Culture
In star-studded Los Angeles, it’s JuJu Watkins’ show
LOS ANGELES — USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb and her star player, JuJu Watkins, were invited to the annual Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation Blue Diamond Gala in May. In a who’s-who world of L.A. glitterati, Gottlieb was astounded by how many people flocked to Watkins. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and owner Mark Walter wanted to meet her. Magic Johnson and his wife, Cookie, came over. A section of Los Angeles Lakers personnel were interested, too.
“Everywhere I’m turning, these fans and these people that are here go, ‘JuJu! JuJu!’” Gottlieb said. “She’s as recognizable with (her) bun (hairstyle) as any of the Dodgers and was the biggest star. I came back and I said to my staff and the administration here, this was next level. Amongst L.A., she is kind of the star amongst the stars.”
Watkins was coming off a historic first season that saw her set the NCAA record for points by a freshman and lead the Trojans to their first conference title in a decade and first Elite Eight appearance in 30 years. Her bun became famous in its own right, and a national AT&T commercial during last season’s March Madness featured NBA superstar Joel Embiid, among others, trying out the look.
Watkins had already brought USC basketball back from relative obscurity. The promise of what she can be and what that means for the program and the city is evolving in real time as the Trojans start the NCAA Tournament as a No. 1 seed, hosting the first two rounds on their home court.
The sophomore sensation and the people around her have been preparing for this possibility before she started college. Watkins signed with Klutch Sports Group as a junior in high school and has been building her brand portfolio ever since. As a Los Angeles native, it has always been part of the plan to use her influence to elevate her community — a previous partnership with Lids allowed her to design a hat that highlighted her neighborhood of Watts — and choosing to attend USC allowed her to remain in the same spotlight.
“L.A. is just a great place as far as opportunity and relationships,” Watkins said. “I feel like L.A. plays a big part in my legacy and what I do on and off the court.”
The city is drawn to Watkins. The Trojans averaged 1,037 fans at home games in 2022-23, per data from the NCAA. During Watkins’ freshman season, that number spiked to 4,279 and further increased to 5,932 during the 2024-25 regular season. In addition to former USC players, Watkins has brought out a number of celebrities to the Galen Center. Actors, musicians and other influential stars, including Sanaa Lathan, Leslie Jones, Vanessa Bryant, Flea, Snoop Dogg and Michael B. Jordan, have cheered from USC courtside seats.
In anticipation of the extra attention, the program reached out to get a sense of what was to come, contacting the Big Ten and Iowa, including former Hawkeyes head coach Lisa Bluder, before the season began.
Caitlin Clark had been the talisman for women’s basketball fans during her senior season at Iowa, drawing historic crowds and TV ratings en route to breaking multiple scoring records. The Hawkeyes’ run to back-to-back national title games culminated in the highest-rated national championship game of all time, outdoing the men’s final the next day.
When Clark turned pro alongside former LSU star Angel Reese, and with UConn star Paige Bueckers entering her final college season, Watkins became the natural heir apparent to fill the superstar vacuum, both in the Big Ten and nationally.
As a result, USC updated its security protocols, adding a wristband policy to control the specific crowds permitted to stay in the arena after games. The Big Ten helped handle pregame and postgame protocols on the road, and Bluder shared details about how to maintain privacy at hotels. Watkins’ agent, Jade-Li English, added that security is a particular topic of interest given how recognizable Watkins is in her home city — with or without her bun.
JuJu Watkins signs her autograph for one of her many bun-copying fans. (Katelyn Mulcahy / Getty Images)
When the Trojans went on the road this season for their inaugural Big Ten campaign, every school (other than Iowa, which sold out every home game) saw an uptick in attendance. The JuJu Bump produced an average attendance increase of 75 percent, punctuated by Rutgers nearly tripling its average crowd when USC visited. All around the country, moms and dads in Watkins jerseys brought their daughters wearing their hair in buns to games.
“It was hard to predict this until you’re living in it in real time,” Gottlieb said. “We all had a vision for her helping to really grow this program, but I think that the gravitational pull in the change in the fan support is really pretty remarkable.”
That Watkins’ arrival into college basketball has coincided with an overall boom for the sport has only enhanced her popularity and her opportunities. Her portfolio is extensive, with 16 current national marketing deals, including Nike, State Farm, Gatorade and Fanatics. Her image is inescapable whether walking around Los Angeles — where she has a three-building-wide Nike billboard in downtown — or turning on the television.
“We’re able to align JuJu with brands that are leaders in their respective industries and align with brands that have a natural synergy with women’s basketball,” Klutch Sports senior vice president of athlete strategy Brittany McCallum said. “All of these partners have television placements, TV broadcasts during the NCAA Tournament. So these partnerships leverage national TV visibility, allowing for JuJu to be a part of a larger cultural moment, while also amplifying the brand’s presence during one of the most watched times in women’s sports.”
Watkins said her collaboration with Funko Pop was one of her favorites, as she helped with the details of its bun and eyelashes being as close to her likeness as possible. She signed at least 30 of them during USC’s Selection Sunday party. Her ad spot with Chipotle was another standout as it included the entire Trojans roster.
But the partnership with Nike has truly opened doors for Watkins. McCallum said her 19-year-old client was over the moon and “completely caught off guard” when she learned she would be appearing in a Super Bowl commercial.
“Seeing those moments and the power behind what Nike is putting behind women’s sports right now has been really special to her and probably something that wasn’t in the cards but definitely aligns on where the women’s game is right now,” McCallum said. “And JuJu is very grateful to be a part of the movement.”
The JuJu Watkins rise doesn’t happen without her corresponding basketball success. She followed up her freshman campaign with another first-team All-American season, joining Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo as the third and fourth players to earn first-team honors as freshmen and sophomores. She led USC to its first conference regular-season title in more than three decades.
With all of the added attention, the focus remains on basketball. She doesn’t do pregame interviews, preferring to stay in the zone. Gottlieb says Watkins goes hard in every rep in every practice, accepting challenges on both ends of the floor. After dealing with cramping during her freshman season, Watkins put extra emphasis on hydration this season to negate that issue.
Snoop Dogg in da house! He’s wearing a JuJu Watkins fit.
Michael B. Jordan is also in attendance for the USC vs. Notre Dame game. pic.twitter.com/FAlD6NCc4A
— Isabel Gonzalez (@cisabelg) November 23, 2024
Even though her star turn has been choreographed, and the expectation was for her to succeed, she is reaching heights that were impossible to predict.
Gottlieb joked that her own identity is now defined through Watkins. At a USA Basketball event, she was working out in the hotel gym with Dawn Staley and the family of one of the U-17 players. The young boy in the family excitedly told his dad, there’s Dawn Staley, before turning around and noticing, there’s JuJu Watkins’ coach! At the 2024 Final Four, a father asked Gottlieb for a picture with his daughter because she was a massive Watkins fan, excited to merely get a picture with someone in Watkins’ orbit. Gottlieb felt compelled to point out that she’d be the one in the picture, not JuJu.
Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick attended the regular-season finale between USC and UCLA. Afterward, he said, “JuJu Watkins is one of one, she’s incredible. First time seeing her play in person, but obviously I’ve watched her before. She lived up to the hype.”
The hype train is unprecedented at this point, Where it leads is anyone’s guess.
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen/ The Athletic; Photos of Angel Reese, JuJu Watkins and Caitlin Clark: Harry How / Getty Images, Brian Fluharty / Getty Images, Eakin Howard / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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