by Ray Allen
Still, I was terrified. Who in my situation wouldn’t be? The day would come, and soon, when that child would be my responsibility, and I knew nothing about being a father or raising a family. I was critical of some of the choices my father made, but I hadn’t been dealing with the pressures he faced. Perhaps there was a lot more to being the head of a household than I thought.
Helping me cope with these fears, in addition to the assurances from my mother, was the faith I gained from being around the military. I don’t presume for a second to have been familiar with what went on in the minds of those who put their lives on the line, but seeing how they handled themselves, I came to realize that, as long as you have a pulse, you should be able to deal with any obstacle. Knowing that I would have a child to support forced me to focus more on my future. It wouldn’t be only about me anymore.
My lone regret is that I wasn’t there to see the birth of our daughter, Tierra, in the fall of my senior year. I had been told Rosalind was in the hospital for a checkup, not that she was in labor. I was in school when Mom came by to give me the news. When I arrived at the hospital and got a first look at my little girl, I was overcome again with the enormity of the task in front of me.
I saw Tierra almost every day, Rosalind wanting to make sure she became familiar with her daddy before I left for college. During those first weeks, I was as inept as I feared. I could change her diapers and feed her, but not having spent a great deal of time around babies, I didn’t know how to simply sit and play with her.
Meanwhile, Mom, as promised, bought the diapers, baby food, milk, and clothing we needed. Given her own finances, this was no small sacrifice.
I first saw the Hillcrest basketball coach, James Smith, while I was in junior high. He was always screaming at his players for one reason or another. One time, I kid you not, I watched him throw a ball rack at them. This man is crazy, I thought.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. In the three years I played for Coach Smith, he hardly ever raised his voice. In fact, most of the time he was so quiet you didn’t know he was there. To me, that is one of the highest compliments you can pay a coach. Same with the refs; we should never know their names. The game, at any level, should be about the players. That’s who fans come to see.
Coach Smith made sure we were in the best shape possible. We ran 3.1 miles each day after school. That was when I discovered my love, and hatred, of running.
He registered us in cross-country meets in the area, and though we normally got dusted, we were slowly getting used to what it felt like to dig deep within ourselves. In practice, I would occasionally look over at him when he’d blow the whistle to have us run a few laps and think: Is he blind? Doesn’t he get it that we have nothing left? But we did have something left, and he knew it.
We weren’t one of the best teams in the state. Not yet. We were still learning how to play with one another, and that takes time. Several of us had been on the same team for two years at Ebenezer, but the competition in high school was much fiercer. The biggest accomplishment in my sophomore year was knocking off our main rival, Sumter High. We felt like we had won the state championship. I averaged 20.5 points and 10 rebounds that season, but I wasn’t aggressive or aware enough of the entire court. That would come later.
Meanwhile, being on the team did even more for my image than it did in junior high. Few kids came to the games at Ebenezer, so they usually found out what happened through an announcement over the loudspeaker: “The ninth-grade boys beat so-and-so, Ray Allen leading the way with 12 points.” At Hillcrest, the results were published in the newspaper. A lot of my classmates wanted to be seen with me, and as I became known as a jock, I was once more able to avoid the no-win choice between the whites and the blacks.
On the other hand, no matter how much I achieved on the court, and whatever status I helped lend the school, some kids still wouldn’t accept me, and that would always be the case. I wasn’t one of them, and by “them,” I mean those who had spent their entire lives in Dalzell.
I’ll give you a perfect illustration. The whole senior class met in the cafeteria to hand out the awards they give at probably every high school in America—you know, Class Clown, Best Couple, Most Likely to Be President, etc.
One by one, each student who was named went up to the front to receive a certificate, everybody applauding. But when they called my name, for being the Most Likely to Succeed, the room went dead silent. Considering how well I had played that year, they thought they had no choice but to give me the honor, but that didn’t mean they were happy about it. I almost felt like I was doing something wrong by accepting it.
People, my teammates included, were always waiting for me to do or say the wrong thing, and when I did, they took advantage. Such as the interview I gave in the cafeteria with a local TV station after I won the state Player of the Week award. Instead of using the word “gym,” I referred to it as a gymnasium. They got a big chuckle out of that. No one in Dalzell would ever use the word “gymnasium.”
Or the time, in a game senior year against West Florence, when I grabbed the ball on the opening tip and scored on a reverse tomahawk dunk. All I heard was silence in return. Why aren’t the fans going nuts? You can’t tell me that wasn’t one of the more spectacular dunks you have ever seen.
“That wasn’t our basket,” a teammate said.
Oops. I was embarrassed, to say the least, and although it made no difference in the outcome—we killed them—I had a feeling I’d hear about that dunk for a long time. I wouldn’t be shocked if some of my former teammates still tell the story.
Many of them would come over to the house and we’d hang out for a while, but I always sensed a barrier between us, and it wasn’t merely because I didn’t come from their world. It was also because of my success, and them understanding, as my mother said, that I would get out of there and do something good with my life, and they most likely would not. One teammate fouled me so hard on purpose in practice that I got scratches everywhere and was bleeding. Another told people that I might receive a college scholarship, but I’d sit on the bench for four years and come back to town an alcoholic. It reminded me of Kenny, the kid from junior high, who said I would never make the team.
