Tyrese Haliburton’s Wild Flashback About Harrison Barnes Buying an Iowa Bank
Harrison Barnes just bought a bank. Not shares in a bank. The whole thing.
The San Antonio Spurs forward invested $25 million of his own money to purchase Community State Bank near his hometown of Ames, Iowa. He told Yahoo Sports it is not a vanity project. His plan is to actually run it, grow it, and use it as a vehicle to help small businesses in his home region.
Tyrese Haliburton saw the news and had the reaction of the day.
“HB told me this was the plan my rookie year,” Haliburton posted. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That was the first time I realized dudes in the NBA got real families and are real adults.”
Haliburton and Barnes were briefly teammates on the Sacramento Kings during the 2020-21 season. Haliburton was a 20-year-old rookie. Barnes was 28, on his second contract, and, apparently, already deep into a business plan that would take six years to close.
That is the funniest part of this. Barnes was not day-trading NFTs or opening a cannabis dispensary. He was thinking about a small community bank in Iowa. He told a rookie about it. The rookie remembered.
Now Haliburton is a two-time All-Star, the face of the Pacers, and one of the more thoughtful player-owners waiting in the wings when his career ends. Barnes is the guy who quietly built the plan he told his teammate about years ago.
NBA players investing in businesses is not new. What Barnes did is different because banks are heavily regulated, capital-intensive, and cannot be sold at a Series A markup. You need real net worth to buy one and real patience to run one.
Barnes has always been that guy. He was a first-team McDonald’s All-American at Ames High, went to North Carolina, was drafted seventh overall by the Warriors, and has quietly stacked $215 million in career earnings without ever making a headline for the wrong reason. Community State Bank is the natural extension of the way he has lived his career.
Haliburton’s reaction hits because it is honest. NBA rookies show up thinking about the next contract. Guys like Barnes are already thinking about the next 30 years. The gap between those two mindsets is where fortunes are made and lost.
Barnes is still a rotation player in San Antonio and can help a young Spurs team push toward the play-in tournament. He also just became the most interesting off-court story of the offseason, and Haliburton reminded everyone that Barnes told him six years ago exactly what he was going to do.
Rookies, take notes. The vet next to you might be building a bank.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
