One is Boston’s hero. One is Boston’s nightmare. Back in 2013, Jayson Tatum and Matthew Tkachuk were grinning teenagers in a St. Louis gymnasium, filming a project for a freshman-year broadcast class.
For the project, Tatum listed reasons why he chose to attend Chaminade College Preparatory School, a Catholic school in the St. Louis suburbs. He mentioned the “great people and great friends” he met in school, including Tkachuk, who held a laptop and danced as Tatum listed his name.
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Their faces were young and clean shaven, still a decade away from featuring the beards basketball and hockey fans have seen on national TV this spring. Sure, they were promising young athletes, but could anyone have foreseen the heights they’d one day reach?
“To be honest, personally, I did not,” says Graham Niemeyer, who was in broadcast class with both Tkachuk and Tatum.
“They were just normal dudes,” adds classmate Luke Radetic. “We knew they were good, but we didn’t realize how cool it would be looking back on it.”
(Screenshot from Jayson Tatum’s project)Nowadays, the former classmates are among the biggest stars in their respective sports, and both have reached the Eastern Conference finals. Playing for the Boston Celtics, Tatum finished fourth in this year’s NBA MVP voting, and he set a Game 7 record with 51 points to beat Philadelphia on Sunday as the Celtics advanced to play Miami. Tkachuk, meanwhile, is an MVP finalist in the NHL and led the eighth-seed Florida Panthers to upsets over the Boston Bruins, who had the best record in league history, and then the Toronto Maple Leafs, setting up a series against Carolina. His mix of skill and the ability to irritate have made him one of the faces of the NHL.
Chaminade has had its share of big athletes, including three-time NBA All-Star Bradley Beal, NBA champion David Lee and former NHL All-Star Ben Bishop. Matthew’s younger brother, Brady, also attended Chaminade and is now the captain of the Ottawa Senators. Hurricanes forward Paul Stastny, whom Matthew will face in the Eastern Conference finals, went there, too.
But Tatum and Matthew Tkachuk, both thriving at age 25, might end up as the school’s two most successful athletic alums when all is said and done — and they were friends in the same grade.
“It was obviously pretty nuts,” says former classmate Will Gladson, a close friend of Tatum who went on to play basketball at Princeton.
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Adds Niemeyer: “Just watching it unfold has been incredible.”
Tkachuk, the son of NHL All-Star Keith Tkachuk, attended Chaminade from sixth to ninth grade before leaving for the U.S. National Team Development Program in Michigan. Tatum arrived in seventh grade and stayed through senior year, long enough for him to become a local sensation and a top-10 recruit in the country. By the time he left for Duke, Chaminade middle schoolers ran up to him in the hallways and Chick-fil-A workers in the area treated him to free meals.
Classmates and teachers both remember the work Tkachuk and Tatum put in while at Chaminade. Both had natural gifts, and they did everything they could to maximize them. Tatum arrived at school early every morning to get shots up and practice with trainer Drew Hanlen, who now works with multiple other NBA stars. Tkachuk frequently wasn’t able to hang out with school friends on the weekend because he was traveling for hockey.
“They pretty much gave their lives to it,” says Mike Derkits, one of Chaminade’s physical education teachers.
The two had gym class together, and those around them remember both being good at all sports, not just the ones in which they’d eventually go pro. Joe Morgan, another physical education teacher, believes Tatum would have made a good wide receiver, and Luke Radetic says Tkachuk “has always been super good at everything.”
Well, maybe not good enough to compete with Tatum in hoops.
“When I was playing basketball, it wasn’t pretty,” Tkachuk told The Athletic at the 2020 NHL All-Star Game in St. Louis.
In a 2020 radio interview with 101 ESPN St. Louis, Tkachuk recounted a floor hockey game in which he wound up playing goalie, likely so no team had the huge advantage of his stickhandling and skill. Tatum managed to score on him that day, prompting him to burst into celebration.
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“He was more excited than I’ve seen him in some of his (NBA) highlights,” Tkachuk said on the radio.
In 2018 interviews with the Calgary Sun, Tkachuk said they’d jokingly trash talk each other when playing the others’ sport, and Tatum mentioned playing goalie in floor hockey games.
