LAS VEGAS — Growing up, Toney Douglas traced the footsteps that his older brother, Harry, made before him — with one notable exception.
“Toney would come in crying and saying, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ ” said Harry Douglas III, their father. “Then Harry would came in, smiling and saying, ‘Daddy, I beat him, 140-4.’ ”
After Toney calmed down, his father would tell him that in the end, the games would make him tougher. Eventually they did. Harry left the large footsteps, and Toney is still quick to fill them in his own way. As Toney, a guard picked 29th over all in this year’s N.B.A. draft, embarked on his professional basketball career with the Knicks’ summer league team, Harry readied himself for his second season as a wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons. The Douglases are set to become only the sixth set of brothers to play in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L., and the first brother combination since Kevin and Nate Burleson in 2006-7, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
Their brotherly bickering was largely limited to the one-on-one games. While growing up, each excelled at basketball, football and baseball. Together, they made a two-man show on the basketball team, and fans packed the stands in the tiny gym at Jonesboro High School so tight that the fire department routinely turned people away. But Harry craved more contact than is common in basketball.
Toney’s decision was simpler and based in the same casual manner that one would choose a shirt to wear in the morning.
“I don’t like the sun like that,” he said, smiling. “I can play football and baseball, but I decided on basketball. And there’s a lot of action in basketball. In football, you’ve got to wait; in baseball you’ve got to wait.”
As effortless as the decision was, Toney put in the diligence, as did Harry Douglas III, his sons’ biggest cheerleader and promoter. He started a recruiting service that scouts athletes in the South and he developed contacts with college coaches. He and his wife shuffled Toney and Harry to hundreds of athletic contests.
Once, when Toney was 9, the family rushed to a baseball game after a football game and arrived when Toney was due at the plate. He rushed into a bathroom, changed and promptly homered.
But it was a basketball that accompanied Toney to bed and eventually to a pro career.
“He would call me at 6, 6:30 in the morning wanting to get in the gym, and I’d be in bed,” Jonesboro High Coach Dan Maehlman said. “I asked, ‘Couldn’t we wait until 8?’ ”
Toney chose to play in college at Auburn, but became frustrated with the team’s system and transferred to Florida State. There, he progressed and finally turned the tide in the one-on-one games with Harry, who had started to blossom as a football standout for Louisville.
“Me beating up on him in basketball stopped,” Harry said. “He started winning all the games. I always respected him, but that’s when I really started to respect his work ethic, his game and the things that he did well.”
The Falcons drafted Harry in the third round of the 2008 draft. Harry made the trek to Tallahassee whenever he could to catch Toney’s games. Then Toney again retraced his brother’s steps, to Atlanta to watch Harry play football.
“His brother really is his role model,” their father said. “He’ll tell him what he should be doing and what he’s not doing. Toney really takes it well. He takes it better from his brother than me. With his brother playing professional football and seeing his brother do what he did, that really inspired him to prove he can do it, too.”
The Lakers drafted Douglas, and traded him to the Knicks in a deal engineered in the hours before the draft. With the Knicks, he is expected to spell the starting point guard Chris Duhon.
Douglas is 6 feet 1 inch and is categorized as a combination guard, a kind way to label a player without a natural position. That, along with playing basketball at the football powerhouse Florida State, might have caused him to slip to the end of the first round despite averaging 21.5 points as a senior.
In the N.B.A.’s summer league, Douglas’s shot was largely absent, although he said the organization wanted him to focus on his playmaking.
“You can miss on him,” Knicks Coach Mike D’Antoni said. “He’s not a point and he’s not a 2. We just thought he has the possibility to be a pretty good player in the league, and that’s why we went after him.”
With Harry and Toney in the professional ranks, Harry Douglas III’s largest coup, he said, is that they both have college degrees. He is out of sons to promote, but his daughter, Jamila, a softball player in her day, has a 2-year-old son named Caleb. Harry Douglas III has already started pitching his grandson to college coaches.
“A lot of them, they tell me that he has a scholarship right now,” he said.
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