EDMONTON - While some teens dream of getting discovered by a modelling scout, Edmonton’s Grace Mahary kept turning them down.
Instead of fashion runways and couture clothing, the tall, leggy beauty dreamed of sweaty locker rooms and sick slam dunks. Like her two older brothers, she wanted to play basketball, or maybe study medicine.
“I wanted to be what I called an NBA doctor,” says the 24-year-old with a laugh. “I wanted to somehow make it to the NBA and still be a doctor.”
At least a couple of times while still a teenager in Edmonton, she was approached by scouts looking to get her into modelling, but she always refused.
“I was like, ‘No way. I don’t want to do this.’ I was a girl who wasn’t interested in being a pageant queen. I didn’t really know what modelling was and I didn’t think much of it.”
The daughter of Eritrean immigrants who fell in love during the war for independence in their homeland, escaping through Sudan to start a new life in Edmonton, Grace and her brothers grew up playing sports.
The slim teen who grew to be 5’ 11” played volleyball and soccer before settling on basketball as her passion. And despite her brothers’ strong influence, she did love her girlie toys as a child.
“I used to collect Barbies like a madwoman, and Polly Pocket. I used to love Polly Pocket — those little houses — and Easy Bake ovens. My top three.”
Still, her mother considered her a tomboy because she hated wearing dresses and styling her hair.
The irony of her current job, which sees her living in New York and jetting around the world to dress up and have her hair coiffed, is not lost on her, she says.
“Did I ever think that? All the time. It’s like, ‘Where am I? What is this?’”
It was a meeting with modelling agency owner Elmer Olsen in Toronto that finally convinced her to give modelling a chance.
She had been approached yet again while visiting family in Toronto one summer at the age of 16. She dismissed the offer at first, but Olsen is “a very persistent man.”
He promised the teen if she moved to Toronto, she could model part-time, continue with high school, and most important, play basketball.
“That was probably the toughest decision I made,” she says of leaving Edmonton’s Archbishop O’Leary High School, where she had been recruited to play basketball. “I really loved the girls and I loved my coach and the program was just so exceptional,” she says. “I was really broken when I had to cut that off.”
True to her deal with Olsen, she moved to Toronto and played basketball at Jarvis Collegiate, modelling on the side. “I was going to castings and basketball practice and doing homework. It was a whirlwind,” she says.
Living in Toronto opened her eyes to the world, she adds. “It’s a very diverse city and I loved it. Growing up in Edmonton, I didn’t know anyone who looked like me … (In Toronto) it was the first time I’d ever heard my language (Tigrinya) spoken on the street.”
She won Elle Canada’s model search and had lots of support in the fashion industry, but “my mind was still in trying to be a normal kid, and that to me meant playing basketball, playing sports and going to school.”
She decided to give up modelling so she could study physiotherapy and play basketball at the University of Toronto.
But one day during a practice over the Christmas break, a teammate’s elbow caught her in the mouth. Bleeding, her tooth knocked in, “I thought, ‘maybe I should give this (modelling) a chance before it’s over … I didn’t give it a full shot. Why am I quitting?’ ”
She finished her year and her season at U of T, then took a deferral from school at 21 to travel overseas to model.
That first season in Europe in 2012, she landed a coveted exclusive contract with Givenchy to walk the runway during Paris Fashion Week.
“The next season, I blew up,” she says of her sudden popularity. In September and October of 2012 (considered the spring/summer fashion season), she “walked” for about 30 clients she estimates, including Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Miu Miu.
During the next fashion season in February/March 2013, she modelled for about 50 clients during the month-long extravaganza that includes fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris.
“That month is insane,” she says. “A season to me meant like a basketball season where it’s nine months long and you don’t do 50 games in one month,” she adds.
While the fashion season is exhausting, “at the end of it, it’s quite rewarding — it’s exposure, and parts of it are really fun.”
The down sides are the loneliness that can come from so much travelling and working. “There’s a lot of down time alone and you really just wish you could have someone with you,” she says.
But the extensive travel is also one of the best parts, she adds. “I do love to see the world. That’s why I did this — modelling was not my interest; seeing the world and meeting people was.”
Her plans for the future include returning to school to become a physiotherapist, and eventually starting some kind of basketball or sports program for children in Eritrea.
She’s also branched out into commercials and is taking some acting classes.
Her parents still live in Edmonton, but she hopes to move them eventually to be closer to her; her brothers both live in Toronto.
Despite her high-profile career, the sought-after international supermodel still occasionally gets the chance to play basketball.
“One of my good friends from Toronto moved down (to New York), so whenever we see a court, or whenever we have time, we shoot some hoops,” she says.
Has she lost any of her skills? “Totally; I suck,” she adds with a laugh.
