When Thomas Walkup’s European teammates find out he’s from Texas, they have one of two reactions. If they speak English well, they barrage him with questions: Did you grow up on a farm? Did you ride a horse to school? Do people really wear cowboy boots?
If they don’t speak much English, they simply shape their hands into finger guns and fire. “I disappoint them when I tell them it’s actually pretty normal in Texas,” Walkup said. “Everyone is really nice. People are super welcoming. It’s not the Wild West anymore.”
Walkup understands what it’s like to have a skewed perception of other places. Before he began his basketball career in Europe, he’d left the United States only once—to visit an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic. When he accepted his first European offer with a team in the German Bundesliga, in 2017, he asked his mom: “Is anybody gonna speak English, or am I not going to talk to anyone for the next ten months?”
To his delight, Walkup discovered not only an abundance of English speakers but also a basketball culture that transcended geographic and cultural barriers and helped make Europe a second home for him. The Houston-area native and former Stephen F. Austin State University star guard is now such a fixture overseas that last year he became a naturalized Greek citizen. This summer he’s representing Greece at the Paris Games and, though the team suffered close losses in its first two games, he still has an outside chance to bring the first basketball medal back to the birthplace of the Olympics.
“I didn’t see any of this happening,” Walkup said on a video call from France a few days before riding down the Seine with his Greek teammates in the ppening ceremony. “When I was in my driveway as a kid imagining myself playing pro basketball, it was like: ‘Walkup passes to LeBron James, who shoots and scores!’ I wasn’t thinking about holding up the EuroLeague Best Defender trophy. But if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Walkup was the third of four brothers, and his early life centered on sports. The boys would play baseball in their cul-de-sac, football in the yard, and basketball in the driveway. Although football is king in Walkup’s hometown of Pasadena, as it is throughout Texas, Walkup always felt at home on the hardwood.
“It sounds a little cliché,” he said, “but when you step out on the basketball court, everything else in the whole world goes away. It’s just you and the hoop. You don’t even see the other guys out there sometimes. After a long day of school, you’re itching to go play basketball. For those two hours, basketball is the only thing in the world. And then life resumes. I felt that way as a child, and I still feel the exact same way today.”
Growing up, his main goal was not to make it to the NBA but to play in the NCAA tournament. His family were diehard Texas A&M fans, and his brother Nathan was a forward for the Aggies from 2007 to 2011. As a boy, Walkup had no trouble imagining he’d achieve his dreams: His youth basketball team didn’t lose in their local league from the time he was five years old to when he was nine. Then they went to an out-of-town AAU tournament and lost by more than seventy points in the first round. “That was the first time I realized I’d grown up in a little bit of a bubble,” he said. “And the bubble burst.”
Walkup initially struggled to establish himself on the basketball team at Deer Park High School after knee injuries sidelined him during his freshman and sophomore years. He became the starting point guard as a junior and earned all-district honors, but he still wasn’t receiving scholarship offers to play in college. That summer, while visiting Nathan, who was playing at A&M, Walkup was asked to meet with then-coach Mark Turgeon. Arriving in the coach’s office, Walkup thought he was about to receive his first offer. And he did: Turgeon said he’d be glad to have Walkup as a walk-on.
“I know he didn’t mean it as a disrespect,” Walkup said, “but that’s how I took it. It really fueled me.” His senior year, he averaged 25.9 points and 8.9 rebounds—before a fracture in his foot again forced him off the court. That injury ultimately became infected and required multiple surgeries. He accepted his only offer, to play for the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks in Nacogdoches, but he had to take a redshirt year as he recovered. As his friends and teammates began on their college careers, Walkup was stuck at home in Pasadena, his scholarship at risk of being revoked. “It wasn’t the happiest of times,” he said.
The next season, as a redshirt freshman, Walkup became a reliable sixth man in the Lumberjacks’ rotation. The team won 27 games—a school record—but SFA missed the NCAA tournament. That offseason, they hired a new head coach: Brad Underwood.
“Tom presented a few challenges positionally,” Underwood said in a recent interview. “He looked like an undersized power forward who didn’t shoot the ball very well. We weren’t sure what positions he could guard. He had had some issues with injuries, and it wasn’t clear how quick he was. But then you’d watch him and he somehow always made the right play—the winning play. He eventually became our primary ball handler. He was tough and gritty and he proved all my initial fears to be foolish.”
