“I GOT A TEXT!” Chris Seeley shouted the four words which have become synonymous with Love Island before reading a message to the season 7 men in the villa. According to the text, they would be playing a game of 3-on-3 basketball.
The group’s euphoric reaction was swift. They were running, jumping and cheering. “Boys’ day! Boys’ day! Boys’ day!” chants broke out in their confessional. But one Islander, Jose “Pepe” Garcia, had mixed emotions.
It wasn’t due to a lack of confidence in his basketball skills or because he was intimidated by the other team captain, Seeley, who stands at 6-foot-8. After all, Garcia has faced plenty of top athletes as a former professional international basketball player.
An injury — not nerves — caused his reluctance. Garcia told ESPN that he stepped on a nail in the previous challenge, which made it difficult to walk and caused significant bleeding. But that wasn’t going to stop him from playing in this game.
“I’m limping everywhere. So for me, like yeah, I’m excited, but at the same time, I’m like ‘Damn, I can’t even walk,'” Garcia told ESPN last week. “But I was like, it’s good, I’m going, I don’t care. That competitiveness in me came out.”
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The game gave the guys a few hours away from the Fiji villa — and set up the second meeting between Garcia and Seeley, who also played professionally overseas. As Garcia later learned from his dad, their first matchup came in high school.
This time around, Garcia scored the first points and nailed a few impressive jumpers, but ultimately, Team Chris won the battle.
“I think the original game was supposed to be to 11 because of my foot,” Garcia said. “And then, of course, like, I was like, now we’re playing at 15, and then I was like, now we’re playing at 21. By the time I got to 21, my sock was full of blood, but I was like, ‘Hey, do we push this to like, 25 or something like that?’
“We just kept wanting to push it and push it.” For a few short hours, the only thing that mattered to Garcia was playing basketball. It all felt familiar.
GARCIA DOESN’T REMEMBER the exact age when he first picked up a basketball, but he remembers when he started taking it seriously: eighth grade. That’s when he joined his first official team, and by high school, he began pushing himself — with a little help.
His freshman year he met coach AC, who would turn out to be an influential figure in his life. Their relationship began with what Garcia thought was a simple offer: Coach AC asked him to come to a workout, free of charge.
Garcia remembers two things about the aftermath of that three- or four-hour session that he still describes as “probably one of the hardest workouts I’ve ever done in my life.” One, he was so exhausted afterward that he sat on the floor completely gassed. And two, what coach AC said to him.
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“I remember he told me, ‘Probably won’t see you next week, but you did good today,'” Garcia recalled. “Obviously, I found out years later that he says that to everybody, because it is true that 99% of people that do that workout do not come back the next week. As a 13-year-old, 14-year-old kid, that’s not most kids’ mentalities. And, yeah, I went back.”
And he kept going back. By his senior year at Los Alamitos (CA) High School, Garcia averaged 18.8 points and 3.2 assists per game.
Coach AC had experience coaching talents like Landry Fields and other players who went on to professional careers overseas. Leaning on his mentor, Garcia asked what it took to reach those heights, and learned that he didn’t need to attend Kentucky or Duke to have a rewarding basketball career.
There were plenty of other Division I schools to choose from that could serve as the steppingstone to reach his ultimate goal of playing pro. He chose nearby Cal State Fullerton.
“Having people like Kyle Allman Jr. and Khalil Ahmad, these two freaking hoopers that I get to play against every single day, that are just dogs really. I mean — they’re playing at insanely high levels — going against them every single day, it was like, ‘Alright, this is the best steppingstone you could ever ask for.'”
Garcia didn’t see much action on the court, but he stayed with the Titans from 2017-19 before deciding that he wanted to leave and get an agent.
“Being born in Spain, I had the opportunity to go and just play in Spain, not for any professional team; nobody actually called me, like from a specific team. They just said, ‘Hey, we have this thing. We want you to come. We know [you were born in Spain]. We know you don’t count as a Spaniard; you count as an American, but still, we want you to come play,'” he told ESPN.
