His story begins long before the basketball career that – finally – has landed him in the Naismith Hall of Fame. It begins before he even picked up a basketball. It begins, in fact, before he even arrived in the state that would nurture his greatness.
His fate was set in motion in 1952 when his father, the toughest man he would ever know, decided to bail on the rigged game he had been playing as a sharecropper in Alabama and move his family northward, joining the Great Migration of five million African-Americans who escaped the south between 1915 and 1960 in search of better jobs and better lives.