Talk of Champions: Stories of the People Who Made Me: A Memoir - Softcover

Smith, Kenny

 
9780593863688: Talk of Champions: Stories of the People Who Made Me: A Memoir
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593863682 ISBN 13: 9780593863688
Verlag: Diversified Publishing, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A revealing, humorous, behind-the-scenes memoir from Kenny "The Jet" Smith—superstar basketball commentator, host of the top-rated show, Inside the NBA, and two-time NBA champion. Smith reveals memorable inside stories of his playing and broadcasting careers, focusing on the star players, coaches, and mentors who inspired him along the way.
 
Kenny Smith was a star at the University of North Carolina before his storied NBA run, in which he won two championships with the Houston Rockets. His popularity skyrocketed when he joined TNT’s new show, Inside the NBA, which has thrived for twenty-four years and won multiple Emmys, receiving enormous acclaim for the insight, humor, social commentary, and unrivaled basketball coverage from Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ernie Johnson, Jr. Kenny is known to fans for his laser-sharp analysis and eloquent observations of the basketball scene and culture. 
 
In this honest and profound memoir, Kenny writes chapters about each of the extraordinary people who taught him invaluable life lessons. He illuminates the personalities, affections, and quirks of friends such as Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Charles Barkley and Kobe Bryant, among others, and what he learned from each of them. He writes about his legendary UNC coach, Dean Smith, and other indelible role models through his career. And he interweaves poignant material about his upbringing in Queens, New York, his parents, his children, and his marriage, explaining the rich knowledge he obtained from the important figures around him. Kenny is also a strong, intelligent voice on race, as his fans and TV viewers will know. Ultimately this is a revealing, humorous, and powerful memoir, offering a candid glimpse inside the rarified world of elite sports and broadcasting, with inspiring takeaways.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KENNY SMITH is an acclaimed NBA studio analyst for the Emmy Award–winning TNT show, Inside the NBA. He joins Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal, and Ernie Johnson each week during the NBA season to form one of the most entertaining studio shows in sports television. He is also a CBS analyst during the NCAA March Madness tournament. Kenny won two NBA World Championships with the Houston Rockets in 1994 and 1995, and played nine seasons in the NBA for the Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets, Sacramento Kings, and Atlanta Hawks. He played his college ball at the University of North Carolina. He lives with his family in California.

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Chapter One

Michael Jordan

Eye of the Tiger

I was jealous of Scottie Pippen. All through our playing days, and even today—I’m still jealous of Scottie Pippen.

The Chicago Bulls were considering choosing me. Their front office brought me in beforehand and asked about Michael Jordan, my old teammate at the University of North Carolina.

“He gets on guys,” they said. “He won’t pass the ball. He’ll scream at his teammates in practice. How would you handle that?”

The question seemed silly. Why would anyone have a problem learning from Michael, no matter how he delivered feedback? Plus, he only got on the guys who needed it. That wasn’t me.

“He wouldn’t do that to me,” I said. “Because he knows I can play.”

They looked at me kind of funny. Soon after, the Bulls chose Scottie. I went to the Sacramento Kings with the very next pick.

In that moment and for many years after, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Michael would have helped me become a perennial All-Star, even a Hall of Famer. His competitiveness would have taken me to another level.

I watched Scottie mature into that, and I felt it could have been me, because I know what type of energy Michael brings into you if you’re open to it. I watched Steve Kerr and B. J. Armstrong play alongside Michael and I thought, I don’t know if they understand what he’s bringing to them.

During the quarantine period of 2020, when the Jordan documentary The Last Dance was all the sports world could talk about, I laughed at the guys who said they didn’t like it when Michael got on them in practice.

If you connect with what Michael is really about, you realize that he’s actually generous. He’s going to share what makes him great and allow that once-in-a-lifetime competitive spirit to rub off on you.

In The Last Dance, they showed the famous image of Michael hugging the NBA championship trophy and crying after he won his first title in 1991.

Most people thought he was crying because he won. But that wasn’t it. He cried because he competed and left it all out there. It was the release of all that competitive energy that made him emotional. He would have cried the same way if he’d lost.

How do I know this? At North Carolina, juniors and seniors had to share a room on the road with freshmen and sophomores. Often as an underclassman I would room with Michael, who was two years ahead of me.

