Basketball would eventually take center stage in Mike Woodson’s life.
But it would be fair to say things got off to a slow start.
The Indianapolis kid in a household of 14 didn’t get serious about the game until middle school.
“I started late,” Woodson told Clark Kellogg on an episode of Home Court that debuted on BTN Plus this week.
“When I was in the 7th grade, I tried out for the basketball team. And the coach said “Alright Woody, if you can dribble down make the layup, dribble back and make the layup, in 10 seconds, you’re on the team.’
“I was just a shy kid. Scared to really try out. But I did it.
“So, I make the team, and next day I don’t show up for practice. I didn’t even tell mom and dad I made the team. I go in the third day, and Mr. Carter was the coach and he says ‘Where were you yesterday?’
“I said ‘Well I just didn’t show up.’”
And in that moment, Woodson’s late start in the game of basketball got pushed back another year.
“He said ‘Well don’t show now, you’re off the team.’
“So I got kicked off the team. No biggie, because I never told my mom and dad that I made the team.”
Getting kicked off the 7th grade basketball team would soon become the least of Woodson’s problems.
Tragedy was about to strike his family.
His father Chester never knew his son made the 7th grade team. And he’d never get a chance to see any of his great basketball career.
“So my dad dies that year,” Woodson told Kellogg. “I had to go live with my sister until my mom can get back on her feet. Which was probably the best thing that ever happened for me.”
Another chance to play basketball came a year later, and history repeated itself.
“I go out for the eighth grade team, and I finally make it, and believe it or not, I got kicked off the eighth grade team,” Woodson said.
“I got kicked off, because I couldn’t understand coaching. He (the coach) would say run these suicides, and I would come in first every time. And he would say ‘Alright Clark you can go home, alright John you can go home.’ And I was always the last one he made go home, and I couldn’t understand that.
“So one day he did it, and I walked off the court. And he said ‘If you walk into that locker room, don’t come back.’
“And I did.”
But this time it wasn’t a secret at home that Woodson was on the basketball team.
“Now the toughest thing was going home and telling my sister and her husband, who was a man, that I had just got kicked off the team,” Woodson said. “And he came home and I told him, and he didn’t like it.
“He said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what Mike, this weekend at that club where they play you’re going to sit behind the bench and cheer.’
“I said ‘No I’m not, you’re not my daddy.’ And he said ‘As long as I’m clothing you, and feeding you, and putting a roof over your head, I’m your daddy.’
“Well where do you think I was that weekend?
“I was behind the bench.
“That was the turning point, because I could have easily gone the other way.
“I was voted back on the team the next week, because the coach saw me sitting there.
“And I never looked back from that point on.”
In just a few years, Woodson was a basketball star in Indianapolis.
At Broad Ripple High School, he averaged 20.1 points per game as a junior before posting 28.6 points an outing as a senior.
A stellar college career and lengthy run in the NBA would follow.
But after starting the game late and getting kicked off his first two teams, that all would have been very difficult to predict.
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