version of myself. Maybe it was a good thing that he didn’t apply different standards to me and my ability on account of my being a basketball player or being relatively new to music. Maybe absolute standards exist in the music world, but instead of spurring me on, his words discouraged me.
I didn’t have many of those kinds of experiences in school. I had several teachers whom I admired, and who I thought did an outstanding job. One thing that I’ve found about developing skills, especially early on, is that a little positive reinforcement goes a long way. I had a teacher in junior high school, Mr. Baker, who was influential in my development. He radiated such a positive energy and such a love of his subject matter that math became one of my favorites. I can now see why it was. I was always a pretty realistic kind of guy. In math, there were clean-cut answers. You were either right or wrong. There were no “yes, but . . .” responses as there were when I was in English class and someone offered up an opinion or explanation about a story we had read. That was one of the things I liked about basketball. You kept score. You knew who won or lost. Now that I think about it, that was probably one of the other reasons I don’t remember how we did in the band competition. I know that scores were given, but it wasn’t as if some electronic device was measuring the airwaves and determining that Parkview High School’s concert band hit 97 percent of its notes in tune / on key. That was better than the next school’s band, which achieved a score of 94 percent. Music didn’t work that way, and as much as I enjoyed playing it, and still enjoy listening to it, I’m not temperamentally suited for it.
None of us are one-dimensional. Frequently, people want to know a lot about us professional athletes, and they judge us for things we do off the court as well as on the court. I’ll get into some of those issues later, but I hope that people know that I’m much more than a spin move and dribble drive to the basket.
My Spanish instructor in high school, Señora Smith, was the very opposite of my private music teacher. I wasn’t the most brilliant student in her class. I was pretty good at studying vocabulary, but then we got into conjugating verbs beyond the present tense and the simple past tense into things like the past perfect and the perfect tenses. Even though I stumbled and got flustered when I couldn’t come up with the correct form of the verb, she never said, “You’ll never be any good at this.” I think she liked that I was generally quiet and respectful.
Parkview was one of the better schools in Little Rock, but we had our share of knuckleheads—including me at times—who liked nothing better than to cut up in class. I sometimes felt bad for teachers like Señora Smith who had to deal with students acting out. No one was ever really seriously out of control or violent, and I sometimes think that because she was so nice, students thought that they could take advantage of her. Because I wasn’t any trouble most of the time, she went out of her way to work with me so that I maintained a B average in her class. I wasn’t immune from schoolboy crushes, and Señora Smith’s being so nice to me turned my head a little bit. She wasn’t a young teacher fresh out of college, but her willingness to reach out to me had me feeling secretly affectionate toward her.
She wasn’t the first female who caught my eye. Back in third grade, I was head over heels for a girl named Sharona. She had long, flowing hair and a really cute smile. I remember one day deciding that instead of admiring her from afar, I would take some action. (Had I told my dad, he would have been proud of me for being so assertive and not sitting back waiting for things to happen.) It took me a while because I was confused since I also had a crush on my third-grade teacher, Miss Leslie. Do you go with the veteran or give the young kid a shot? One of
I didn’t have many of those kinds of experiences in school. I had several teachers whom I admired, and who I thought did an outstanding job. One thing that I’ve found about developing skills, especially early on, is that a little positive reinforcement goes a long way. I had a teacher in junior high school, Mr. Baker, who was influential in my development. He radiated such a positive energy and such a love of his subject matter that math became one of my favorites. I can now see why it was. I was always a pretty realistic kind of guy. In math, there were clean-cut answers. You were either right or wrong. There were no “yes, but . . .” responses as there were when I was in English class and someone offered up an opinion or explanation about a story we had read. That was one of the things I liked about basketball. You kept score. You knew who won or lost. Now that I think about it, that was probably one of the other reasons I don’t remember how we did in the band competition. I know that scores were given, but it wasn’t as if some electronic device was measuring the airwaves and determining that Parkview High School’s concert band hit 97 percent of its notes in tune / on key. That was better than the next school’s band, which achieved a score of 94 percent. Music didn’t work that way, and as much as I enjoyed playing it, and still enjoy listening to it, I’m not temperamentally suited for it.
None of us are one-dimensional. Frequently, people want to know a lot about us professional athletes, and they judge us for things we do off the court as well as on the court. I’ll get into some of those issues later, but I hope that people know that I’m much more than a spin move and dribble drive to the basket.
My Spanish instructor in high school, Señora Smith, was the very opposite of my private music teacher. I wasn’t the most brilliant student in her class. I was pretty good at studying vocabulary, but then we got into conjugating verbs beyond the present tense and the simple past tense into things like the past perfect and the perfect tenses. Even though I stumbled and got flustered when I couldn’t come up with the correct form of the verb, she never said, “You’ll never be any good at this.” I think she liked that I was generally quiet and respectful.
Parkview was one of the better schools in Little Rock, but we had our share of knuckleheads—including me at times—who liked nothing better than to cut up in class. I sometimes felt bad for teachers like Señora Smith who had to deal with students acting out. No one was ever really seriously out of control or violent, and I sometimes think that because she was so nice, students thought that they could take advantage of her. Because I wasn’t any trouble most of the time, she went out of her way to work with me so that I maintained a B average in her class. I wasn’t immune from schoolboy crushes, and Señora Smith’s being so nice to me turned my head a little bit. She wasn’t a young teacher fresh out of college, but her willingness to reach out to me had me feeling secretly affectionate toward her.
She wasn’t the first female who caught my eye. Back in third grade, I was head over heels for a girl named Sharona. She had long, flowing hair and a really cute smile. I remember one day deciding that instead of admiring her from afar, I would take some action. (Had I told my dad, he would have been proud of me for being so assertive and not sitting back waiting for things to happen.) It took me a while because I was confused since I also had a crush on my third-grade teacher, Miss Leslie. Do you go with the veteran or give the young kid a shot? One of
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