Welcome back to She Pivots. I'm Crystal McCrary maguire.
Welcome to She Pivots, the podcast where we talk with women who dared to pivot out of one career and into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Welcome back Pivoters. This week, I'm joined by the lovely Crystal McCrary. I first met Crystal through my mom, the way I meet
most people in my life. But right away I could tell this woman was impressive, which explains why Sex and City and just like that, based a character off of her. Her superpower is combining fine and fabulous energy with an unparalleled drive and desire to tell stories that uplift and power black culture and black women. Crystal is an accomplished producer, director, lawyer.
Growing up in Detroit, Cristal always knew she wanted to do something bigger, and throughout her life she's always pivoted, leveraging her circumstances to create new iterations for herself, from being a two time New York Times bestselling author to appearing on numerous television networks as a cultural legal and political pundit and who can forget? She also co hosted the view She's Really Done It All? On top of it all, Kristal's life has revolved around basketball for decades now.
Her oldest son, Cole Anthony, now plays professionally for the Orlando Magic, and her other two children, Ella and Leo, also excelled in the sport, taking up nights and weekends for as long as she can remember. After years in the youth basketball scene, she's teamed up with her son Cole to share their experience and connect young basketball players with local basketball resources through.
Their new app up.
Crystal embodies someone who's always allowed herself to steadily explore and pivot, leading with the personal hope you enjoy. Welcome Crystal McCrary maguire. I am so excited to have you on she pivots.
I'm really excited to be here. Emily, Thank you so much for having me.
You have been a long inspiration in the pivoting for me and just in general in the like you bring the kind of energy that I aspire to bring into the world.
Thank you, like with.
Generosity and with kindness and general boss ladiness.
But let's take it back. Let's go to the beginnings. Okay, so you grew up in Detroit, Yes, I did. Did you think you were going to stay in Detroit or did you think you'd ever leave?
Well, I always knew I want it out. I mean, listen, I love Detroit and it's had an incredible resurgence right now. But I just was more so interested in the arts. I was interested in creating and content creation. And I didn't have anyone in my family who'd ever had a quote unquote creative profession. I had a lot of lawyers, few doctors, and I really didn't have that roadmap in
front of me. And I guess as a kid, whatever it was that was incoming on my end, I was informed that there's something in New York City that's pretty cool.
You know.
I didn't know what it was. I'd never been, but I really did always want to move to New York City.
If you hadn't actually been, do you remember, like, was it images?
Was it movies? Like what kind of drew you to the city. Sure, I mean it was certainly images. You know, I will say this not the most glamorous, but certainly gritty. But I do remember as a child seeing the movie Fame Ough.
With Irene Kara Debbie Allen.
Oh my god, that Times Square. I mean, well, first of the dancing up on the taxi.
Of course, of course, in the in the school, the liberal arts school, the just the diversity, you know, the music, the excitement. There was just something that I saw in that film and all of sort of the imagery and
messaging around New York City. And I think I had a cousin that had moved to New York City, and there was something sort of exotic and far off, and you know, but I will say, you know, the part of Detroit that I grew up in, you know, we used to joke it was like a little mini United Nations.
And I grew up in the seventies in downtown Detroit, and so I grew up really and I feel very fortunate to have have grown up in a community that was, you know, just multi cultural, ethnicity, gender, everything.
Despite living in downtown Detroit, Crystal started to travel out to Gross Point to go to school, a wealthy and largely white area just a few miles from downtown.
Yes I did. I was.
I wasn't like bussed in the traditional sense that I now understand busting to mean, but in hindsight, there was that feeling that I imagine a kid, you know, going from a fairly urban community out to the suburbs, you know where like the Fords of you know, their family went to school an industrialist and you know, people whose families were much more financially well off, so to speak,
than my family. And frankly, racism me being other was made aware to me at the schools I went to in gross Point in a way that they had never been made aware to me going to school in downtown Detroit. I became aware that, oh, you're a black girl. I remember going to a party in middle school because I went to the school called gross Point Academy and then
this University of Ligott. They they sound like they are, Yes, I think I can picture it from the Point Academy and I remember going to a party at a classmates class and this is actually, can't make this up. As I'm thinking about this, and I'm thinking about this young lady's name you but we did. We had Muffy's, we had Carrington's. No, we really did. I mean it was remember like the preppy handbook, But I remember going to
a party and she lived in this mansion. You know, I didn't know that people could live in houses like this, right, And I remember a bunch of kids being outside and I don't know what we were doing. I was the only black girl. But then I saw this black boy there that had never seen before.
