INDIANAPOLIS — When he was in fifth grade, Khalif Battle set the background on his phone to the image of an internet comment.

It came from a website that treated Battle, now a freshman guard at Butler, and his family well: Basketball Spotlight, a New Jersey based outlet that follows players from grade school through high school in the New York and New Jersey area. The site had followed Khalif’s older brother, Tyus, so closely that he published a diary for it, and it started to take notice of Khalif’s game by the time he was 11.

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But on one of the pieces on the site, a reader posted a comment that cut so deep that Khalif put it in on his phone so he’d see it every day. All the way into high school, the remark drove him in every workout and every game, on the floor and in the weight room. According to Khalif, the reader said he’d never be as good as his older brother.

“That hurt so it triggered something in my mind,” Khalif says. “It’s definitely not a competition between me and my brother, but the younger brother always wants to be better than the older brother.”

Except there is a competition, because with Khalif, everything is a competition.

He refers to Tyus, a two-time all-ACC pick at Syracuse, as his basketball hero. The two are in constant contact, and Tyus calls Khalif almost daily to push him.

But the driving force for Khalif for much of his youth was to find a way to surpass his older brother. Tyus was considered a blue-chip prospect from the time he was a grade-schooler. At one point in his sophomore year, he was a top-10 recruit and he finished his high school career as the No. 34 player in the Class of 2016.

“He’s the reason why I really wanted to pick up a basketball,” Khalif says. “I used to see him outside as a kid just playing and I always wanted to be better than him. My brother used to beat me at one-on-ones, 11-0, and I would play him until the lights shut off and my dad had to force me out of the gym.” 

But Khalif made perhaps his biggest leap as a player once Tyus went off to college. That’s a big reason why he is in Indianapolis, so far away from his hometown of Roselle, N.J., unlike Tyus, who picked Syracuse in large part because it was close to home.

At Butler, Khalif gets to escape from his brother’s shadow, beginning his career as one of the most celebrated freshmen ever to play for the Bulldogs. As a four-star recruit and the No. 99 player in the 2019 recruiting class, he’s the second-highest rated recruit to attend Butler since 247Sports has been collecting data. Only Kellen Dunham, the No. 88 player in the Class of 2012, ranked higher.

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Though the 6-foot-5, 180-pound Battle will have a hard time cracking the starting lineup as a freshman with returning starters Kamar Baldwin and Aaron Thompson manning the backcourt, he has a chance to be a dynamite scorer as the only reserve scholarship player who can handle both the 1 and the 2.

“I didn’t want to go to Syracuse because I didn’t want to be Ty’s little brother,” Khalif says. “Here I get an opportunity to be Khalif Battle and be who I am as a basketball player and a person.”

Gary Battle, the father of the young men, was an all-state basketball player at Colonia High in Woodbridge, N.J., in the late ’80s and became a Division II All-American at New Haven in Connecticut.

He played professionally in the United States in the CBA and abroad in Germany. Like his sons, he was an athletic and powerful guard who could shoot the ball. He still ranks third at New Haven in career scoring, 3-pointers and 3-point field goal percentage. Gary is 51 now and runs an employee benefits consulting firm, and Khalif says, he can still dunk.

From the beginning, Gary was a mentor for both of his sons, and he coached them on the grassroots circuit in his program Team Battle. Tyus was always big for his age and skilled beyond his years, so he was the centerpiece on every team he ever played on. Khalif, meanwhile, was often asked to play well above his age group so that Gary could coach both boys on the same team.

Khalif made the most of the minutes he got.

“He was always able to put the ball in the basket in the little time he got to play in games,” Gary says. “Even if he played for a minute, he could always put the ball in the basket. What I think it led to was him really becoming a hard worker as he got older.”

In fact, Khalif was arguably even more driven than Tyus was, and certainly more one-track minded.

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“We’re opposites but the same,” Khalif says of Tyus and himself. “He’s more reserved. I’m more going to get after somebody. I’m more of an attack-first kind of guy. He sees the playing field first, then goes.”

The younger Battle was dedicated to his craft. He’d watch old Michael Jordan videos and YouTube clips of Vince Carter, Russell Westbrook, Stephen Curry, Damian Lillard and others to try to emulate their moves, spending hours in the gym.

And according to coaches who knew both Battles, Khalif had a little more of a nasty streak in him. Tyus didn’t like losing, but he could deal with it. Khalif couldn’t.

“Yeah, I take it personal,” he says. “I hate losing. I had to work on it growing up. I used to get in trouble for throwing a fit because I hate losing.”

There were times when it all got to be too much and Gary had to tell Khalif to take it easy, whether that meant not spending all of his time in the gym or toning down the histrionics when he would lose a game or a drill in practice. As much as Gary appreciated his son’s drive, he knew it had to be tamed.

“With him it was just about finding balance,” Gary says. “A lot of times, he tended to overwork in terms of being in the gym all the time. Which is great, but I think Tyus was more of a balanced guy. I didn’t expect Khalif to be him, but he could learn something from that balance. He was film, gym, talk about it, and that can wear on you. We tried to teach him to have that balance.”

Khalif calmed down some, but even through his freshman year at St. Joseph High in Metuchen, N.J., he admittedly had a lot of growing up to do. He played varsity that season, Tyus’ senior year, and he didn’t see the floor much. After that, he transferred to Trenton Catholic High, but sat out his sophomore year after injuring his lower back.

