INDIANAPOLIS — Gregory Hines was living the bachelor’s life in 2008. A former professional basketball player — he was a fifth-round pick by the Warriors in 1983 — Hines had a one-bedroom apartment in Montclair, N.J., a white boxer named Blazer, a half-full refrigerator and not a lot of responsibility.
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Then his rambunctious, 12-year-old nephew asked to move in. The responsibility expanded. The refrigerator was wiped clean.
“It became the three of us,” Hines said of him, his dog and his nephew, Josh Allen, the Kentucky edge rusher who has a good shot at following his uncle’s path to the Bay Area next month. “And Joshua always had — it was almost every weekend — one of his friends come and sleep over. It would be the boys’ club. And I’m sitting there adjusting to the life because I was a bachelor and now on my weekends, I’ve got him bringing friends for sleepovers. They’re wrestling. They’re diving off the couch and jumping all over me. I’d have some snacks and a couple of beverage choices, which is fine for me, but now it just disappears. They would tear my refrigerator up. The cold cuts would be gone. The drinks would be gone. If I walked out the door and left them there, by the time I got home everything was gone. But we had some good old times, that’s for sure.”
Hines said their favorite activity — downstairs neighbors be damned — was a game they called “tap out.” The rules weren’t elaborate. Uncle and nephew would grapple, tussle, put each other in various holds and simply try to make the other guy give up.
“And I used to always make him tap out,” Hines said. Then he paused and laughed. “But I don’t think I’ll be making him tap out any more.”
On Friday, the once rail-thin tween who used to spring off of Hines’ sectional measured in at nearly 6-foot-5, 262 pounds with 33.5-inch arms. He had 28 repetitions of 225 pounds on the bench press — a solid number for an outside linebacker — and, perhaps more significantly, an unofficial 1.61-second 10-yard split in the 40-yard dash, which scouts use to gauge a prospect’s explosion off the line of scrimmage.
Allen’s size, quickness and ability to make powerful, sharp cuts to the quarterback have some drawing parallels to Von Miller and Khalil Mack, which makes him an obvious draft candidate for the 49ers, who have the second pick, or the Raiders at pick No. 4. Far from shying away from such comparisons, Allen emphatically encouraged them here at the NFL scouting combine this week. His opponents were just as effusive.
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“He’s got real good bend,” said South Carolina left tackle Dennis Daley, who watched Allen tally three sacks on Sept. 29. “He gets around the edge. He’s real good at that, and he never stops. He’s got that motor. Facing Josh Allen — it put in the back of my head (that) I never want to go through this again. I kind of took my preparation to another level.”
Josh Allen completely took over vs South Carolina. Gave Dennis Daley fits all game. Dips and rips to beat him here for the strip sack. pic.twitter.com/9vqq9u6dbB
— Rob Paul (@RobPaulNFL) February 26, 2019
Allen is a football player raised in a family that breathes basketball.
His grandfather, Morris Hines, played high school basketball against long-time Warriors player and coach Al Attles in New Jersey. Uncle Greg — known in his playing days as Dunkin’ Hines — never played a regular-season game after the Warriors drafted him. But he spent 12 seasons in the CBA and overseas. Another uncle played professionally as well.
Then there are Allen’s four older sisters, all of whom inherited the family’s “tall” gene and three of whom were serious basketball players.
Josh Allen, foreground in the black coat in 2011, was raised in a basketball family. Of his four older sisters, the shortest is 5-11. His fraternal twin, Isaiah, is behind him in this photo. (Courtesy of Gregory Hines)
LaTorri scored more than 1,000 points at Towson University. Kyra played basketball at Cheyney College where she also went over the 1,000-point mark. The youngest sister, Myisha, might be the best of the bunch. She played at Louisville and last year was drafted 19th overall by the WNBA’s Washington Mystics.
The girls, the smallest of whom is 5-11, didn’t go easy on Josh or his fraternal twin, Isaiah, during backyard games.
“They’d really be going at it,” Hines said. “And the girls at the time are not little girls. They are big girls. And Joshua and Isaiah, they’re their little brothers. They were skinny, little kids and their sisters were all athletically built.”
It’s the reason Allen preferred to sleep on Uncle Greg’s sofa when he was in middle school. His single mother’s apartment was teeming with women. (Isaiah was living with an aunt and uncle in Alabama at the time.) And it’s why he decided to make football his passion: there already was plenty of family history with basketball. He was the type of kid who wanted to make his own mark.
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“He’s been playing football since he was young,” Myisha Hines-Allen, who currently is playing in Serbia, wrote in an email to The Athletic. “So it’s like everyone else — once you find a sport you truly love, you stick with it. That’s what he did.”
It was Hines who first signed him up for football, doing so against the wishes of his own sister, Kim, who is Josh’s mother.
“He convinced me to let him play,” Hines said. “‘I’ll be all right, Uncle Greg. I’ll be all right.’ And his mother didn’t want that because she had that motherly love, didn’t want him to get hurt. And, of course, there’s always that crazy uncle in the family who lets you do what you want.”
Allen lived with that crazy uncle for all three years of middle school. But it wasn’t always the breezy, every-day-is-recess experience the youngster might have initially envisioned.
Hines worked as a security guard at the local high school, where he’d get regular information on Allen from colleagues at the middle school. The reports weren’t good. Though it wouldn’t be diagnosed for years, Allen was dealing with ADHD, which at that time was dismissed as school-boy hyperactivity.