It got to the point where I stopped sharing good news, even with those I had assumed cared about me. When my teammate Chris (not his real name), failed to say a word any time I showed him a recruiting letter I received, I realized it was because the letters from colleges were pouring in for me but not for him. I decided not to show him, or anyone, another letter. Chris would wind up going to a small university in South Carolina, and we’d lose touch. Moral of the story: Don’t get too excited about your success in front of others. Many don’t care if you succeed, and quite a few hope you’ll fail.
Besides, I couldn’t waste time on what others might think of me. There was too much work to do. In the summer between 10th and 11th grades, I competed in AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) ball against a number of the top players in Washington, DC, and Virginia. DC, in those days, was the crossover capital of high school basketball; I had never seen such crazy handles with the ball anywhere. The best part of AAU was getting a chance to play in big cities and to meet kids from all over South Carolina, including one from Greenville, about 150 miles northwest of Dalzell.
The kid was Kevin Garnett.
Kevin and I had a mutual friend who picked me up first, then him, and drove us to Columbia to play against guys from the University of South Carolina. The trip took a couple of hours, but that’s what you do if you’re 16 years old and you want to find out how you match up against players older than you. The two of us got to know each other quite well that summer.
“Man, you’re like Jordan,” Kevin used to say. “Every time he scores 30, you score 35.”
Believe me, I was no Jordan, but I was clearly a better player my junior year, and the summer in AAU ball was one of the reasons. I found the aggression I didn’t have in my sophomore year, and it also had to do
with how assertive I had become in my relationship with Rosalind. I was gaining confidence by the day.
Our team was also getting better. We knew which plays worked and which ones didn’t. Coach Smith let us play. He said less than ever.
He was also a huge help with the recruiting letters. Some coaches, when they have a player who is attracting attention from top schools, see the situation as an opportunity—for themselves, not just the kid.
You want him to play for you, fine, you have to take me too.
Conversely, if a school doesn’t take the coach, the implication is: I’ll make sure the kid goes somewhere else.
That wasn’t Coach Smith. Did he want to advance in his career? You bet. Except he would advance the right way, and not exploit me, or anyone, as a bargaining chip. I was so naive, it wasn’t until years later, when I was a pro, that I learned about the deals recruiters routinely made, as they say, under the table: offering cars, women, cash, you name it. No one offered me a dime, and that’s probably because they didn’t believe I was good enough. The Class of 1993 included players a lot more heralded than I was, such as Rasheed Wallace, Jerry Stackhouse, and Jeff McInnis, all of whom would one day play in the NBA.
There were times I, too, wondered if I was good enough, like in the summer after 11th grade when I attended the annual Nike camp in Indianapolis. Seeing a gap between the other players and myself, I realized I couldn’t just beat the competition back in South Carolina; I had to dominate. It really hit me when I wasn’t selected for the All-Star Game near the end of camp. Which, I should add, was to be shown on television.
I watched the game from the bleachers next to Stephon Marbury, who was only going into 10th grade.
“Yo,” Stephon said. “I saw you play all week. You’re better than they are.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I told him. “Run down to the floor and tell them to put me in?”
From the look on his face, that’s exactly what he thought I should do. Little could either of us have imagined that, in four years’ time, he and I would be back-to-back picks in the NBA Draft, and be traded for each other the same night. We hadn’t made it to college yet.
I left Indianapolis more dedicated than ever. As a senior, I was the Gatorade Player of the Year in South Carolina, averaging 28.5 points, 13 rebounds, and six assists. I even was given a nickname, “Candy Man,” from a coach who was also the public-address announcer.
“Everything you do is so sweet,” he told me.
Word traveled fast, especially in a small state like ours. Since our gym seated about only 650, people would squeeze in the side door and stand up the whole time. They came to find out for themselves if I was as good as they had been told. First, they had to find out who I was, period. This was years before the Internet, where your face is everywhere. I’d be warming up before a game when I’d overhear fans searching for me:
“That’s him over there.”
“No, it’s not. That other guy is Ray Allen.”
“You’re wrong. He’s the one by the free-throw line.”
I preferred to have the attention on the team, not on me. We deserved it. By this point, we were among the finest in the state.
Besides playing together since eighth grade, some of my teammates and I competed in the games at Shaw and on courts near my house. As we got taller—I was now six-five, while the others were six-three or six-two—we learned to play above the rim, practicing at first with a volleyball, which we could palm, before moving on to the real thing. Every so often we’d face a team with a player who was six-eight or six-nine, but it was never anybody who could take over a game.
We were simply more athletic than everybody else. In one of our set plays, I’d throw the ball to Ronnie Morant, who we called “T,” on the block, and dart down the lane. He’d toss it high in the air, and I’d slam it home. The other team knew what was coming but couldn’t stop it.
