It took skipping college to make Scoot Henderson a reader.
Growing up, the Blazers rookie didn’t consider himself a bookworm, or anything close to one. Reading put him to sleep, and books were never something he sought out away from school.
“I was always playing sports, unless we had a book report,” Henderson said recently, before a mid-March road loss to the New Orleans Pelicans. “But I didn’t really like it growing up.”
Subtracting book reports from the equation might be the answer. In the two years he spent with the G League Ignite, though, Henderson developed a reputation among his teammates—for, of all things, reading like a madman.
“He reads all the time,” Shareef O’Neal, Henderson’s former Ignite teammate, told The Ringer in 2022. “He’s always in his room, locked in on a book.”
Henderson, the 20-year-old who went No. 3 overall in the 2023 draft, explained that the habit started with his decision to skip college and spend two years in the NBA’s minor league. At his going away party, a family friend gave Henderson a copy of Don Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. The popular self-help book, which spent a decade on The New York Times best seller list, joined him on his cross-country trip from Georgia to Walnut Creek, California, where the team was based its first two seasons. In his first year with the Ignite, Henderson lived around the corner from a park and would walk there and read. He’s an old school reader, too: no Kindle, no Nook. Physical copies only. He has designs on having his own personal library, which is why he doesn’t have a library card.
As a newly-minted professional, Henderson had increased free time and was trying to find ways to fill it. One day, he decided to pick up the book and see what it was all about. From there, he was hooked—in part because, at 19, he was busy figuring out what sort of pro—and person—he wanted to be. “I think that’s why I started reading when I got to the G League, because I was really trying to figure out who I was,” he said. “I knew who I was, but I didn’t know who I wanted to be and who I wanted people to know me as, so that’s why I started reading. And just find different ways of how I want to be perceived.”
The Four Agreements helped him with that—and spurred a new desire. “I wanted to read more like it,” Henderson said.
And he has. To his surprise, the self-help books have unintentionally spilled into helping him on the court. He cited Robert Greene’s international best seller The 48 Laws of Power, a book that draws on philosophies from leaders throughout world history. He’s tasked with becoming the Blazers’ next franchise player; in a season in which they’ve struggled to win, the book has helped him make sense of his job.
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