He wasn't a classmate.
And my host said, oh, you'll like so and so he's like you, and I.
Was like, whatnot?
And then and then I gathered that he was the son of their Jamaican nanny, and they placed us together based on, you know, our skin color. And again I just I had no problem meeting him and talking tom but the fact that I'm the only black girl. He's not even there really as a guest. He's like just there as the nanny's son. And I was made acutely aware of I was different than the rest of the kids at this party.
Things like that.
I mean, it wasn't you know, that wasn't like overtly you know, rude. I don't know how to you know, like, I know it wouldn't happen to my kids in the same way growing up in New York City, but I was. I was definitely made aware of my otherness and how I was raised. You know, we actually we didn't really talk about race, you know, we didn't talk about political issues that that just was not what we talked about. I mean I was raised, I mean I was actually
raised by my maternal grandparents. They raised me as my mother and father because my mother, my biological mother, had me in a very young agd. She basically left me at their door step and there my parents, right. But they were Depression era parents born in the Jim Crow South who their families migrated north to Detroit for economic opportunity during the you know, the Great Migration, as Isabella Wilkerson writes about in the Warmth of other Sons.
I mean, it was very much that.
And so they came through the Depression, and they weren't children of the sixties, so it was just a different way of There wasn't like activism around civil rights in our household. I mean, I really didn't start learning and leaning into that part of who I am really until I was in college.
Did they just not discuss civil rights or was there did you get the sense that you really shouldn't be talking about it?
They just didn't discuss it.
They didn't and you know, again it was this prop you know, I'd say quote unquote properness. Right, my mom she was born and she turns in ninety eight, but she was born in nineteen twenty five.
She's still alive. It's incredible.
My dad was born in nineteen twenty three. He passed away. And also just the age wise, I mean when I was as my parents slash grandparents, they were older parents, and look at this in the in the seventies, you know, they were already married, had a family established. As you know, my mom was a school teacher and then a principal, public school teacher and principal. My dad was worked for Ford Motor Company, and so it was the era of where you didn't change jobs.
Right, there was no pivot, right, there was no pivot. There was no pivot.
You know this that was not that same type of optionality and even awareness of particularly as it relates particularly as it relates to women in my mom. On one hand, she was made money as a school teacher and then a principal, but she wasn't going to do anything. There was I'm going to stop being a teacher and go and start a singing career or start a podcast or there was.
None of that.
Yeah, it just wasn't the vibe for moving through the timeline. So did you always think that you were going to go to law school like so much of your family.
Well, I did really look up to the lawyers in my family, you know, because they were sort of that next generation of getting advanced degrees beyond the undergraduate degree, and there was this upward mobility associated with one that had a law degree. I can't say that I was particularly interested in it other than it to me symbolized stability. There was a certain status to it, you know, particularly as I juxtaposed that to the people that I went to school with. I just looked at that as, oh,
this is an opportunity to sort of excel. I wasn't particularly interested in it. I was an English major in undergrad and would have loved to have gone straight from undergrad into a creative profession. I didn't know what that could have been, what that looked like.
As I said, I.
Didn't have anybody in my family that was in the arts. In my family, like so many families of my generation, were what are you going to do with a quote unquote creative profession? Are you going to get health insurance with that? And so I sort of took that path of least resistance, which is law school. Took that path that had a level of familiarity and went to law school, graduated from law school in nineteen ninety five, and went to a farm in New York City called Paul Weiss.
And I did what many people who wanted to go into the arts. I became a shadow artist as a lawyer, what Julia Cameron writes about in the Artist way so eloquently. And I was an entertainment lawyer. So I wasn't, you know, earning a living as an artist, but I was representing artists. But I got through. You know, I got through. I graduated, I got a job. You've got a guide I got I got a good.