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But when he got healthy for his junior year, he became the star at Trenton Catholic, and that forced him to reconsider how he operated. He was looked up to as a leader, and that meant things such as his body language mattered. Also, he had the opportunity to play without constantly being compared to Tyus.

“I could tell early on in his career he was playing very tight, playing with a lot of pressure,” says Eric Elliott, who became the coach at Trenton Catholic during Khalif’s senior year and was an assistant before that. “He was trying to show the doubters and the naysayers that he had his own game, that he wasn’t just Tyus’ little brother. He deserved to be talked about as one of the better players in the state. It weighed heavy on his shoulders trying to live up to that name, but he learned that it really wasn’t about his brother. It was about him.”

With that burden lifted, Khalif developed into one of the most explosive scorers in New Jersey, showing off some offensive skills that were superior to Tyus’. He wasn’t as fast end-to-end and he didn’t have the length of his 6-6, 205-pound brother, but he could jump higher, get to the rim and finish just as well, and he was a better shooter despite some funky mechanics.

Like his father, Khalif gets up high on his shot, but in so doing, his body twists. When he leaves the floor, his feet are lined up with the bucket and parallel, a little farther apart than his shoulders. Before he lands, his hips turn and his feet cross as if he is doing a scissor kick in the air.

But his mechanics from the hips up are so good that it doesn’t matter. He was still one of the best shooters in New Jersey, and in EYBL play with Team Playaz in the spring and summer of 2018, he made 23 of 58 3-pointers, a few ticks under 40 percent.

“It goes in at such a high clip,” Team Playaz coach Chico Johnson says. “When those start going in, you just kind of let it be. When he’s knocking down four or five in a row, what coach is going to say something about that?”

Khalif also discovered he was a better player when he didn’t try to do everything himself. If he moved the ball, it found him again in a better place to score or led to a bucket for a teammate.

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“When he started trusting his teammates, he realized how much better it made him if he was a willing passer,” Elliott says. “Early on he’d get in trouble with turnovers and charges from playing too fast. The more he grew as a playmaker, he learned how to change speeds and let the game come to him a little more. That’s when he started to take off.”

Khalif averaged 18.5 points, 5.3 rebounds and 3.0 assists as a junior at Trenton Catholic, followed that up with 12.4 points per game with Team Playaz, then averaged 23.7 points per game as a senior to lead Trenton Catholic to the Mercer County title.

Thanks in part to his brother’s name, the recruiting attention Khalif received never slipped much. He was always a top-150 recruit, even during the season he sat out. He ended up with eight major scholarship offers, with Connecticut, Miami, Syracuse and Washington among the suitors.

He went with Butler to follow a path different from his brother.

If Michigan were closer to New Jersey, Tyus Battle would have had a much harder time picking a school.

He had 25 offers with just about every blue blood covered, including Arizona, Duke, Indiana, Kentucky and Louisville, but the way Michigan developed its guards and wings piqued his interest.

“They were a great fit for Tyus,” Gary says. “At the time, the family wasn’t really ready for him to move so far away. His mom works different sorts of hours so she wanted to be able to drive to games. Syracuse was great, don’t get me wrong, but Michigan, he loved John Beilein. But Tyus has always been a very mature guy, and he wanted his mom to come to games. If it hadn’t come down to that, he might have gone to Michigan.”

Khalif noticed the same things about Michigan’s staff as his brother did, and that style of coaching was appealing. He was impressed by Beilein’s assistants, LaVall Jordan and Jeff Meyer, so when Jordan became the coach at Butler in 2017 and brought Meyer with him, the younger Battle wanted to follow him there. It helped that Butler is in the Big East, which meant the Bulldogs at least would get close to home with annual road trips to Georgetown, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova.

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Gary kept in touch with Meyer and persuaded him to take a look at Khalif. Once Butler offered a scholarship, it quickly became the school Khalif focused on. He committed in May 2018, just before the end of his junior year.

“I trusted in the coaching staff here,” he says. “They’re invested in getting better, I’m invested in getting better. I saw what they did at Michigan. I saw what they did with (guards) Nik Stauskas, Trey Burke, Tim Hardaway Jr., Glenn Robinson, Caris LeVert.”

Jordan and his staff are trying to make some adjustments to Khalif’s game. They aren’t demanding that he remake his jump shot, because they don’t want to screw up a good thing, but they are trying to get him to focus on his footwork to see if it will make him a little more consistent.

“I’ve always shot like that,” Khalif says. “But you get to the next level, you have to change it. You can’t keep doing the same thing you did in high school. You can’t get away with that anymore.”

The Bulldogs are pushing him to become a better defender as well. He has never been on Tyus’ level on that end of the floor, but he made improvements as a defender at Trenton Catholic, and it would help him get minutes if he can contribute there.

The players and coaches are also monitoring his exuberance when it comes to practice drills. He still flexes and hollers whenever his side wins, but they do what they can to make sure he doesn’t go overboard.

“He’s animated in everything he does,” junior wing Jordan Tucker says. “You always hear his voice. He’s very passionate. Sometimes that can be a negative, sometimes that can be a positive, but I always see him as somebody who cares.”

And the Bulldogs don’t want that part to change.

“That’s the attitude I bring to Butler,” Khalif says. “A gritty kid who hates to lose and is not going to accept losing.”

(Photo: Courtesy of Butler Athletics)