DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It’s a scene inside the Lemerand Center on an unfairly cold Wednesday night in early January.
A junior college men’s basketball game is happening in a 1,000-seat gym. Everyone is here for that, including two players who were never supposed to be. But play has been paused. Security is defusing an altercation between the Daytona State College and Santa Fe College women’s hoops teams, who faced off earlier and are now pointing and yelling at each other across the bleachers. One of the Santa Fe players holds back a teammate by yanking on her shirt.
Some of this owes to Daytona State’s baseball squad raising the temperature by sitting behind the visitors bench and trolling them ruthlessly. And now, here come the Santa Fe women, who have been relocated to a section right next to them. The baseball dudes knowingly simmer down. “We don’t want no trouble, guys,” one of them concedes.
But if there’s a trigger to all of it, it’s a tie-up during the first half. A missed shot, some wrestling for the rebound, some choice words and Daytona State’s Ryan Bewley shoving a guy who got in the face of his brother, Matt. That’s when the mercury really jumped. And it brings us to the pertinent question.
What in the world are Matt and Ryan Bewley doing here?
Once upon a time, the 6-foot-9 Bewley twins were the first to hit a new switch on the traditional track for elite basketball talent: Top 15 phenoms who signed with a then-nascent operation called Overtime Elite, exchanging their last two years of high school for training, exposure to scouts and millions of internet eyeballs plus compensation. This was May 2021, one month before a Supreme Court ruling tore down barriers to college athletes profiting off their name, image and likeness (NIL). At the end of two years with Overtime, the Bewleys weren’t ready for the NBA nor eligible to play in the NCAA, fishhooked by the fine print of their choice.
The timing was excruciating.
Why it matters anymore is the issue.
Matt and Ryan Bewley, now 21, started by awing grassroots crowds across Florida. They then went from a throbbing 100,000-square-foot training facility in Atlanta to the far South Side of Chicago and court-ordered basketball purgatory to, on this night, a junior college with 16 women’s golf banners hanging in its gym. They are playing again. There is a joy in that. It helps wash down the thought that NCAA programs blithely use NIL money to make millionaires every year, and it’s completely fine. And they’re the ones paying, still.
“People think me and him just fell off the face of the earth,” Matt Bewley says. “It low-key feels like we’re the only people in the world that are going through what we’re going through.”
If the Bewley boys from Fort Lauderdale were not a figurative tag team, born a minute apart and bonded at every step in their basketball lives, they might have been an actual tag team. They were professional wrestling fans growing up, and that might be underselling it. “Bro,” Matt says, “that’s all we did.” They each can recite their top five all-time grapplers (the Undertaker and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin make both lists), and their enthusiasm occasionally broke the barrier to reality, among other things. Neither is sure who tried to powerbomb whom. They do remember the smashed window, their father asking what happened, and both of them shrugging and saying they didn’t know.
“We got in trouble so many times,” Ryan says. “Broke the bed. Broke the window. Couple of walls have holes in them.”
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