I got a good job.
I passed the bar exam on the second time.
Well, all that matters is that we're barked out right and started practicing law representing all of these really extraordinary entertainers, writers, playwrights, choreographers, authors, visual artists, et cetera.
And really hated every minute of it. Wow, But my one.
Big butt in that is it showed me that they're is a road map for one to have a creative profession. And so from that perspective. It was instructive. That was one of the great things that came out of it. I did learn, you know, just the reasoning that one learns, the writing that one must practice to be a lawyer. And then I also met a lot of really fantastic people.
In fact, one of the men who was an associate at Paul Weiss, a senior associate when I was a young associate, a man by the name of Andrew Hurwitz, left Paul Weiss also like I did, a little after me, but he started this company called the Film Sales Company flash forward many years he actually sold. I went to him to sell my first film that I produced and met him because of being you know, at Paul Weiss together.
So it wasn't totally for nothing.
Absolutely no. I do believe though that every saying so cliche, everything does happen for a reason. Every coincidence is a meaningful coincidence. I do believe in serendipity, and so I can sort of sum up my whole legal journey as being a part of that. That was a huge stepping stone for me on the next path in my journey.
We talked so much on this show about how every pivot is different and the time frame is differently. You know, some happen in an instant, but some happen over time. So what was that timeline for you of starting to write, staying at the firm, and what was the thing that made you feel like, Okay, it's time to leave the firm, I'm ready to go into this full time.
I think I knew that my days were numbered at the firm because I just had it was.
It was.
I was less than passionate. I was barely making it there, just emotionally and mentally, and it's kind of making me depressed is not the right, but just down. It was every day. I just really did not look forward to going to work, and I took enough time to kind of save up some money. I did have a husband that was making some money, but I didn't want to have to rely on him.
Crystal was married to her first husband, Greg Anthony, an NBA player for the New York Knicks at the time.
So I kind of got a plan in order that I said, you know, let me finish working on this book. And I think it was when Rita and I.
Rita Ewing, one of her best friends, who in fact introduced Crystal to Greg and was writing the book with.
Her Rita, and I got a completed draft of the book, found an agent, and I think it was right around that time that I felt ready to make the leap and leave the firm. And so that was sort of like the first pivot. Didn't have a buyer yet, didn't have a publishing house yet, but I felt pretty confident
about it. I felt like, I'm sure you've talked to people who are passionate about a particular profession or a dream or an idea or something, and they bulldoze ahead with it and they don't necessarily have a plan B. I guess my plan B was to stay at the firm. But I knew that I had to cut those ties if I was really going to ever give it a go to have a creative profession.
So Crystal cut ties. She leaned into her book, eventually publishing Home Court Advantage in nineteen ninety nine. The book explored the flip side of the basketball scene, highlighting the stories of the women who lived in the shadows of quote great men. Though she never says it directly, the book was almost certainly a reflection of Cristal's personal life and the other accomplished women around her.
We would joke about it or talk about it all the time, the wives and girlfriends of that New York Nicks team and that era. Like, let me set the stage for you, Like, so pat Riley was the coach, and so you had Patrick Ewing at the time, his wife Rita Ewing, who's a very good friend of mine. She's a lawyer and she's also an entrepreneur. You had herb Williams, his wife had a PhD. You had Lisa Bonner at the time, She's a lawyer, entrepreneur, real estate developer.
I mean, I could just go on and on with that list of really impressive women. Home court advantage was derived out of something called the Morning Pages, which was an exercise in that book The Artist Way, which was written by Julia Cameron, which she recommends for people that want to begin writing. She recommends this thing called the morning Pages, which are you wake up every morning and before you do anything else, write a minimum of three pages in a brain drain style. Don't edit yourself.
Just do that.
Commit to that act of writing and the discipline of it. Don't edit yourself, and just see what you get after a few months of doing that and I did that. You know, in hindsight, I'm proud that I actually had the discipline to do it. But I got up every morning like an hour before. This was while I was actually still at Paul Weiss and did that. And that was the beginnings of Home Court Advantage. And I said, Rita, I was like, I've been doing this.
This came up.
