Q&A: Kevin Durant on NBA Draft Day

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TIME: You took an acting class in college—do you have any interest in that?

Kevin Durant: Not at all. I'm not going Hollywood. The point of the class was to be goofy. My teammate was in it with me, and that's all we did. We made everyone laugh. We got a lot of participation points from that, and we got an A.

TIME: Did you take any other classes that interested you?

Kevin Durant: I took an anthropology class—how people live in different countries that I never heard of before I got in the class. The rituals of how they found food were just amazing to me. It is easy for us to just go to the store and buy food. They had to catch it, cook it, make sure it's not poisoned—all that different type of stuff. It was crazy.

TIME: Did you really struggle with the decision to turn pro after just a year at Texas?

Kevin Durant: I thought about it a lot, because I love my family in Texas. It was fun playing with them last year. And it was a great experience going through college as a person—meeting new people, seeing new ethnic backgrounds, things like that. But this has been my dream for a long, long time. Now that I have this opportunity, I have to take it.

TIME: At what moment were you convinced that you had to turn pro?

Kevin Durant: I would say right after I won the Wooden award (for being the nation's top college player), it hit me. I did as much as I could do in college individually. As a team, we could have went to the national championship. But making a decision like that, you have to be selfish a little bit.

TIME: Bob Knight called the NBA's rule prohibiting high school players from going straight to the NBA "the worst thing that's happened to college basketball since I've been coaching," as it floods schools with players that intend to stay for just a year. Do you agree with him?

Kevin Durant: I didn't know that I was going to go for a year. Let's get that out of the way first. If a kid comes out and says, "I'm going to be here for a year," I think it does hurt. It will hurt him in the classroom. It will hurt the team as well, because he will just be focusing on going to the NBA.

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