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They didn’t want to see you fail just because they failed.
    It probably sounds strange for people who didn’t grow up in those kinds of circumstances, but that’s just how we lived. The sad thing is, in poor communities now, the drunks and addicts are the ones pulling kids down, not pushing them out. That’s why I started going back to the neighborhood and spending time with kids. Derrick Stafford, the NBA referee and now one of my good friends, grew up in Atlanta, graduated from Morehouse. He once said to me, “I know how involved you are in charity work and how often you speak to kids at schools and camps and things. But have you spent much time with the kids in their neighborhoods?”
    It was something I needed to hear because my view is that you can make it—that anybody can make it—if you just work hard enough. I tend to believe hard work can overcome almost anything. But now you’ve got thugs and drunks pulling kids down and these kids live year to year without any encouragement. There’s nobody steering them away from trouble. In fact, somebody’s bringing trouble right to them, handing it to ’em.
    I realize now how much support I had from outsiders, but mostly from home. There were three important men in my life: my grandfather Simon Barkley, my grandmother’s first husband, Adolphus Edwards, and her second husband, Frank Mickens. My father wasn’t there, and I was always resentful about that. But I know how great it was to have those three men in my life. My grandfathers were spectacular. I was probably too immature to understand at the time how necessary they were to a kid’s success. It’s just so difficult to be successful without that kind of support network. That’s why when I speak to kids, I tell them, “Hey, you think your parents are a pain in the ass now, but they’re going to get smarter as you get older.”
    As I look back on it, I’m glad my grandmother didn’t tolerate any foolishness when I was growing up. I believe in my heart there were other athletes who could have made it to the NBA from Leeds High School. Leeds was a sports factory in baseball, football and basketball. We were really good in all of those sports. But I think it helped me that I didn’t know how good I was. Being a late bloomer worked to my advantage. I think it works to the advantage of a lot of kids not to be phenoms when they’re really young. There were no AAU guys coming around, swelling my head with a whole lot of garbage about how good I was and how much money I could make. I had no letters about going to college on a basketball scholarship until my senior year. There was no Big Man on Campus attitude for me. My grandmother wouldn’t have had any of that.
    Anyway, my mother and grandmother made me be in charge of my brothers by the time I was fourteen. They said, “You’re the father figure. You’ve got to help take care of your brothers.” And so I was the father figure. We didn’t have the battles I know a lot of brothers had, because I needed to take care of them. With my mother and grandmother working the way they did, I was in charge of the housecleaning, too. That’s probably why I’m a neat-freak to this day. Never did dishes, though. That’s the one thing I didn’t do.
    I have a greater appreciation for my mother and grandmother the older I get because I realize they were willing to do whatever it took to provide us with things we needed even though money was so difficult to come by. I distinctly remember being the first kid in my neighborhood to have a pair of Chuck Taylors. Did you know that we get a new pair of basketball shoes every single game in the NBA? When I was fifteen, sixteen years old and playing basketball in high school, I would get one new pair of shoes every season. My mother would bring the shoes to the game, and after the game was over she came and waited at the locker room door, and I handed her the shoes and she took them back home. That’s the way it went all