Garcia took the opportunity and said that after his first experience, he received offers to play for overseas teams. According to Promo Sport, a FIBA certified agency, he played in Spain from 2019-21. And then went on to join Mexico’s Fuerza Regia and Toros Torreón from 2021-2022 — where he averaged 9 points, 1.4 rebounds and shot 35% from the 3-point line. He capped off his career back in Spain in 2023.
He told ESPN that his final season in Spain was “brutal” due to a lingering knee injury from the year prior. The plan was to go back to Mexico and play, but Garcia said that after completing his preseason evaluation, the team owner told him his patellar tendon was “completely dead” and that there was potential of it snapping again.
“And I remember my dad telling me that when I got home, ‘It’s going to end at some point,” Garcia said. “As a kid, you don’t think about it. And the stupid thing that I did was, as a pro athlete, I wasn’t thinking about it either.”
He finally took time to contemplate his future and ultimately decided to call it a career and focus on his next chapter in life as a personal trainer.
Garcia looks back fondly on his time playing overseas. It not only allowed him to live out his dream but also allowed him to find a new hobby he still holds close to him, playing the guitar. But he recognized that there were challenges that came with the lifestyle. From the time changes that affected calling loved ones to missing holidays to struggles in his dating life.
For years, he spent half of his time in Europe or Mexico and the other half at home in Los Angeles, so he dated with the intent to ultimately move on.
“I would try to date people from the States, but again, I’m living in Spain,” he said. “So, it just turned into, you’re talking to people, and it just never goes anywhere. So yeah, it definitely interfered with it all.”
ALL IT TOOK was one viral TikTok video for Garcia to start getting noticed. After one in particular blew up, reality TV shows — including Love Island — began reaching out. He shared the message he received from Love Island to an old college group chat and one of his friends, Ryan, reached out to him separately.
“He tells me, ‘I love Love Island. It’s the best show in the freaking world. If you’re gonna do any reality TV show, you have to do that one. You’ll love it,'” Garcia recalled. “It was like a four-page text, just the longest text I’ve ever had. And I was like, man, you know what? He convinced me to do it.”
The Love Island franchise is no stranger to having athletes appear on the show. Season 7 of LIUSA alone had three in Garcia, Seeley and TJ Palma, who was a part of the University of Tampa’s 2024 DII national championship baseball team.
Garcia, Seeley and the rest of the male contestants bonded over their shared love of basketball throughout the season.
“Every lunch and dinner, there’s a ‘I can beat you 1-on-1,’ or ‘Us three can beat you three, or us five can beat you five,'” he said. “It was just the topic of way too much.”
And the contestants’ wish was the producers’ command. After the group basketball game, the vibes continued to be high. Seeley even went as far as to say in the show’s final family dinner that playing basketball with the guys was “probably the most fun I’ve ever had.”
Garcia and Iris Kendall ultimately finished the dating show in fourth place — however, the two are speculated to no longer be together after they unfollowed each other on Instagram.
The summer still turned out to be life-changing for Garcia. He now has 1.4 million followers on Instagram, had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles Chargers’ training camp and, most recently, played in the Big3 celebrity game.
“It’s, it’s unbelievable, you know.”
“You know as a kid, it’s like, I wish I could do this for a living,” Garcia said. “Now I get to go and play at the Big3 celebrity game, and I get to go and meet the Chargers and hang out with the guys … So blessed to be able to do all of that, and thankful that I get to do it all.”
When the Big3 reached out to him, he asked his management team if it could make it happen, and it did.
“I got to meet Ice Cube, I met Shaq, I met Mark Cuban, and I met all these people,” he said. “I got to chop it with Ochocinco, who is someone that I looked up to when I was younger. I got to hang out with Dez Bryant and Waka Flocka. It’s like, I mean people that I grew up watching, and now I’m just playing basketball with them on the same court.”
Garcia said there’s still a lot more to come from him as he continues to live out his new dream. But on Monday, Aug. 25, the Love Island Reunion will air, representing the highly anticipated final chapter of this unique experience (at least for now).
There’s bound to be drama and heated discussions, but Garcia was tight-lipped on any potential spoilers. His one-word preview? “Fun.”
