sport news Meet the $500m Beard who rules basketball: James Harden is making NBA history...

They call him 'Lucky'. 

Not because he is so prolific from the free-throw line or that he continues to smash points records but because it is a miracle that he is even playing professional basketball at all. 

Now the sport's MVP and valued at close to $500million, he is yet a divisive figure on and off the court. But love him or hate him, everyone has an opinion on James Edward Harden Jnr these days.  

Monja Willis had suffered two miscarriages before she gave birth to Harden on August 29, 1989. Expectations were low for the new arrival. After all, each breath was a miracle. 

Growing up his surroundings were eye-opening. His father dipped in and out of jail and played little to no role in Harden's formative years as Willis raised him and his two siblings in a mobile home in Compton while the 1992 LA riots raged across the city. Homicide rates in men were high. Gang recruitment among young boys likewise. 

Sport was to be the release but for an out-of-shape asthmatic, eyebrows were raised when Harden opted for basketball as the sport for him. Shooting, honed in the backyard to the mobile home, quickly became his key asset. 

Practice was relentless and soon enough he made up for what he lacked in stamina and fitness with pinpoint precision both under the net and from range. 

High school came and Harden began to trim physically. He impressed. Willis, working as a service dispatcher at AT&T at the time, rarely missed a game from his first to his last and is now entrusted as the his agent and manager. 

A spot at Arizona State University arose - he became the marquee signing - and a clean-shaven Harden now appears almost unrecognisable on reflection. But like most college students, laziness slowly crept into his lifestyle and as he developed physically, he was faced with a decision that would later become a million-dollar question: shave the beard, or keep it? 

Laziness won and soon scouts across the US were fascinated by the shooting guard they simply referred to as 'The Beard'. 

With the help of his trusted inhaler - and the notoriety of his beard - Harden soon became a nationwide talking point and with the 2009 NBA draft on the horizon, teams were busy jockeying to secure his signature. It quickly became apparent that of all the top young players up for draft selection, Harden was one many really wanted. 

First out came 2019 NBA All-Star Blake Griffin, then came 7ft 3in 'unicorn' - a term given to taller players that are considered to be genetically advanced - Hasheem Thabeet, now plying his trade in Japan with the Yokohama B-Corsairs. Then Oklahoma City Thunder made their pick… James Harden. 

Aged 20, few could imagine a bearded asthmatic from Compton going on to be the sport's Most Valuable Player over the next decade. But it happened.  

Arriving at OKC, Harden was rightly considered one of the best all-round prospects to emerge from college basketball in his generation. That said, this is the NBA. Bursting on the scene and upsetting the apple cart from the off is tough and relatively unheard of. 

And so Harden quickly became the team's 'sixth man' - a player who does not start games but makes an impact from the bench - having begun to gel with team-mates Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant. The presence of such a formidable sixth man showed the quality of Thunder's team at that time. 

His game-time was a slice of what he enjoys now at Houston but when chances came Harden left an impression. He recorded the fourth-highest three-point percentage in NBA history (.375) for a player under the age of 21 during the 2009–10 season. 

Two seasons later he went on to lift the NBA's Sixth Man award, taking 584 of a possible 595 from the votes cast. But like any ambitious sportsman, patience wanes and when OKC came back to the negotiating table in 2014 with a four-year deal worth $55m, Harden felt his time in blue and orange was up.

They didn't value him like Westbrook or Durant and that bothered him deeply. He needed to step out from the shadow, show his personality and go on to establish himself as not another sixth man, but a main man. 

Houston had a problem, and Harden was the answer. That was in 2012 and now, seven years on, Harden is the reigning MVP and is the leading scorer in the entire NBA with an average of 36.1 points a game from his 78 starts this season. For context, that is 8.4 points a game more than 'Greek Freak' Giannis Antetokounmpo and 8.8 more than Golden State supremo Stephen Curry. 

A shooting guard being good at shooting should come as no great surprise but even by Harden's standards, this season has been preposterous. Only this month did he become the first NBA player in history to score 30 points or more against every team in a single season. Absurd. 

Last month, Harden hit a 42 points against the Minnesota Timberwolves to make it 31 consecutive games with 30 or more points. A month earlier he stormed past LA Lakers icon Kobe Bryant who hit 16 consecutive games in the record books. Harden is rewriting history with every three-pointer. 

Harden can be a polarising figure on court but off it he is nothing short of a phenomenon. Beard masks have never been so popular and with no other star player possessing such a dominating and marketable feature, he is an advertising and social media dream. 

Harden

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