“Joshua was special-ed,” Hines explained. “He was playing in the hallway. He couldn’t sit still. And he was always running around.”
The next year, Hines transferred to the middle school. Now when Allen broke out of the classroom and tore through the halls, he’d run into his uncle, all 6-9, 280 pounds of him.
“He could not be in the hallways,” Hines said. “Because I would catch him. And we’d have, let’s say, a fellowshipping right there in the hallway. And he started getting mad because I would pop up in the classroom, too. And I know it was rough on him because I would put a lot of demands on him. And I know he didn’t like ’em at the time.”
While the rest of the students changed classes every period, Josh remained in the same special education class throughout the day. One day Uncle Greg had a long, serious talk with him about truly breaking free of his all-day classroom and asked what his favorite subject was. The answer: world literature.
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That was tricky. The school’s world lit class was taught by a veteran teacher known for discipline. When Hines approached the school’s child-study team about Josh perhaps taking that course, the members were skeptical that a kid who had trouble sitting still would last even a day in that environment.
They were wrong.
“As soon as some structure came, he excelled,” Hines said. “By the time he graduated from middle school, he was taking mainstream classes. And he made the honor roll. The honor roll. He did that. I had a lot of help. Because a lot of the teachers were my co-workers. And they were helping me out with tutoring and stuff. But he’s the one who did it.”
Hines never played a regular-season game after being drafted in the fifth round by the Warriors in 1983, but he was the one-time captain of the Toronto Tornados in the CBA, as seen in this 1985 photo. (Jeff Goode/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
When Josh finished middle school, he and his twin, Isaiah, switched places. Isaiah returned to New Jersey while Josh went to Abbeville, Ala. He had his own room there — no more sleeping on Uncle Greg’s sofa — and an aunt and uncle, Jill and James Barber, who doted on him.
Josh’s sojourn down south had a storybook feel. When he left, he was a tall, thin-framed boy who played receiver and who got roughed up in his first practices with the Alabama boys. When he returned to New Jersey three years later before his senior year, he was 200 pounds.
“Super-sized,” Hines said.
John Fiore, the football coach at Montclair High, remembers hearing the buzz about the kid who had just returned from Alabama. He shrugged it off.
“For years it was Josh Allen, Josh Allen, Josh Allen. ‘You gotta see Josh!’” Fiore said. “Well, in my mind he’s Isaiah’s twin. Isaiah is 6-foot, 180 pounds. Good football player. Very happy with him. But it’s nothing like, ‘Oh my God, write home about him,’ ya know? Then senior year (Josh) comes walking into our weight room and I’m like, ‘Who the hell is that?’ And they’re, ‘That’s Josh Allen. We’ve been telling you about him for years, coach.’”
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At the time, Allen had gotten some attention from college football programs who thought he could be converted into a pass-catching tight end. Fiore had a different idea.
Montclair High had been successful at sending defensive ends to Division I schools, a group that includes Darius Slade (Ohio State), Julian Pinnix-Odrick (Rutgers) and Austin Stevens (Boston College). Fiore saw Allen’s tall build, long arms and relentless energy and thought he’d be better off slamming into quarterbacks than catching passes from them.
He knew his instincts were right during a summer warm-up game against a private-school powerhouse nearby.
“That scrimmage — after that it was like, ‘Forget about it. It’s a done deal, it’s a wrap,’” Fiore said. “He was as good as any of the kids we’d sent off to Ohio State. Honestly, I thought he was better than Darius Slade, and I thought Darius Slade was going to be an NFL draft pick.”
Allen led the state of New Jersey that year with 22 1/2 sacks, breaking Slade’s single-season record in the process. The performance was a precursor to his final season at Kentucky, when he had 17 sacks, including an exclamation-point, three-sack game against Penn State in the Citrus Bowl.
Penn State's Trace McSorley is the only QB to have played against Nick Bosa (in 2017) and Josh Allen (in the 2018 bowl game).
When asked about the best pass-rusher he has faced, he talked about Allen. pic.twitter.com/H6XNj76B6e
— Brad Almquist (@bradalmquist13) March 1, 2019
Asked his opinion about the top pass rusher in the draft, Penn State quarterback Trace McSorley noted that he didn’t have to face Ohio State’s Nick Bosa, who was injured at the time, this past season. He cited Allen as the toughest defender he faced. So did a handful of college left tackles.
“I mean Josh Allen brings a lot of different moves to the table,” said Florida’s Jawaan Taylor. “(Florida State’s) Brian Burns is more of just a speed guy. He has moves as well. But Josh Allen is a guy that is stronger. So you have to be able to prepare for it.”
At the combine on Saturday, Allen thanked the large extended family that shaped him, including the uncle who chased him out of the hallways and into mainstream classes.
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“He helped me out through life,” he said. “I actually lived with him for a couple of years growing up, so he instilled a lot of man traits in me. And a lot of independence, because it was just me and him. He helped me become the person I am today.”
The experience, Hines said, sent him on a different path as well.
When Josh moved in with him, Hines’ bachelor life ended for good. After Josh left for Alabama, Hines rekindled his relationship with his college sweetheart and got married.
His three years with his nephew, he said, may have emptied his refrigerator, but it opened his heart.
“It was a sense of, ‘This is where I should be in my life,’” Hines said. “Living with Josh prepared me. Now I’m happily married for seven years and I don’t live in New Jersey no more. I live in down here (in Maryland). To think that my old college sweetheart never got married and neither did I. … It was a good thing I had him. Because it was a change for me, too. It was a win-win situation on both ends.”
(Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
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