Jerryd Bayless grew up in a competitive culture. Whether it was dominoes or bowling or even hiking, his parents never let him win. They taught him to win.

Jill torrance / arizona daily star 2008

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After he scored the most points ever by a freshman in a Pac-10 game Sunday, Jerryd Bayless showered and changed but never did wipe the scowl off his face.

He spoke to the media in front of his locker only as long as he had to. Bayless complained that his teammates needed to "get on the same page." He wondered why the Arizona Wildcats' shots didn't go in. He tore into the team's porous defense.

And, mostly, he complained about losing to ASU twice in the same season.

"I don't know if you can forget about something like this," Bayless, 19, said.

Never did he bring up the 39 points he scored, addressing them only when asked by saying, simply, "I don't care."

UA interim head coach Kevin O'Neill believed him.

"Jerryd just cares about winning," O'Neill said. "He doesn't care about other things in college life, or scoring 39 points. I'm not surprised at all he reacted that way."

If the off-court behavior was typical Bayless, so was the on-court production. Ever since Bayless began running around as a toddler in his native Phoenix, confidence, competitiveness and winning have defined him.

Bayless' mother, Denise Bowman, said Jerryd blew away all his classmates in a "fun run" during his first year of preschool, then repeated as champ the following year.

Before he could run for his third and final year, however, the preschool pre-emptively called Bowman.

"They said you should talk to Jerryd, because none of the kids want to run. They all think Jerryd's going to beat them," Bowman said. "The kids said 'You're going to win again.' He said, 'Yep, I probably am.' "

So he did. Unable to resist, Bayless blew his classmates away, again.

From then on, all of life was a competition — with his peers, with his parents, with his brother and even with himself.

His father, Brad Bayless, said the family once took a 3-year-old Jerryd to a swimming pool, where he sat on the side and cried in fear of swimming alone.

Then, seeing the challenge in front of him, he dropped in the water and swam to the other end.

"He'd come out on the other side and still be crying," Brad said. "It scared him but he kept going. He just would not quit. He's always been that way."

If anybody knew why, it would be Denise and Brad. She's a community college counselor and he's a forensic psychologist.

They know how to analyze people.

Yet they still can't figure him completely out. They don't fully know whether that competitive drive was hard-wired into his brain, nurtured from backyard competition with older brother Justin, or just developed as a freak of nature.

"I can't tell you," Brad said. "I don't know."

Certainly, Brad said, it wasn't a product of his socio-economic environment. Jerryd grew up in the upper-middle class Phoenix neighborhood of Arcadia.

But no matter how comfy the outside environment, on the inside Jerryd could not escape his immersion in a competitive culture.

At home, he'd see his father playing spirited games of dominoes with former professional athletes he had befriended while doing consulting work for the NBA.

"There's always been a sense of competitiveness in my house," Brad said. "We'd play dominoes and he saw that. Kids model that. Did that play a role in his toughness? I don't know. But Jerryd's always been extra tough."

Even on vacation. Jerryd once went with his family to a Club Med in Ixtapa, Mexico, saw some windsurfers and determined that he would join them — at age 6.

"He couldn't get up on that board," Brad said. "He spent three days and didn't do anything else. But by the fourth day, Jerryd was out on the ocean by himself. He was the youngest windsurfer they've ever had there."

Even little things caused the same reaction. At age 8, Denise gave him a bumblebee-buzzing yo-yo one afternoon and tried to get some sleep that night.

Bad idea.

"He wasn't very good at first," she said. "He couldn't do it that day. And then, all of a sudden, at 2 in the morning, I hear this 'Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.' He was up practicing and by the end of that day, he could walk the dog, do the baby in the cradle, everything. He just wouldn't quit until he could do it."

Then there were the family games, the ones where Jerryd and Justin never received a break.

"We played basketball, went bowling, played cards, board games," Bowman said. "We never let them win, but just tried to teach them to win."

She tested him in reverse psychology, too. When Jerryd was 8, Denise took him hiking on Phoenix's Squaw Peak and, when the outdoors failed to excite him, she appealed to his thirst for competition.

"We got maybe a third the way up, and he said, 'This is boring,' " Bowman said. "I said, 'OK, I understand it's hard and you probably can't do it. So just sit here and I'll come back to get you when I come down.'

"Then he nearly sprinted the rest of the way to the top. I knew if I told him he couldn't do it, he would do it."

But if Jerryd's parents helped drill in that competitiveness, they take no claim for the athletic talent. Brad says it was Justin, four years older than Jerryd, who made him a basketball player.

"He beat him up endlessly," Brad said. "And Jerryd would never quit."

