Keldon Johnson of the San Antonio Spurs, seen on December 29, 2025, in San Antonio, has helped the Spurs enjoy success this season with his energy. Kenneth Richmond Getty Images
SAN ANTONIO -- Deep in the bowels of an NBA arena, the San Antonio Spurs have gathered around a boom box with a bubbling energy. Their emotional leader has his hands in the air, a sign that everything is going to be OK.
“It’s a party in the U.S.A.!” wing Keldon Johnson, a seventh-year pro, screams as his teammates throw up their hands in unison.
Then the Spurs run out to the floor, win another game, then run back to the locker room in jubilation. The team is full of stars, from Victor Wembanyama to De’Aaron Fox to Dylan Harper. But nobody has a bigger presence in the locker room than Johnson. It’s easy to know when he’s there. Just listen for Mariah Carey or Vanessa Carlton.
“You know I’d walk a thousand miles if I could just see you tonight,” you can hear Johnson belting from the showers.
Johnson doesn’t listen to pop anthems all the time. Just like his teammates, he listens to plenty of rap and country. But he taps into a deeper sense of self when he hears the opening piano riff from Carlton’s song “A Thousand Miles,” from 2002. He becomes carefree when Miley Cyrus yells, “Yeah,” in “Party in the U.S.A.,” from 2009.
“As soon as you put it on, I know every lyric,” Johnson said*.* “I feel like you go back to your childhood.”
Johnson has a rotating playlist, but the mainstays are “Party in the U.S.A.,” “A Thousand Miles” and “Rather Be” by Clean Bandit. There’s no place he’d rather be than San Antonio, so it has to stay in the queue.
“I thought he was messing around, trolling and being funny,” Carter Bryant, a rookie wing, said. “But it turned into a thing. Every game, home and away, don’t matter.”
Johnson delights in playing the role of lovable buffoon in the locker room, but his goofiness has purpose. His teammates often roll their eyes when talking about his antics with a brotherly reverence. Johnson makes it impossible for the locker room to be overly tense on down nights, which have become increasingly rare this season. The Spurs are in second place in the NBA’s Western Conference.
“He’s always joking around, and he’s never really too, too serious,” a teammate, Devin Vassell, said. “He’s always trying to have a light mood.”
His energy is a big reason this franchise has gone from losing to winning so quickly. Of course, drafting Wembanyama in 2023 helped also. The team’s talent is deep and versatile, but its success has been a product of the energy it brings every night. Johnson and his giant speaker have been at the center of that.
“It’s ultimately team bonding,” Johnson said. “We’re all singing, and when we get ready for the game, we’re all hyped out. It don’t matter how it looks or how people feel about it. It’s what gets us going.”
Every night, now, the Spurs are coming out to Johnson’s playlist. If he’s not on the auxiliary cable, they have failed the first step of their game plan.
“It’s one of those things where it’s almost like a tradition now,” Bryant said. “It’s getting to the point where everybody knows the lyrics, so you know it’s go time when you hear those songs.”
Bryant, 20, is younger than “A Thousand Miles,” and was 3 when “Party in the U.S.A.” came out, so this has been a learning experience for him. It’s a given that rookies will make mistakes. But there’s one place he wanted to make sure he didn’t screw up.
“I knew ‘A Thousand Miles’ pretty well beforehand,” he said. “But ‘Party in the U.S.A.,’ I listened to a few times on my own to make sure I’m not out there sounding crazy.”
That’s music to Johnson’s ears, who has found joy in his teammates’ growth. He gets hyped when someone else makes a play. He screams louder for his teammates than he does when he hits his own shots or grabs his own rebounds.
A talented team needs players whose selflessness is not just a necessity but a preference. A player who wants his teammates to be better and will go out of his way to make it happen is a player who sets the culture.
He finds little ways to bring his personality into the locker room, from pondering a llama purchase for his farm to debating who is the strongest player on the team, hoping his teammates will reflect the energy back at him. It has been working.
“It’s easy to put on rap music and try to get everybody to enjoy it,” Johnson said. “But to switch it up and get the reaction, I feel like it really made us a closer group.”
Forward Harrison Barnes said: “Whatever the disposition of the team is, you can have fun and believe in the process of that. The biggest thing is, you don’t want to be a front-runner. If we had that mentality of we want to have fun, then you stick with that, regardless of what’s going on.”
Players are even keeping track of their won-lost record with each song, making sure they get a win next time if they happen to lose with “Party in the U.S.A.”
“We got a lot of big personalities, and we got a face of the franchise,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said, “but that guy’s the heart and soul of the team.”
The Spurs started the season hoping to make the playoffs. An NBA championship is the ultimate goal for Keldon Johnson. He has been clear for some time that he wants to bring the trophy back to San Antonio.
But in the meantime, he just hopes he can sing a duet with Carlton someday.
“Why not? I feel like that’ll be great,” he said. “I love her music.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
New York Times