LA might be a city of angels, but only a small part of its population finds it heavenly. If you are a Beverly Hills kid, life could be all sunshine and rainbows, but if you grew up in Oakland, California, life could look grimmer than an episode of The Wire. And former NBA champion Paul Pierce knows this better than most.
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Pierce grew up in Oakland before moving to Inglewood, and since both areas were heavily influenced by gang culture, it would have been easy for a young kid to get pulled in. Yet somehow, Pierce managed to stay ahead of the curve.
The 2021 Basketball Hall of Fame inductee recently joined Shannon Sharpe on Club Shay Shay, where the NFL legend asked him about his childhood and how he managed to escape the gang culture despite growing up in those regions.
“That’s a story we don’t document enough,” Pierce replied, emphasizing the need for a documentary on how sports and gang culture often intertwine for inner-city kids. “It kind of went hand in hand,” he explained.
“You grow up with guys, and once you start getting older, you start forging your path, but y’all still live in the same … So you can easily get caught up. I have seen guys that were great at basketball, but they were still in the streets,” Pierce continued.
Escaping that reality, according to Pierce, depended on having the right people around and hanging out with the right kind of friends. And of course, parents need to play an extremely crucial role in a child’s development as well. For him, it was his single mother who provided that guidance.
“I saw my mom struggle … I come from a single-parent home, okay? I never met my father … One thing I always preach is that- don’t be a follower. Because I think that’s what the gangs are all about; just following each other,” he added.
When Sharpe noted that some people would say they only felt the love of a family from their gangs, Pierce said, “But if this is love, then why y’all beating my a** to get on?”
“If this is love, then why are you asking to put my life on the line for dangerous acts? I am getting in a car and there’s a drive by, I can go to jail,” he continued, revealing that he had once been caught in one such situation before. “My life flashed before my eyes and I never got in that car again,” remembered the former NBA champion.
Pierce went on to say that as kids, they never really thought about these things because this was just their life. Seeing friends get killed can leave lifelong scars. “I saw a lot of my young friends get killed … I went to 3 funerals in high school. That’s not normal.”
Having lived through this, Pierce chillingly recalls just wanting to make it to 21. “Because the statistics was- most young black kids before the age of 21 would be dead or in jail.”
He also revealed that his friends would help him out of tough situations because they believed he could be the exception to the rule. They wanted him to get out and succeed, partly because, by their own admission, it would have felt like they had also succeeded.
Well, it takes a village to raise a kid, and Pierce’s neighbourhood, no matter how rough it was, did rather well!
