How Jon Wallace became Nuggets co-general manager while running his family’s cattle operation ...Middle East

Agents and general managers calling the new executive vice president of the Denver Nuggets around Thanksgiving might’ve heard an unusual but unmistakable background noise through the phone: mooing.

Jon Wallace was home for the holiday, which coincided with a brief interlude in Denver’s schedule. It was only a 48-hour trip — a quick stop nestled within a nomadic work itinerary that inspired a recurring game called “Where in the world is Jonathan today?” between his mother and two sisters. They try and they sometimes fail, via group text, to keep up with his travels. But the one place he always returns is to the pastures of his childhood, near Huntsville, Ala. Like most of his visits, he immediately put himself to work.

“Within minutes, he’s outside on the four-wheeler,” his sister, Hannah, says. “Driving around, checking the cows, looking at the pastures, the grasses, everything. That’s just the norm. That’s his routine.”

Wallace, 39, took over alongside his friend Ben Tenzer in June as the bosses of Denver’s front office. Assuming responsibility over a roster with championship ambitions — and by extension, over the remaining years of Nikola Jokic’s prime — they wasted no time making a strong impression, executing a series of trades and signings that have helped launch the Nuggets (21-8) to their best start in franchise history this season. They’re positioned in third place in the Western Conference as they enter a rivalry showdown with the Timberwolves on Christmas (8:30 p.m., ABC/ESPN).

Wallace is the latest to join a recent tradition of sharing between the two franchises. His first NBA job was in Denver under Tim Connelly, who eventually brought Wallace with him to Minnesota when he became president of the Wolves. Three years later, Wallace is back.

“Him and Ben, they’re like family. We couldn’t be more proud,” Connelly told The Denver Post. “It’s just awesome. There’s a tremendous sense of pride watching your buddies do such great things professionally. … Four times a year, I want to beat them, and the other 78, you won’t find a bigger Denver Nuggets home than ours.”

Minnesota may have been Wallace’s most recent home, but the true beginnings of his path to NBA front-office leadership are unorthodox. He was raised on his family cattle farm, purchased by his late grandfather in the 1960s and passed down to his parents.

He spent his childhood daydreaming of a future in basketball while he worked the land and tended to the cattle. Now he finds sanctuary in farm life when he’s not around the sport he loves, coveting his visits and even overseeing cattle operations from afar. His parents, Manuel and Cynthia Wallace, describe him as the farm’s general manager.

“The lineage that his family has left, he’s very proud of that,” said former Nuggets player Jeff Green, who was Wallace’s college roommate and teammate at Georgetown. “That’s life for him, and I don’t think that’ll ever change.”

“We’ve all taken interest in the farm and tried to keep it from a legacy perspective,” Manuel said. “He fell in love with it and developed a lot of good traits from it.”

He was 3 years old when the affection first budded. “Granddaddy Wallace,” as much an idol to Wallace as any NBA star, would drive him around the land and teach him various tasks. It was a hobby farm at the time. Wallace “loved being out there with the cows,” Hannah said, and he often asked his parents to stop by their pond on the drive home from school so that he could feed the ducks.

Both sisters are a few years younger than him. Hannah remembers the early weekend mornings, when chores awaited; the sight of Jon eagerly driving the tractor; the summer days spent picking up rocks and plants together to clean the pastures; the more exciting duties, usually involving the cows. “Days when we worked the cattle,” she said, “that was always fun.” The kids were too young to corral the herd on their own. But they could assist the adults and feel important, at least. “We were just holding the gates open and bringing them what they needed,” she said.

Manuel was a teacher, school administrator and basketball coach by day. In grade school, Jon attended practices with the junior high team his dad coached. Playing against older, larger children cost him a tooth once.

It didn’t quell his enthusiasm. He persistently told his parents they would see him on TV someday as a basketball player. He wanted to make it to the NBA. Unfortunately, he was not gifted with height. Manuel and Cynthia saw the determination. They anticipated the obstacle by formulating an idiosyncratic drill.

As Jon got older, the entire family took evening field trips to the gym at Sparkman High School, where Manuel had been hired as principal. They had the place to themselves. Sisters Hannah and Cierra entertained themselves on the cheerleading mats. Manuel checked the ball to his son and guarded him. Mom stood between them and the basket, wielding a broom.

“That’s how we taught him to arc,” Manuel said. “… We would never let him just shoot. Because we always said, ‘You’re gonna be maybe, at the max, a 6-1 point guard. You have to learn how to get off the shot.’ She held the broom high enough so he would never shoot flat.”

“We saw how hard my dad worked Jonathan,” Hannah said, “and we were like, no, we’ll stick to dance and ballet and piano, and let him have that.”

Wallace burgeoned into a talented shooter, enough to receive recruiting attention from Division I mid-major programs. Instead of taking a scholarship to play basketball, he attended Georgetown and joined John Thompson III’s team as a walk-on. He had visited the campus while in Washington, D.C., for a high school debate competition called “We The People.”

Instantly winning a spot in the starting lineup, Wallace enjoyed a successful four-year college career. In the 2007 NCAA Tournament, he made a game-tying 3-pointer in the last minute of an Elite Eight game, forcing overtime and eventually leading the Hoyas to their only Final Four of this century. His family watched from the sunroom back home.