It was originally actually called Seasonal Ties because it was about the season ties, you know, And she said, because you and I would laugh so much about the various stories being these wives. And we talked about it and thought it would be really fun to write it together. And we did and it became Home Court Advantage, and we were fortunate enough to, you know, get the first book published and it was a New York Times bestseller, and many efforts to.
Make it into a movie a series.
I think I was just telling somebody the other days and I think I made more money from optioning that book than I did for my actual advance.
Even after Crystal's divorced from Greg Anthony, basketball was ever present in her life because of her children. When we come back, Crystal talks about balancing the demands of her own life with her kids, extremely active youth basketball career. Now back to the show. You have three children who
are very involved in basketball. In particular, you are a very present parent, and you've said that you started in national championships with your oldest when he was as young as fourth grade, and even younger once you got to the third child.
Yes, but that takes time. That takes time, and that takes.
Brain power and bandwidth and time in your It takes space in your life and in your thinking. How did you navigate, Like I don't think there is such a thing as work life balance, but how did you navigate it?
Being so present?
You know, it's been a real journey. I mean, what is it you hear you can have everything, just not at the same time. And then the great Jackie Oh quote of I'm only as happy as my least happy child, and so there's kind of like a mashup of those that I think that every working mom tries to walk in balance of that. And I have tried to be as present as I could possibly be, but I know that a lot of things have fallen through the cracks.
And your kids are approximately ten years apart, like the two and then right.
The younger, right, right, So Yeah, Leo's eleven, and Ella is twenty one and Cole is twenty three. So I have like the ten year age difference between my youngest and my middle and then the twelve year age difference between my youngest and my eldest. So in any event, yes, of course stuff falls through the cracks. You know. Of course I have not always given the best advice, but I guess what I have sort of gotten to the point of, you can always be doing more, but you can always be doing less.
Also, what do you mean by that?
I've struck a balance with myself and have decided to be a little easier on me than these last several years. I've decided to show myself some grace and do what I can do, you know, because now I like, I have three kids in three different states, at three very different stages of their lives. You know, I have a fifth grader who that's the hands on, taking to basketball practices, taking to birthday parties, taking to mommy and me activities,
taking a Broadway. But then I have a college student who's a junior in college, who there's parent weekends, there's you know, she wants me to be there, ready to edit. She writes for the Harvard Crimson. She wants me to be there to edit something for her, her or you know, there's a breakup or something to talk about that, you know, just there to be present in in that way. But there's never just enough time. Like there's parents weekend. I'm sorry, I can't come up for the whole weekend. I can
come up for one night. Well, mom, that's not enough. Why you know things like that, My you know, eldest who's a professional basketball player in place with the Orlando Magic. And you know, there's a part of me that, gosh, I wish I wish I could live down in Orlando.
Well maybe not.
I wish I could be at every game home and away, but I can't. And he has, you know, like he's like other parents are down here, other parents, you know, but other parents have packed up and moved. All my teammates parents they packed up and moved to Florida, and our neighbors with you know, like.
I have things to do here.
It's like, I love you, baby, but I have a job, and you have a little brother who's here. I mean, you know, so and I realized that this is a very fortunate, blessed situation I am describing, But as you're living and going through it as a parent, as a working parent, you do feel that, well, at least I feel that I'm not there for everything, and I may have bouts of guilt about that from time to time, but I do do a.
Lot, and she does.
Crystal continued to evolve her creative career, eventually moving into film. But do you feel like it was a pivot into documentary films? Was that another like big moment for you?
Before I did a documentary film, I actually produced a scripted film that I was asked to come on board. Its called Dirty Laundry. It was such a fun film and it was like became a festival. Darling did it independently with a group of folks. It was a gay love story that had this incredible cast.
Gildon Davis seemed to have it all perfectly. Fate is about to crash the party.
I'm looking for mister Davis.
I'm mister Davis. Who are you, Gabriel your son?
Oh?
This is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
It's Dirty Laundry.
And so that was my first foray actually into filmmaking.
Soon after producing Dirty Laundry, Crystal was asked to produce regularly Viacom while working on documentary style shows for BT and MTV.
She fell in love with the format.