Radetic, who is still close with Tkachuk, doesn’t remember much from gym, but he does recall Tatum standing in net “because he was the biggest guy.” The students dressed in red, mesh P.E. shorts with reversible cotton shirts, Radetic says, and played a variety of games, including a dodgeball-volleyball fusion dubbed “over-under.” In that game, which is still played in Chaminade gym classes, you can throw the ball under the volleyball net and eliminate an opponent by hitting them.
“I kind of felt for the other guys, their opponents,” Derkits adds. “They both could move the ball and really put some speed on it.”
Adds Radetic: “Jayson could hurl the ball under.”
Derkits doesn’t have specific memories of Tatum and Tkachuk together in physical education class — Chaminade has multiple teachers, and he isn’t sure he was the one teaching them at the same time — but can recall plenty of stories about them individually. In a game of baseball on the blacktop, Tatum once whacked a ball over a nearby building, a feat Derkits hasn’t seen since. In floor hockey, the teacher had to create rules to slow Tkachuk down. The now-NHLer had to collect an assist between goals, or else he’d score too quickly for games to be remotely competitive.
“I still remember these eighth grade kids, when he’d wind up to shoot, would almost get out of the way,” Derkits says. “Not many kids had the speed and power he did.”
Tatum was “a touch more quiet” than Tkachuk when competing, Derkits says, which isn’t surprising given the hockey player’s reputation as a pest on the ice.
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“Matthew, as you know, likes to muck it up a little bit,” Derkits says. “He would always be talking trash, always in a fun way.”
But they shared a competitive fire still burning today.
“Sometimes I had to pull the reins in a little bit,” Morgan says. “They were definitely two of the top as far as being competitive goes that I’ve ever been around.”
Tkachuk didn’t play hockey for Chaminade, but Tatum was on the basketball team, even in middle school. His eighth grade games were must-see events: a hint at what was to come.
“It was the coolest thing to go watch as a middle schooler,” Radetic says. “Everybody knew he was going to be great.”
Tkachuk left Chaminade before draft buzz around him reached a fever pitch — Calgary eventually drafted him at No. 6 overall in 2016 — but Tatum was a minor celebrity by the time he graduated. Gladson, who is now godfather to Tatum’s son, Deuce, says his close friend always kept a level-head.
“We had a lot of dumb friends, and he was never one of them,” Gladson says. “He never wanted to jeopardize what he knew he could accomplish in basketball with something like grades.”
The rules Tatum broke were minor ones. Only seniors were allowed to leave Chaminade during the day, but Gladson remembers sneaking out with Tatum to get Chick-fil-A as an underclassman. One day, as they returned to campus in Tatum’s cream Chrysler 300M, a school resource officer followed them into the parking lot.
“He knew we shouldn’t have been doing what we were doing,” Gladson says.
Tatum parked, and he and Gladson got out of the car and crouched as they walked through the parking lot — not necessarily an effective strategy for a pair of 6-foot-8 basketball players. Eventually they broke into a run toward the building. Surely the officer saw them, Gladson says, but they never got in trouble.
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“The moral of the story was: ‘That’s Jayson Tatum. Whatever they’re doing is probably fine,’” Gladson says.
Both Tatum and Tkachuk have been back to Chaminade since establishing themselves as professional stars. Tkachuk made sure to visit ahead of the 2020 All-Star Game, and Tatum has held multiple camps there.
With the Panthers and Celtics, respectively, Tkachuk and Tatum are chasing their first professional title, and their paths will come close to crossing in the conference finals. Tatum’s Celtics are playing the Miami Heat, who play only 35 miles from where Tkachuk and the Panthers host home games. The two former classmates will be competing in South Florida for four alternating nights, starting with the Game 3 of the NBA series.
Plenty of their old teachers and friends will be watching every step of the way.
“It gives me a reason to watch sports every night, I’ll tell you that,” Radetic says. … “It’s very exciting. All our Chaminade buddies in our group chat, we’re all pretty fired up.”
(Illustration by Sean Reilly; Photo of Jayson Tatum: Eric Espada / NBAE via Getty Images; Photo of Matthew Tkachuk: Bill Wippert / NHLI via Getty Images)
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