Sometimes teams didn’t know what was coming. We had this one trick play where it appeared that T would be the in-bounds passer, but as soon as the ref handed him the ball, I’d say loud enough for the guy guarding me to hear: “I’m supposed to take the ball out.” The defender would relax, for an instant, and that was all I needed. T would hit me as I cut to the hoop for an easy dunk.
We went 23-4 during the regular season and kept the momentum going in the playoffs, which were held at Morris College in Sumter. In the state championship game against James F. Byrnes on the University of South Carolina campus, we grabbed a 40–14 lead in the first half, and began to celebrate. Prematurely.
With only a few minutes to go, the lead was down to single digits. To this day, I don’t know how they came back. Fortunately, I nailed a couple of jumpers and made a dunk to seal it for us. I finished with 25 points and 15 rebounds. We were the state champions!
One would think winning the title would make us heroes in Dalzell, then and forever. Not so. No parade, no keys to the city, nothing. That said everything one needed to know about the differences between high school basketball and football in the South. Win the state in football, you’re a legend. Basketball took such a backseat that we had to take up collections to buy uniforms and shoes and to go on road trips.
Yet I wasn’t bitter. If anything, I was grateful for my years in South Carolina—grateful for discovering the courage I wasn’t sure I had and, of course, for the woman I fell in love with and the girl we were raising together.
In California, I could do little wrong, but in South Carolina, I came to realize there would always be people testing me, and the question was: Would I become what some hoped I would be, a failure, or what I hoped to be—a winner, on and off the court? That’s the challenge facing all of us: to overcome the doubts others have about us and the doubts we ourselves have.
I changed in South Carolina for good. And for the better.
4
Go North, Young Man
The first letters came junior year from small schools mostly in the South: Furman, Liberty, Mercer, Winthrop, East Carolina, Campbell University, UNC-Charlotte, and East Tennessee State.
I was thrilled to open every one of them, no matter the size or prestige of the school. Barring any mishaps during my senior year at Hillcrest, I would be going to college, and that was something I never took for granted. Most of the kids I played with in high school would have given anything for one letter. From anywhere.
Going to college would also mean I could think of a career in the NBA. Sure, the idea had been in the back of my mind for years, ever since the day I saw Michael Jordan on TV against the Knicks, but it seemed closer to fantasy than reality. Think about it: No one from Dalzell, South Carolina, had ever made it to the NBA. Why would I, Walter Ray Allen Jr., the son of an Air Force technician, be any different?
I had been too busy, in any case, with each step along the way to get ahead of myself. I have long believed that if you focus too much on the next level, you will not succeed at the current level. Give your very best in the situation you’re in, and the rest will take care of itself.
Of the schools I heard from, I was most intrigued by UNC-Charlotte, the 49ers, who seemed more interested in me than the others were. So what if it wasn’t a top-tier program? The 49ers competed against a lot of quality teams, which would give me the exposure I was looking for, and there was no reason, if I performed well enough, I couldn’t go from there to the NBA. That’s what Cedric Maxwell, who played for the Boston Celtics in the 1970s and ’80s, did.
I also liked the city. Charlotte was far enough away, roughly 100 miles, that I would feel I was on my own, yet close enough for friends and family to visit. I could definitely see myself going there.
Besides, I did not expect to hear from the bigger colleges. No one in Dalzell did. In football, yes. Basketball, never.
I was wrong.
Not long afterward, I heard from one major school after another: Wake Forest. Virginia. Southern Cal. Villanova. And so on. Then I was really excited. I put each letter in a large tr
easure chest that belonged to my dad. The chest was a time capsule for me. I knew, even then, there would be a lot of ups and downs through the years, but whatever happened, I would always have the chest to remind me of this special time in my life.
There were occasions, I must admit, when it was overwhelming. Wake Forest sent me a letter almost every day, and not just about their basketball team. They sent articles about other teams to show that I would be a part of the entire university community. After a while, I stopped reading them.
Some letters seemed to have been written by someone who had attended one of my games; the details were specific and the sentiments personal. Others felt like they’d been written by a secretary in a coach’s office, who wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Ray Allen and Ray Alston. It reminds me of the guys, and you know the type, who hit on a dozen different girls at the same time. One is bound to go out with them.
I’ve forgotten some of the schools that wrote, or called, but there is one call I will never forget.
“You’re a hell of a player,” Dean Smith said.
Yes, Dean Smith, the coach at North Carolina. No figure in the sport was more revered than he was.
“I want you to know I think you’ll have a great career,” he went on. “We’re not recruiting you, because we have someone on our roster at your position. If we didn’t, we would definitely be interested in you. I wish you the best of luck.”
If that wasn’t the epitome of class, I don’t know what is. And he didn’t need me. The “someone” Coach Smith was referring to was Jerry Stackhouse, who would go on to be a star for the Tar Heels.
Come senior year, the clock was ticking and I had to narrow my choices down to five. That is the maximum number of official visits the NCAA allows you to make, and I was not going to commit myself to four years at a place I never saw in person.