So there were a few shows I did there, Leading Women, Leading Men, where we profiled men and women of color who've impacted the country socially, politically, culturally, artistically. And so I was doing that, which coincided with Cole playing this youth basketball as like a third grader, fourth grader, and I was also the team mom. All the kids would
always come to our house. I was always you know, carpooling, doing all that stuff, and really got to know these kids' close teammates that were from an array of socioeconomic backgrounds that otherwise Cole would have not gotten to know kids like that, being you know, frankly being raised in Manhattan. Again we call it a melting pot, but let's be honest, Manhattan it's you know, economically prohibitive for many, and you
don't get much diversity in that. And so I was struck by how different all of these young men, all these boys, how their backgrounds were. But they were brothers, they were teammates, and I just felt like there was something there in their stories.
Leveraging her background in documentary style film, Crystal knew this was her moment to bring the personal and the professional together.
And I said, I'd love to put a camera on these boys and really kind of highlight their friendship also to show that black boys aren't to show their common goal of wanting to win a national championship, and that became little Ballers. There were some kids that their families were immigrants from Jamaica. There was a boy on the
team whose family was homeless. There was a boy on the team whose family lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the mom had him playing so he could get away from his community, which was really filled with a lot of gang violence. And I looked at this also as I'd love to make a documentary that shows the tells the story of these boys before the dream has died, that you're not actually going to go to the NBA, and that everybody has a dream and let's capture them in this last age of innocence.
When you think of AAU, I think of everybody on the team just having the same goal, and that's to get a college scholarship and then playing in the NBA. You know that was everybody's dream. Everybody wanted to make it.
Everybody has dreams, everybody has a talent. If you're a basketball player, it's nothing to be the best in New York. You want to be one of the best players in the country. If you ain't trying to be the best player, that you possibly do something else. That's in anything. If there's a muscle seed, a doubt, you might as well quit. If you ain't trying to be the best, then what are you doing it for.
How is it that basketball became this cultural cathedral in the African American community. It's almost like the African tribe in that you can have individual expression within the context of a try and the same thing with basketball. You're part of a team, the past and all that, but you could also create. You could also be individual as well.
When that was my first time directing a documentary and again did that independently, I call it real of filmmaking. Forged ahead and ended up with my one of my producing partners who was representing her name's Tammy Brooks. She was representing Amri Stotdomeier at the time, who was playing for the Knicks.
Brought him on.
He loved the story, brought him on, he became an executive producer. He was in the film that was a pivot, you know, when it was a pivot based on my life, my kids' lives.
Crystal is continuing to work at the intersection of the personal and professional with her latest venture with her son Cole for the app Game Up. So tell us about this new venture and new relationship with your son, a business partnership.
Yeah, so, you know, speaking of like going full circle with your kid. You know, Cole likes me again after high school. He's finally listening to me again. His favorite thing that he said to me, you know, like his first two seasons in the NBA, when I tried to give him some advices. You know, Mom, listen, I'm a grown ass man.
I don't need you. I'm paying my own bills. You tell me this, that and the other, you don't you know.
I finally realized I cannot give him any basketball advice because he knows more and is one pinky than I will ever know. But what has been happening for ten plus years is that I have been that basketball parent that people would come to and say, can you make a recommendation for a team for my kid? Can you make a recommendation for a developmental program, for a trainer, for a tournament, for a camp, for this, that, and
that and the other. And I had been spending hours and hours on calls, on emails, on text messages, sharing knowledge with parents who really have just been trying to navigate this youth's basketball landscape that's getting bigger and bigger, that's getting more and more complicated, that's gotten more and more expensive. And I really started aggregating all of this information in the youth basketball landscape and people would ask
whole the same thing, but from a player perspective. And I started talking talking to him about this idea, and I said, why don't we make sort of a one stop shop platform where we can defragment this information, make it sort of like the Angie's List for you know, youth basketball. And that began the beginning of making Game Up.
