip from Philadelphia for his star player’s first regular-season game in college. He wore Edwards’ high school jersey. After all they’d been through the past four years, he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Noble knows Edwards still has a lot to work on. But he also knows that kid who almost quit his team as a freshman has the strength to carry on.

“He does have really high expectations for himself,” he said. “So sometimes, it’s just like, ‘Hey, you’re going to make errors. Coach Cal is going to yell at you.’ Just like I yelled at him. That’s going to happen. When he makes a mistake, you can still sometimes see it stick with him for a play. And, obviously, as he grows and keeps maturing with that — he’ll get better. And Coach Cal’s on it. He knows he’s going to have to get better, because Coach Cal’s going to hold him to it. …

“We think that the young man that he is can take him through the tough things. He’s a great kid. He works really hard. He’s got really good character. So we say, ‘Jus — just be you.’”

It’s gotten him this far. But it wouldn’t have been possible without Mom.

He watched her working around the clock. Leaned on her in his toughest times. Saw basketball as an outlet not just to live out his own dreams, but to give her a better life.

“He’s been around the whole struggle,” Edwards’ mother says. “He’s been around my tears. He’s been around my frustration. Trying to figure out this, trying to figure out how to pay that. So, I think that kind of motivates him to — I don’t want to say he’s working to make my life better. But I know for a fact that a lot of his push and his drive is to make sure that I don’t have to go through that anymore.”

Sometimes, Twiggs tells her son that if he wanted to have an ego, he could. But she sees a humble kid who’s done his best to make life better for those he cares about the most.

“You have every right to have a big head,” she says. “You got your family out of Philly. Your mom is able to be a full-time parent to your siblings, and not have to struggle. You have every reason to have a big head. But you don’t.”

What does that say about her son?

“That he’s a great kid,” she says.

And then the seriousness in her voice gives way to a little chuckle as she recalls what she tells her son once a year, reflecting on their nearly two decades together.

“Every birthday, I tell him: ‘You know what? I did a hell of a job.’”

Tuesday

No. 16 Kentucky vs. No. 1 Kansas

What: Champions Classic

When: About 9:30 p.m. EST

Where: United Center in Chicago

TV: ESPN

Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1

Records: Kentucky 2-0, Kansas 2-0

Series: Kentucky leads 24-11

Last meeting: Kansas defeated Kentucky 77-68 in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge on Jan. 28, 2023, in Lexington

This story was originally published November 13, 2023 at 7:00 AM.

Ben Roberts

Lexington Herald-Leader

859-429-2848

Ben Roberts is the University of Kentucky men’s basketball beat writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader. He has previously specialized in UK basketball recruiting coverage and created and maintained the Next Cats blog. He is a Franklin County native and first joined the Herald-Leader in 2006. Support my work with a digital subscription