12-10-2007, 01:44 PM
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#1 (permalink)
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Your Humble Homer, Seuss
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Inside a computer, touching gadgets
Age: 18
Posts: 9,992
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Skinner's Journey
Quote:
INDIANAPOLIS - With a shaved head, two-tone goatee and muscles like a boxer's on his 6-foot-9 frame, the Suns' Brian Skinner hardly plays like a big man who has had his toughness questioned.
After nine NBA seasons, it would not seem that the Suns' newfound enforcer ever would have struggled with his place on the court.
But baseball was Skinner's first love in his football-crazy hometown of Temple, Texas. He tried playing football, but nobody on the freshman team could throw as far as the spindly wide receiver could run.
He was no brute. He was a 6-footer put on the third string of a "B" freshman basketball team after playing point guard in junior high.
"I could dribble the ball," Skinner said. "I just got away from it."
Growing 9 inches during high school will do that. His outfielder days ended when Harry Miller, his high school basketball coach and later his coach at Baylor, implored Skinner to commit to realizing his basketball potential, figuring he would grow into his huge hands and feet.
Miller met one day with Skinner's mother, Gladys, and put a pair of scissors on his desk.
"These are to cut the umbilical cord," he told her, or the "apron strings," as she recalls it.
"I didn't really know that much of what I was doing then," Skinner said. "At that time, I was easily influenced."
Gladys and Skinner's father, James, did not know what they had, especially as they watched his older sister, Pam, "beat him up" regularly on the court.
Skinner was uncoordinated, battling knee pain caused by Osgood-Schlatter disease, a condition caused by his growth spurt. He had to learn to be aggressive, difficult for a kid who preferred fishing over other activities.
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Skinner's Journey
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