Gary Knox is a photojournalist for KARE 11, a local television station in Minneapolis. He works hard at his job — showing up on time, helping cover some of the most important stories in his area as a member of the station’s investigations unit and always looking for ways to hone his craft.
But recently, Knox was joking with his co-workers about his internet fame. He’s well aware of how you might actually know him.
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“I’m known as this person who wrote this tweet about Paige,” Knox said. “Which is pretty cool. I like that.”
Paige, of course, is Paige Bueckers, the UConn star guard who, on the heels of winning the national championship April 6, is expected to go No. 1 to the Dallas Wings in Monday night’s WNBA Draft.
The tweet Knox is referring to is the four-sentence prophetic paragraph he posted to his Twitter account Sept. 24, 2013.
“Remember the name: Paige Bueckers. 6th grade, think Diana Taurasi,” Knox wrote. “Best 6th grade G I’ve ever seen.”
Remember the name: Paige Bueckers. 6th grade, think Diana Taurasi. Best 6th grade G I’ve ever seen. St. Louis Park. pic.twitter.com/BHr72kA3lR
— Gary Knox (@gPrep) September 25, 2013
Knox — who ran a preps basketball website in Minnesota at the time — remembers his post garnering a couple of retweets at best after he hit send. He thinks it might have had one or two likes.
“Other than that,” he said, “it sat dormant on my Twitter page for like, four years.”
But when Bueckers won national player of the year honors as a freshman at UConn in 2021, it started to blow up.
And when she won the 2025 national title, it went to viral heights with 5,800-plus reposts and 20,000-plus likes on X. College basketball fans everywhere chimed in about Knox’s eye for talent, with several telling him it was among the greatest tweets they’d ever seen. Others hoped he’d worked his way up into a scouting role by now.
Turns out, Knox was just a dad in the gymnasium that day who happened to be in the right place at the right time and was smart enough to recognize that something was different about the sixth-grader in front of him.
“My daughter at the time was playing varsity for Hopkins (Minn.) High,” he said, referring to the same high school Bueckers would eventually attend. “They had open gym at Hopkins High School, and they had three courts: They had a varsity court, a JV court and a sophomore court.
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“A couple of parents were coming around (saying), ‘Hey, have you seen the sixth-grader over there?’ I said, ‘No, what sixth-grader?’ And then I looked around and then all of a sudden it was, ‘Oh, yeah. I see exactly who you’re talking about.’ She was just over there putting in work and doing her thing on the sophomore/freshman court.”
Knox moseyed over to the court to get a better look at Bueckers up close and couldn’t look away. When the older kids tried to rough her up and bump her off her spots, she’d find a way to create space for herself. Her jump shot was “textbook.” Her footwork, “impeccable.” It was like watching a child prodigy play Mozart, he said.
Before snapping her photo and writing a quick blurb about her for his readers, Knox found Bueckers’ father, Bob, and asked for permission.
“Normally, I’d never write anything about sixth-graders,” he said. “But she was different.”
Knox had no way of knowing Bueckers would end up at UConn seven years later when he compared her to Taurasi, and he said he wasn’t likening Bueckers’ style of play to the three-time WNBA champion’s. The two are very different players but have similar abilities to take over games and will their teams to victory. UConn coach Geno Auriemma said earlier this month that no one loves the gym more than Taurasi and Bueckers.
“Believe it or not, it was a very easy comparison because at the time, back in 2013, Diana Taurasi was tearing it up,” Knox said. “I was just comparing Paige to Diana Taurasi as an analogy to draw a comparison between Paige’s potential and Taurasi’s established greatness.”
After his post went viral, Knox joked that his phone went from alerting him to one notification every couple of days to constantly dinging every second last week. ESPN, Overtime and other media outlets picked it up over the years, and as Bueckers matriculates to the WNBA, there might be more to come for the filtered photo he posted all those years ago of a smiling Bueckers wearing a T-shirt and backpack that both swallowed her.
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Like most of his fellow Minnesotans, he’s looking forward to Monday night and what’s ahead for one of his state’s most beloved stars.
“That’s going to be a special day for all of us in Minnesota,” he said of Bueckers hearing her name called at the draft. “All of us are rooting for her. To see the work that she’s put in, all the countless hours she put on the court, I feel like she’s one of the good ones.”
(Photo courtesy of Gary Knox)
This news was originally published on this post .
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