Every Sunday, he’d watch his mother, and his grandmother, prepare the coconut. He’d watch how precisely, how intensely, they’d shave each piece with a grater for arroz con gandules, rice and pigeon peas, the Panamanian version, one of his grandmother’s best dishes. A nod to their heritage. His grandmother never wrote down the recipe; never needed to.
When Donovan Mitchell, then a young boy, would wake, he sensed the commotion in the kitchen. The chopping, the blending; he saw how no detail was left unattended. There were no short cuts, either. His grandmother could have bought frozen coconut milk, but instead she insisted on buying a fresh coconut each time, cracking it open and saving the water, then manually grating inside the coconut. She’d place the shavings into a blender, mix and drain it, using her hands to squeeze out all the milk, and then place that in the rice. Watching the blade hit the coconut, again and again, Donovan saw that one could not have sweetness without work — a lesson learned.
And now, years later, approaching 30 at the peak of his NBA career, he still thinks about his late grandmother. “She had it rough. She came from Panama,” Mitchell says. “She raised a family of three by herself … No one believed in her.”
She came to the States on her own, full of hope. Raising her family on her own in Brooklyn, she worked long hours as a nurse to move her family to a better neighborhood in Dobbs Ferry, New York. “One obstacle after another,” says Nicole Mitchell, Mitchell’s mother. “My mom’s mindset was just, ‘I have something to conquer. This is just not it. This is good, but this is not it.’” Grandma pushed herself to finish her undergraduate degree with high honors and even earn a master’s at Fordham University with high honors.
Nicole pauses. I have something to conquer. This is good, but this is not it. The words sound familiar. “It’s so interesting,” Nicole says, “because that’s Don’s mindset.”
Read the rest of my feature on the Cavaliers’ star.