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Giants edge rusher Kayvon Thibodeaux (r.), now a minority owner of the New York Warriors USA Masters T10 cricket team, shakes hands with the team’s majority owner, Muhammad Kamran Awan, at an event in Dallas, Texas, in early May. (Ilesh Patel)
Kayvon Thibodeaux says he has always thought outside the box.
He attributes the origin of his curiosity to his father Angelo’s creativity and unorthodox mindset in the construction business growing up in South Central Los Angeles.
“I watched him build houses, I watched him fix things, and I think for him there was an understanding that nothing is actually broken,” Thibodeaux, 22, the Giants’ pass rusher, told the Daily News on the phone Thursday. “There’s a way to fix it.”
The story of how Thibodeaux became a minority owner and equity partner in a professional, New York-based cricket team, the New York Warriors, is not about fixing something that’s off.
But Friday’s launch of Thibodeaux’s involvement in this new, six-team, USA Masters T10 cricket league is about the Giants defender gravitating towards opportunity, approaching life a bit differently than the next guy and approving of a slight fix, let’s call it, to a world-famous game:
Shortening the play time of cricket matches from five days to 90 minutes.
“It’s more home runs, more entertainment, faster and shorter games, with a new format that’s possibly being placed in the Olympics in the next two years,” said Cervando Tejeda, founder of Athletes Sports Management Inc. and a minority owner of the USA Masters T10 league.
Six seasons of popular and financial success in Abu Dhabi with this new format laid the groundwork for worldwide expansion. The U.S. league will hold its inaugural draft in the second week of July and launch its first season in mid-August. It will be televised internationally, and the plan is to add two more teams in 2024.
The first six teams will represent New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, North Carolina (Morrisville), Los Angeles and Houston. Games will be played at stadiums in Florida, North Carolina and Houston. And that’s where Thibodeaux comes in.
“We want to cover the entire USA. That’s why we want to involve USA athletes,” said Ritesh Patel, majority owner of the U.S. T10 league alongside billionaire founder Shaji Ul Mulk. “So we started discussing this with Kayvon, and we see it: He’s one of the best in the NFL but he has the best business brain, has lots of good business ideas. He can take this to a different level. So we brought him on as an equity partner.”
Thibodeaux attended a Dallas T10 launch event in early May and spoke with Patel and New York Warriors majority owner Muhammad Kamran Awan. And Patel said Thibodeaux “blew me away” with what he had envisioned, from educating people about cricket, to doing cricket commentary, to other ideas that would promote growth.
“One big part of my role is obviously the money but, two, it’s storytelling,” Thibodeaux said. “Being an athlete in this new world of media, I understand how storytelling works in the new age, I understand how to connect with people, and marketing is something I majored in. So that’s definitely how I’m going to help market my team and also the league itself.”
The Giants and NFL football are still number one for Thibodeaux, but Tejeda said it’s realistic that when he has the time, Thibodeaux will make himself more “present” around this modern cricket league and team.
“But I think what he’s doing right now coming in as an owner of a team is just setting the standard for other athletes to say look, you don’t just have to own an NFL team or soccer team or NBA team,” Tejeda said. “There’s other sports that are coming into the States that you guys can get ownership of.”
Thibodeaux has never played cricket and only has watched matches online so far. He likes the fast new format, though, and the fact it’s not difficult for the average person to pick up and try.
“It’s about opportunity,” Thibodeaux said. “The tough thing about football, for example, is it has to be orchestrated to be really played. With cricket, I love it because it creates an opportunity for a lot of people to be aware of it and start to play it. You don’t really need that much. It’s similar to baseball in a sense where you really just need a ball and a paddle.”
Thibodeaux really does seem to be one of a kind, just as he advertised himself before the Giants picked him No. 5 overall in the 2022 NFL Draft. Just this offseason, he launched a TikTok cooking series called “KT’s Finger-Lickin’ Kitchen.”
“Dinner gets expensive,” he said at Wednesday’s OTA practice. “I’m going to start eating at home, going to the grocery store.”
Thibodeaux also revealed “I want to be an analyst” just like the sportswriters who cover him in the NFL, to see and evaluate “what the next moves are for teams.” He started as a rookie by doing analysis for FOX Sports of last year’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles.
On top of that, his social media is covered with examples of appearances, charity work, paid sponsorships and even an inaugural, free, youth football and cheer camp on June 24 in L.A.
Of course, that’s where Angelo Kayvon Thibodeaux Jr. grew up. (That’s right: his real first name is Angelo, and he is technically a junior.)
The man is full of surprises.
Some of that is about learning from his father’s approach. But a lot of it is intrinsic to Thibodeaux’s own curiosities and mindset. In his second year playing a professional sport, he is already part owner of a team in another, and it’s possible he won’t stop there.
“Ownership is the goal in anything, whether it’s sports, entertainment, business,” Thibodeaux said. “Definitely in this league and other leagues, I would love to continue that mindset of getting equity and becoming an owner.”
He believes in the “vision” of the T10 cricket format that took off in Abu Dhabi. He said there is an unmistakable “power” to the “great ambassadors” and people behind this USA initiative.
And he is attracted to pioneering this sport in the U.S., “being in the first wave of the league coming to America” with a game people know of but not about.
“Even as a kid I always thought of that next thing,” Thibodeaux said. “You start to see all these billionaires and people who have done well for themselves, and it always stemmed from thinking outside the box. I feel like we all kind of live in a simulation, and once you start to break that code of what’s normal and start to create that for yourself, you’ll be able to accomplish your dreams.”
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