Royce White’s long, strange road from progressive darling to MAGA warrior and potential US Senator

The former Iowa State basketball star will face off in November against Amy Klobuchar for her Senate seat. Here's a deeper look at his hard right turn

There’s a quote, commonly attributed to Vladimir Lenin, that has been frequently referenced over the better part of the past two months.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Even by the standard of presidential election years, 2024 has been eventful. In that perpetually fraught, seldom boring American political landscape, another interesting development emerged early last week, one with an impossible-to-ignore tie to college basketball.

Last Tuesday, former Iowa State basketball star Royce White won the Republican Senate primary in Minnesota and advanced to a general election matchup with longtime incumbent Amy Klobuchar. If he shocks many and wins, he’ll become one of the 150 or so most powerful people in the United States government.

A former college sports star earning a high-ranking government position wouldn’t be a completely novel concept. Gerald Ford rose all the way to the presidency. Bill Bradley and Jim Bunning were Senate stalwarts. Jim Jordan, in defiance of all reason and humanity, is a Congressman. Even in this election cycle, Colin Allred and Steve Garvey, like White, have seen their Senate aspirations survive to the general election.

Among that group, though, White’s ascent stands out for its meandering and unpredictable nature. A decade ago, he was a progressive-minded face and voice of mental health awareness in American sports. Just four years ago, he was one of the most visible figures marching in the streets after the murder of George Floyd in White’s hometown of Minneapolis.

Now, he’s a conspiracy-minded public ally of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones who is running to the right of much of the Republican Party on a number of key issues.

How, exactly, did he get here?

Royce White: the basketball star and mental health champion

The latest twist in White’s story is unfolding where it all began for him.

The Minnesota native showed immense athletic promise from an early age. He led two different high schools to state basketball championships and as a senior in 2009 at Hopkins High School, he was named Minnesota Mr. Basketball.

A top-30 national recruit, White originally stayed home to play for Tubby Smith at Minnesota, but a shoplifting incident and an alleged on-campus theft kept him off the court his freshman season before he left the university in Feb. 2010. 

He ended up at Iowa State, where he would formally introduce himself to most basketball fans nationally. In what would be his lone season with the Cyclones in 2011-12, he was a first-team all-Big 12 selection while leading his squad in the five major statistical categories – points, rebounds, blocks, steals and assists, making him the only player in the country to do so.

Behind White, Iowa State made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in seven years and won more than 20 games in a season for the first time in 11 years. The success the Cyclones enjoyed under coach Fred Hoiberg and still enjoy today can be tied back, at least in some part, to White and his contributions. He, just as much as Hoiberg, got the ball rolling for what has been one of the best teams in the sport’s best conference for more than a decade.

For all the attention his college heroics gave him, White was about to become a lot more famous once he left Ames.

White suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, defined by the National Institute of Mental Health as a condition in which people "go through the day filled with exaggerated worry and tension, even though there is little or nothing to provoke it. They anticipate disaster and are overly concerned about health issues, money, family problems or difficulties at work. Sometimes just the thought of getting through the day produces anxiety." 

Among those anxieties, White most famously feared flying, something he had been open about during his time at Iowa State and in the leadup to the 2012 NBA Draft. Still, even when armed with that knowledge, the Houston Rockets selected him with the No. 16 overall pick, 19 spots ahead of future Golden State Warriors star and likely Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Draymond Green.

From there, the conversation around his anxiety disorder took on a different form. Rather than being an uplifting story about an athlete overcoming considerable odds to excel, White faced questions about whether he could feasibly exist in a league in which his team was scheduled to take 98 flights his rookie season.

In the months after being drafted by the Rockets, an increasingly public back-and-forth took place between player and team.