A.J. Griffin Leaves Basketball Behind For God

An unusual but hardly surprising move

Former Blue Devil AJ Griffin stepped away from basketball last week, and people could not believe anyone would do it. Everyone dreams of playing in the NBA and he got there. How could he turn his back on that?

Well, as it turns out, Griffin has a calling: he wants to follow Jesus and preach the Word.

Here’s what he said, according to CBS’s Colin Ward-Henninger: “I gave up basketball to follow Jesus. And I know that in a lot of people’s eyes, that seems like — it seems like a loss in the world’s eyes. But, I just want to let you guys know that I’m super excited because I truly get to serve God, you know, with my full Yes, and I feel like letting go of basketball is allowing me to, you know, go into full-time ministry and truly serving the Lord with all my heart — with all my time too, as well. So, I’m just excited to see where that leads me.”

It would be a pretty unusual decision for anyone, much less for a 21-year-old who went to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round of the NBA Draft just two years ago. In June, he was traded to the Houston but never played a game for the Rockets.

Clearly, though, for Griffin, basketball is not his highest priority. We’ve seen a number of religious posts he’s made since he was at Duke and it’s clear that he takes his faith very seriously.

He’s not the first NBA player to be deeply religious of course. A.C. Green famously said that he began and ended his 16-year career as a virgin. Chris Jackson, known as Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf after converting to Islam, taking his religion quite seriously. Perhaps no one’s journey has been more interesting than that of Amar’e Stoudemire: after discovering that he had Jewish ancestry, Stoudemire, who was born Baptist, began a long, slow journey. He formally converted in 2018, became an Israeli citizen in 2019 and changed his name to Yahoshafat Ben Avraham.

It’s hard for many today, in a deeply materialistic society, to understand why someone would walk away from great wealth and fame, but many do and it’s a good thing, too. The religious have given us Maximilian Kolbe, Martin Luther, Gandhi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few.

These people have enormously changed the world. We’re not saying that Griffin will have that kind of impact necessarily, but we’re glad that he feels called and wish him all the best in his new life.

We have plenty of basketball players. What we really need now are a few good men.