Written by: Keifer Sykes, PG, Korea

THE JOURNEY

When I first started playing basketball, it was just for fun. The idea was to play whenever and wherever I had the chance, which at the time was the playground across the street from my project building. We would dribble around on the woodchips acting as if we were playing in front of thousands of fans and shoot the ball in the spaces in-between the monkey bars. At the time I never thought I would make it outside of my block to play basketball because on the South Side of Chicago, you hear all about the broken dream. Makes you think that dreams just don’t come true. What you see is reality and what I saw was gangs, jails, drugs (that a large number of people I knew fell victim to), and everything else you hear about when you grow up poor in the neighbor“hood”.