Navigating youth sports can be tough for parents. There's so many options out there. But there's a new sports at that's changing the basketball landscape. It's called Game Up. New York native and NBA point guard Cole Anthony's mom, Krystin McCrary maguire, teamed up to create a one stop shop to help parents out and connect their kid with the best basketball team and trainer based on their age, goals, and location. Join me now to speak more about Game
Up is co founder Krystal mccrairy McGuire. She's also a New York Times bestselling author and producer, just to name a few. Good morning, Chrystal, thanks for joining us.
With the Wrens Frinds, I with the team Real in Jersey and then high school FOPSA Cardinals I played with was that six to seven different AU programs levels of youth basketball.
And went through all of these great programs that developed him at every stage.
And that is really what parents are looking for.
Most parents that are trying to find a program for their kid, it's not like they enter into it saying, I have this elite kid that's, you know, gonna go D one or go to the NBA.
That may be the ultimate dream.
But they're really looking trying to figure out how to navigate this system.
And Cole as a as my.
Son, as a resource and as somebody who truly lived it as a player, was the perfect person.
Plus we get along pretty.
Well tolerator, and so we've been working on it together, we hired you know, we seeded it ourselves again, just forging ahead, seated ourselves, that's right. Got a chief app designer and coders computer software engineers, got the graphics UXUI designers, got the chief strategy officer, chief operating officer, and built this and we launched in the Tri State area and now in Q one, twenty twenty four, we are expanding across the US.
Is there something that holistically not just on little ballers, but is there something that at the time you feel like you felt like was a real low point negative, like you weren't really sure you're gonna get out of it, and then now in retrospect, you see it as having really launched the next step for you.
I actually had an experience where it wasn't that it was what was rather male dominated, but I had an experience with somebody under the Viacom umbrella when I was working on the shows there that I was executive producing and creating. There was a very senior executive there that will I will never forget it, Like I think I was talking to him sort of like one of those career advice kind of talks, and I will never forget again. You remember those things that light a fire under you.
But I remember he said to me, you know, Crystal, this was before I had done Little Ballers, and he said, listen, if you just keep reaching, you know, for that low hanging fruit, he called it low hanging fruit. He said, if you keep reaching for that low hanging fruit, there's something there for you in that. See where that gets you. And I just remember being so offended low hanging fruit, Like, what the heck does that mean?
Yeah? What are you?
Are you trying to give me a ceiling where I'm just beginning.
But it doesn't lights a fire. It lights a fire.
And you know, so that was that was a period that that did inspire me, and it was it was you know, there were so many other parts of that, but there was certainly that.
Oh I'm going to show you, you know, just you wait, okay, one last question. What everybody wants to know, what is it like to have a sex and the city character based on you?
Well, listen, first of all, the fact that the character quote unquote inspired by me is played by the you know, pretty amazing Nicole Ari Parker. I'm like, okay, I'm just you've you've flattered me beyond you know, it's it's kind of you know, it's kind of cool.
Totally, it's kind of cool.
I mean Susan fails Hill, who's a writer there and a very good friend of mine, you know.
She and then there was Kelly Goff who was there.
She's she's no longer with the show, but they somehow were inspired by some aspect of my life. I think there are many inspirations for ltw's character, but I'm just, you know, really flattered. Did you know did they tell you or you just watched it in your thought, oh, we seem similar. I started getting rumblings maybe four or five months before the first season came out, and I was like what. I was like, that was like that
just sounds crazy. I had that one girlfriend, you know, who's like the gossip the town crier, and she was like, girl, there's a character Texas City three Kids documentary, Viille mak her husband's running for mayor because at the time, my husband Ray was running for mayor, and like, that certainly
sounds like you. And then it started picking up momentum, and you know, look, I've been in sort of the writer room places and they're like this character is like so and so this is sort of think of, sort of, so I get how that can happen. I think that there again, I think that there are many people that sort of you know, are part of the inspiration. But you know, if you want to say it's me, I'll take the good part of it for sure.
Well, thank you so much, Krystal for coming to she Pivots.
Thank you so much for having me. It was a joy and an honor.
As always, thank you, You're the best. Crystal still lives in New York City. Her weekend's still filled with lots of basketball and now growing game up to be available to youth basketball players across the country. To learn more about Crystal, follow her on Instagram at Krystal McCrary Talk to.
You next week. Thanks for listening to this episode of she Pivots.
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