Gordon Hayward’s NBA tenure came to an end this offseason. Hayward, who last played with the Oklahoma City Thunder, announced on social media that he decided to retire at 34 years old, marking the end of a career that included stops in Utah, Boston, and Charlotte.
Like many retired athletes, Hayward has appreciated the opportunity to focus on things that he just could not pack into the busy schedule of an NBA player. He’s “excited,” he tells Dime, about what he has going on outside of basketball, taking golf lessons and getting back into tennis, the latter of which he famously played in high school. He’s relishing the chance to be a dad, too, as he ran through the list of things he had to miss as a father during his playing days — even if his kids weren’t thrilled with his decision at first.
“Initially, they were all upset about it, because they wanted me to keep playing,” Hayward says. “They like going to the games, they like seeing me. But then I think it set in that I’m going to be around more, and they like that, too.”
Hayward is also getting into the world of movie production. On Sept. 27, Hayward’s Whiskey Creek Productions will release its first featured film, Notice to Quit, which features Michael Zegen of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the lead role.
“The movie is about a real estate broker in New York who’s trying to figure things out, as far as life is concerned,” Hayward explains. “He’s trying to sell these places, just basically trying to make ends meet, and he’s struggling to do so. The movie is called Notice to Quit because the day that he’s getting evicted from his apartment, his daughter, who he has with his ex-wife, is basically coming and saying she’s being evicted from his life, as well, because they’re moving to Orlando. And not to tell too much of the story, but the story goes of him and his daughter over the next 24 hours, and what they go through in New York, being together, and Andy, who’s the main character, basically figuring out what’s important in life, and seeing work-life balance and how that plays out.”
Hayward wasn’t someone who always knew he wanted to get into filmmaking — he didn’t take film classes in college with an eye on this being in his post-playing future. He just loves the art of storytelling, whether that means listening to others or getting to tell stories on his own. His interest in film started, like so many, by watching movies. With the amount of traveling that athletes do, Hayward needed something that would help him pass the time. That ended up being movies and television shows. His NBA career started when athletes got portable DVD players and a packet of DVDs handed to them as they got on the team plane, and ended with guys being able to watch whatever they wanted on their phone or an iPad. Still, getting lost in that world doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to want to pursue it as your post-playing career.
And then, Hayward’s life and career changed in an instant. Five minutes and 15 seconds into his first game as a member of the Boston Celtics in 2017, Hayward suffered a leg injury that would cost him an entire season, and while the Celtics went on to make the Eastern Conference Finals in his absence, Hayward worked to get his body right. That story was told in “The Return,” a docuseries produced by The Players’ Tribune and directed by an up-and-comer named Simon Hacker. Working with Hacker on that project led to the two staying in touch, and as Hayward entered the later years of his career, the two began working on a partnership that became Whiskey Creek.
“We hit it off just talking about movies and our passion for movies, and we ultimately decided we wanted to start a production company, and then decided that we wanted to make a film,” Hayward says. “Simon is a creative genius. He is really, really talented. And he’s like, I got this script, and I kind of want to go for it. I was like, all right, let’s do it, and we decided to shoot our shot.”
Hacker wrote and directed Notice to Quit. Hayward, who admits he’s “a very curious person” by nature, wasn’t able to be especially hands-on as it was being made — filming happened while his basketball career was ongoing, so Hacker handled the day-to-day but sent him dailies and talked through things when problems needed to be solved. Unsurprisingly, Hayward relished the opportunity to get involved by going out to Skywalker Sound and working with Chris Scarabosio, who served as the film’s re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is that it’s not what you’d expect out of a production company started by a recently-retired athlete. It would have been very easy for Hayward to jump into the world of filmmaking by putting his name on a documentary about, say, Butler basketball. Instead, Hayward appreciated that he had the opportunity to have his first film as a producer be something other than, as he describes it, “a typical athlete sports movie.”
“I feel like a lot of people, when athletes make movies, they want to make it all about sports and stuff,” Hayward says. “And while I think we could go down that route, I want to do movies and tell stories that are not just about sports, which, this movie has nothing to do with sports. Telling stories that apply to where me and my friends, me and my boys would go to the movies and enjoy it. Ones where me and my wife would go to the movies and enjoy it. Ones where me and my kids, just all kinds of different genres. I don’t want to be pigeonholed into one thing.”
Whiskey Creek has a few ideas for what is next on the horizon, with Hayward saying there are a couple scripts that he and Hacker are excited about once their focus is no longer on Notice to Quit. He hopes that, over the next decade, the studio continues to churn out interesting stories and people continue to show up to the movie theater to watch them.
And as he enters this chapter in his life, Hayward already sees parallels between his career in professional basketball and the early days of his career in filmmaking, and he plans on bringing the mindset that he used in his old gig to his new one.
“I think that, as in sports, and as in life, I think it applies in filmmaking as well, and it’s been a little bit mirrored in my career: It’s not always going to go exactly the way that you planned,” Hayward says. “But I think if you’re passionate about it and you believe in it, and you work hard and put everything you can into it, usually the results take care of themselves. That’s the way that I approach a lot of things in my life, and I’m approaching this the same way.”