By the time Jerryd hit 10, Justin really knew his little brother had something special. But it wasn't from what he saw on the court.

"One day I came home, and there's this wild thundering noise going on upstairs," Justin said. "He was in the bathroom doing a little workout, jumping on the bathroom counter flat-footed. It was 3 1/2 feet high. The vertical leap was amazing."

Jerryd smiled almost bashfully when he was reminded of that one.

"That's when I was young," he said. "I was just doing dumb things like that."

Also about that time, Jerryd began rewriting a local Pop Warner record book, leading his father to believe that maybe football or track would be his best sport.

It wasn't. Jerryd said he loved basketball the most. He must have, judging by the way he put up with endless drills from former Suns coach Frank Johnson, a family friend who threw verbal and physical obstacles at Bayless to develop his focus.

The bond stuck. Bayless said he still talks with Johnson every day, expressing regret at letting Johnson down when he allowed an ill-fitting shoe to throw him off in a UA loss at Stanford last month.

To the man he calls "Uncle Frank," to brother Justin, and to all those athletic gifts, Bayless remains grateful.

"I've just been blessed," Bayless said. "A lot of things have fallen in place for me. I don't think I'd be anywhere without Frank. He pretty much made me who I am."

In junior high, Jerryd began using all that tutelage and experience to dish it out to others. He held his own in pick-up games against Justin and the St. Mary's varsity, guys such as former UA star Channing Frye and ex-Oregon State guard Jason Fontenot.

Then, when he finally joined St. Mary's summer team just before his freshman season in 2003, he took over immediately.

Nobody blinked.

"Most everybody let him lead," St. Mary's coach David Lopez said. "In his first game, he scored 35 points. He was not only a good player but just a real strong personality, real competitive."

Jerryd's arrival helped Lopez replace what he lost on the court and in the classroom in Justin. Both were intensely driven, in slightly different ways: Justin was an outstanding student and a good athlete. Jerryd was an outstanding athlete and a good student.

No surprise, then, that Justin graduated with early honors from Morehouse College and is now an investment banker with Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, the epicenter of business competition.

"It's almost like their roles were reversed," Lopez said.

Lopez wasn't the only one to benefit from Jerryd's presence. Anthony Ray, coach of the summer-league Arizona Magic basketball program, received an anonymous e-mail telling him to look at an amazing eighth-grader named Jerryd Bayless.

Since he had heard of Bayless, Ray agreed to meet him. Ray says he later found out the e-mail came from Bayless himself — something Bayless denies — but that didn't ultimately matter.

What counted was that Ray's entire program changed soon after their meeting. Ray took Bayless to a freshman-sophomore camp before his freshman year of high school. He blew everyone away, and the Magic's profile suddenly changed.

"Once everyone got to know Jerryd, we had a better shoe contract with Reebok, and that allowed us to go to more tournaments, which helped other kids get scholarships," Ray said. "Fourteen kids got scholarships that year, just by having Jerryd Bayless."

Bayless also elevated his own profile. Among his first showcase stops came after his freshman year, when he had a chance to face now-USC guard O.J. Mayo in a summer event in Las Vegas.

The game was scheduled for 9 a.m. At about 3 a.m., Ray entered the hotel restaurant and saw Bayless sitting alone at a table.

"I said, 'Jerryd, you need to get some sleep.' He said, 'I can't,' " Ray said. "He was so excited. He was just sitting there thinking. All the plates had been cleared and everything. I remember thinking 'Wow. I may never see a player like this again in this program.' "

Just two years after complaining to his mother that UA coach Lute Olson did not remember him from previous success at Olson's camp, Bayless had planted himself firmly on Olson's radar, a top-10 national prospect in his class.

He committed to the Wildcats in November 2005, then decommitted the following spring. This time, it was Olson who wouldn't give up, and the Wildcats received a re-commitment from Bayless in August 2006.

While Olson hasn't been able to coach Bayless during a leave of absence this season, Olson has noticed Bayless' impact. After the UA dropped three of four games when Bayless was out with a knee sprain, Olson said the Cats would have won all four if Bayless had been on the floor.

O'Neill wouldn't argue the point. If nothing else, O'Neill knows, and Bayless' family knows, that Jerryd wouldn't have quit trying in those losses to Memphis, Oregon and ASU earlier this season, just like he didn't quit trying on Sunday in the rematch with the Sun Devils.

He never quits. Ever. In anything.

"It's hard to find players at any level that truly, truly care about winning," O'Neill said. "They all tell you that, but the bottom line is it's very, very difficult to find players where losing really hurts them. Your best NBA players, losing really hurts. Your best college players, losing hurts. Jerryd's one of those guys where losing hurts him."