When you’re eighteen or nineteen years old, you have conversations that you don’t have at thirty. You’re still vulnerable and figuring out who you are. This is when he was Mike Jordan, a kid from the South who wore corny clothes and drove a corny car. A kid who liked a girl at school who didn’t really like him back. He wasn’t yet Michael Jordan, American icon.

We’d be lying there in the dark, trying to sleep after a game, well past midnight.

“Smith? You awake?” he’d say from across the room.

“Yeah, I’m awake.”

And we’d spend the next few hours talking about our dreams and fears, developing a bond that would survive through later decades in which we hardly saw each other.

The school bell rang at 2:20 p.m., signaling the end of the day at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, New York. It was 1981 and I was in the eleventh grade.

Desks slid across the floor and lockers slammed. My two best friends and teammates, George Kingland and Chris Sterling, and I dashed out of the school. There was no basketball practice that day, and for kids our age that represented a special few hours of freedom.

If you skipped every other stair as you sprinted out of the building, you could catch the N train that pulled in at two thirty and be home by three. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly exciting waiting for us at home; it’s more that teenagers are in a hurry to get as far from school as they can, as quickly as possible.

Archbishop Molloy was an all-boys school at the time, and the sheer energy and testosterone pouring out of that building every afternoon must have been something to behold. This was a Friday, which brought the frenzy up yet another notch.

We busted out of the school and ran the 334 yards to the Main Street subway station (yes, we had measured it).

As we rushed down the subway steps, we could hear the train pull into the station. Chris, George, and I ripped off our parochial school–mandated neckties, because we didn’t want to be seen in them by either a cute girl or a tough guy who might want to make a victim of a private school kid.

We dropped our tokens in the slot and ran through the turnstile as we heard the automated voice saying, “The doors are now closing.”

We slithered through the doors as they sealed off the kids on the platform who hadn’t quite made it. We turned and laughed at them.

Breathing as if we’d just run wind sprints after practice, we collapsed onto the plastic seats—and that’s when I heard the crackle and pop. It sounded like I’d sat on a bag of potato chips.

My first thought was to look behind me to see if there was indeed something on the seat, so I tried to stand. I couldn’t. My knee had gone extremely wrong, and I couldn’t even straighten my leg.

By the end of the day I learned that my growth plate had broken off and was dislodged inside the joint of my knee. The doctors said surgery was necessary, and just like that all my dreams fell into serious jeopardy. Playing on national television, advancing to college and the NBA—it was all endangered.

When I woke from the surgery, the concern on my face must have been obvious. My dad, standing next to my mom at the side of the bed, saw it and made a perfectly timed comment that reignited the drive in me.

“This injury can stop you and you can become a lamb,” he said. “Or you can work hard to become a tiger. Who’s eating who?”

I decided to work. I decided to be a tiger.

Over the next six months my brother Vince, a basketball savant, devised a custom practice routine that I could handle while rehabbing the knee.

Me, Vince, and my dad ran six miles together every day. We came up with drills: dribbling a basketball up the stairs, dribbling two basketballs as we evaded a dodgeball, shooting over my brother as he held a broom trying to swat our shots.

Within six months I had not only worked my way back from the injury but had gone from having no scholarship offers to being recruited by nearly every school in the country.

A first-team All-American, I narrowed my choices to Duke University, the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina. UNC was my final visit of the three.

The legendary coach Dean Smith came to New York to watch me score 41 points against Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School and its star point guard Mark Jackson, who later became an NBA All-Star, head coach, and ABC/ESPN analyst. Mark dropped 39 that night, but we came out on top.

Coach Smith and I then flew down to Chapel Hill together. When I arrived on campus, he assigned two players to chauffeur me around, Buzz Peterson and a sophomore who, a year earlier, had hit the game winner against Georgetown University to capture a national championship. His name was Michael Jordan.

That day I met Mike, not Michael. To a New Yorker like me, he seemed very southern. I was used to seeing colored jeans or gabardine pants, Kangol hats, and Adidas. Mike wore skinny jeans, a light blue tennis shirt, and Converse sneakers.

In New York, style ruled, and hip-hop ruled. Mike listened to...

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Verlag
Diversified Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593863682
ISBN 13 
9780593863688
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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