He also formed valuable professional relationships and profound friendships at Georgetown. Green treasures “the time we had off the court, people-watching, taking classes together.” He went to Alabama with Wallace for a weekend once, experiencing his roommate’s background and feeding a cow for the first time. Years later, Wallace visited and supported Green after he underwent a life-saving open heart surgery. They eventually teamed up in Denver, with Wallace playing a part in recruiting Green to the Nuggets. They still talk every day.

“We always had dreams of when he chose to come to the NBA, him being in a front office, me playing, of being in the same city at some point,” said Green, who’s now a Houston Rocket. “We grew a friendship that can’t be broken.”

A young Tim Connelly was also living in D.C. during Wallace’s college days. Working in the Wizards’ front office at the time, Connelly got to know him by running into him occasionally at games or social events. They shared an off-color sense of humor. The Wizards brought in Wallace to play for their Summer League team after he graduated. He ended up going overseas for a playing career that included stops in Germany, Slovenia and Angola. Connelly kept in touch, asking Wallace for his thoughts on a player he’d encountered from time to time.

In 2016, Wallace returned to Georgetown to get his MBA and work on Thompson’s coaching staff for a couple of years. “Lucrative career paths” emerged on Wall Street, according to Connelly, who tried to keep Wallace from leaving the business of basketball by pitching him on a front office job with the Nuggets. Wallace has described it to The Post as “basically an intern” position.

“I called him, like, ‘We have an entry level job. I don’t know where it’s gonna lead. Certainly not as well paid as some of the options you have in the business world. But I think you’d have a lot of fun,’ ” Connelly told The Post. “I said, ‘The only thing I can promise you is you’re gonna learn a lot and have a lot of fun. Above and beyond that, there’s no promises. I don’t know what your career might look like. But those two things are here, and they’ll be here.’ ”

Wallace embraced the opportunity, building relationships with Denver’s players, including a young Jamal Murray, who held one-on-one training sessions with Wallace in their spare time. When the aspiring executive followed Connelly to Minnesota, his responsibilities increased. He was put in charge of the Wolves’ G League team, preparing him for his jump to the lead executive role back in Denver.

“A lot of the jump he made here was just being more forward-facing with other decision makers, whether it’s prominent agents or having him call different teams about trade ideas,” Connelly said. “Jon did such a great job wearing so many different hats. There are so many driven, really smart people in the profession, but what’s rare is to find that level of drive and passion and a guy who can communicate across different rooms.”

One of those hats is a Stetson. As Wallace ascended in the NBA, he also juggled his second job as a cattle-breeding expert. Back home, the farm became an LLC. Wallace couldn’t be there to manage the daily work, but he still wanted to contribute. He took an interest in the artificial insemination process and started building business relationships with sire companies across the country.

“Jonathan pretty much runs the farm,” Manuel said. “He’s kind of the brain on it. We just implement a lot of the things he wants to pursue. He knows when there’s a need for him to be here for specific things, for instance when we get into the breeding season. He wants certain cows to be bred by certain bulls.”

Specifically, he’s concerned with the safety and success of the birthing process. If a smaller cow is bred with a bull that might produce a large calf, that calf is at risk of being stillborn while also endangering the mother. Matching genetics are essential. It’s Wallace’s area of expertise, in addition to basketball roster construction.

Breeding season is in August, a quiet time on the NBA calendar. At other times of the year when Wallace can’t get home, he attends events like the annual National Western Stock Show in Denver. He texts his parents instructions. He makes cattle transactions.

“Everything is broken up into seasons. He’ll write out the whole outline for what we’re supposed to do,” Cynthia said. “How we’re supposed to rotate the cows. Everything.”

“He called me one day and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got some cows coming in.’ I said OK,” Manuel said. “But he says they’re coming from Missouri. I’m thinking, ‘What?’ And he’s arranged to have cows to be loaded and shipped and brought in. … The cattle business is a small world. It’s who knows who. He knows certain individuals who he can have conversations with, or he can negotiate with, that enable him to enhance our farm. He can get semen from a bull anywhere in the world, per se.”

The Wallaces are well attuned to the fact that Jon’s day job is a public-facing position that requires him to be on the clock at all times. They try to make sure the farm never encroaches on that, even when he’s home. If an agent calls him while he’s driving the tractor or baling hay or feeding a cow, he tries to answer and hand off the task.

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But those odd jobs around the property are his source of serenity, his mental release from basketball. He can be as involved as he wants from several states away; the precious time he gets to spend at home is unparalleled. He’s even invited Nuggets guard and noted cowboy Bruce Brown to visit the farm with him next summer.

“It’s his refuge,” Cynthia said. “When he’s stressed or bogged down with a lot of work, when he breaks away and can get home, you should see him. He’s on the four-wheeler and he’s riding all through the pasture. He’ll get out in the middle of the herd, just stand there and look at them.”

On more than a few occasions, he and Hannah have been home together as adults, helping out with the cows. She followed in Jon’s footsteps by attending Georgetown years after him. He was inescapable there. Hannah remembers a mural in one of the dining halls that included a rendering of him — an exciting but peculiar feeling, to be reminded of her brother’s folk hero status every meal. “Your name precedes you,” she said.

But as they corralled the cattle together, Jon was not an object of aspiration. He was just as determined to live up to a name that preceded him. The task at hand was all that mattered, and the more personal legacy that it represented. One handled the gate, the other ushered the cows through, and no help was required from the older generation of Wallaces.

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