As a sophomore, Walkup averaged 13.1 points and 5.3 rebounds and helped the number twelve seed Lumberjacks upset number five seed Virginia Commonwealth University in the 2014 NCAA tournament. He was named the Southland Conference Player of the Year the next two seasons before culminating his college career with one of the most memorable upsets in March Madness history. In 2016 the Lumberjacks were the number fourteen seed facing off against Final Four hopeful West Virginia. Walkup scored 33 points—and shot nineteen-for-twenty from the free-throw line—in the 70–56 upset. He became an overnight sensation in part because his beard matched the Lumberjacks’ mascot almost perfectly.
“Tom wasn’t just the best player on the floor that night, he was literally a Lumberjack—right down to his look,” Underwood said. “The greatest players have a way of showing up in the biggest moments, and that’s what he did. He deserved all the attention he got. If anything, it was long overdue.”
When Walkup thinks of that game, he still gets chills. He remembers returning to Nacogdoches and feeling as though the entire town showed up to welcome the team home. “I could have achieved the same thing at a big school, but it wouldn’t have meant the same thing,” he said. “We were this tiny school from this small town in East Texas. We had the same fans in the stands every game. They felt like our family. We got them their first NCAA tournament win and had so many special memories along the way. It wasn’t the way I imagined it growing up, but it worked out perfectly.”
As he would soon discover, the same story would be true of his professional career.
Walkup went undrafted in 2016 and spent his only NBA season in what was then called the D League, as a member of the Windy City Bulls. Rather than returning and taking another shot at the league, he decided to sign with MHP Riesen Ludwigsburg in the German Bundesliga. After one season, it was clear that his hard-nosed style of play was better suited to European basketball. He was named to the All-German BBL First Team.
“When I was younger, I never thought I would be a defensive stopper,” he said. “But that’s where I found my fit and my best role here. I even found it fun to be able to beat people up and push people around a little bit here and there. You have to do whatever it takes to keep crawling and climbing to whatever the highest level of hoops is for you.”
He spent the next three seasons in Lithuania, where he won the league’s defensive player of the year award in 2019—and where he barely survived the Baltic winters. One year, he remembered it snowed just about every day between October and April. When he was homesick, he’d check his weather app and see that it was 85 degrees in Houston. In 2021 he was offered a three-year deal with Athens-based club Olympiacos, one of the traditional powers of European basketball.
In Athens he found not only the sunshine he craved but also the success. In three seasons with Olympiacos, he has started every game and played in three consecutive EuroLeague Final Fours, the culmination of a regional competition between the top club teams from domestic leagues across the continent. In 2023 he led the EuroLeague in steals, and in 2024 he was named its best defender. But his biggest honor was a much smaller prize: a passport.
In 2023, Walkup’s agent, Alex Saratsis—who also represents two-time NBA most valuable player Giannis Antetokounmpo—helped arrange for Walkup to receive Greek citizenship, paving the way for him to join the national team. The kid from Houston and Antetokounmpo, who has been recovering from a calf injury, have bonded over their basketball journeys, which have run on parallel tracks but in opposite directions.
In Greece’s group games in Paris, Giannis has carried the country’s hopes on his back, with 61 points and 16 rebounds in two close losses to Spain and Canada. Walkup has struggled to find his shot but has contributed four assists per game, and one of his three steals against Canada kept Greece in the game until the final minute. On Friday, Walkup and his newfound countrymen will face an elimination game against Australia.
“I tell my players about Tom’s story all the time,” Underwood said. “He could probably get a spot in the NBA now if he wanted to. A lot of teams are looking for veteran guards like him. But he’s found a great life through basketball outside of the league. He’s one of the best players on one of the best teams in EuroLeague. He’s an Olympian. The best basketball players in the world are all in one place right now, and Tom is there. He deserves to be.”
For Walkup, Greece has become more than just a place to make his name—and his living—in basketball. “I’m still an all-American boy,” he said, “but my heart is split in half now. Greece has provided me with so many opportunities, like going to the Olympics. One day I’ll be able to tell my grandkids about this. It’s part of my legacy.”
But of course he still misses his family in Texas. And mom’s mac and cheese. And Whataburger. Last summer, he flew back to Houston from Europe on a Sunday. After a long travel day, he wanted to crash into the couch but instead found a full house. The grill was hot, the pool was shimmering, and his family members were all around to welcome him back—not just to his house but also to his home.
