Buddy Hield could hear his mother’s old, green minivan’s brakes squealing from almost three streets away in his Bahamas neighborhood.

 

Hield understood he had best run if it was after dark in the summer.

Determined to “knock the devil” out of 12-year-old Buddy for sneaking out of the house—again—after she’d fallen asleep after a long day of cleaning houses, Jackie Swann sped around the corner and approached the Pinedale Road basketball court. There were evenings when Hield hid under a neighboring gazebo and his companions made up stories about where he was. At other occasions, he would take a shortcut home and get into bed before Jackie came back.

Hield claims that at least then he could receive his reprimand in secret rather than in front of his pals.

Even though Buddy could be annoying at times, Jackie secretly felt proud of her kid. Buddy had found passion and a purpose in basketball, while other youths in the Bahamas experimented with marijuana, dropped out of school, and loitered on the streets. At the age of 11, he started telling his family and friends that he would play in the NBA like Kobe Bryant and all the other celebrities he looked up to on television.

The majority of people at Eight Mile Rock rolled their eyes and told Hield that his idea was unrealistic. Teenage guys who were fortunate enough to graduate were expected to pursue careers in auto mechanics, welding, or construction—all of which were emphasized at the local high schools. Being a professional athlete was practically unheard of, and they hardly ever went to college.Actually, Mychal Thompson and Rick Fox are the only two Bahamian-born players in history who have had successful NBA careers.

But to Buddy, none of that mattered.

“People laughed at him,” says 26-year-old Jalisa, Hield’s older sister. “He was not taken seriously by anyone. No one had faith in him.She stops.

“Ask them what they think now.”

After a journey that has taken him from the Bahamas to a prep school in Wichita to the University of Oklahoma, where he begins his senior season with preseason All-American honors for the No. 8-ranked Sooners, Hield is, in fact, just months away from fulfilling his NBA promise.

The current Big 12 Player of the Year, if he keeps getting better, is likely to be chosen in the first round of the draft next summer. This would instantly make the 6’4″ Hield a millionaire and, more importantly for him, a success symbol for the kids of a nation that desperately needs role models.

Many would argue that he has already attained that position, of course.

“He used to run through these streets telling everyone he was gonna be like Kobe,” Jackie remembers over the phone from her Freeport home. “Now, all the kids around here say they want to be like Buddy.”

It’s just incredible. Buddy Hield searched for someone who believed in him for years.

Currently, nobody does not.

When he travels to his home country, bystanders beg for his signatures and photos, and children swarm to his free basketball clinics. Not long ago, however, Buddy Hield was not very well-liked in the Bahamas.

People in his former area, in particular.Mr. Benny, who lived next door to the house where Hield resided with his mother, grandmother, and six siblings, was one of them. When Hield started shooting baskets on the street after cutting out the bottom of a plastic milk crate and nailing it to a wooden light pole, there were initially no complaints. However, Mr. Benny was so frustrated with Hield’s practice sessions as they went farther into the night that he threw shattered glass all over the patch of soil where the 13-year-old practiced his jump shoots.

Hield picked up on it. The following night, he positioned his homemade basket 50 yards down the block in front of a house that was occupied by Carol, a friend of his mother’s. However, the experiment was short-lived as well, as Carol, who was unable to sleep due to Hield’s incessant dribbling, rushed onto her porch while wearing pajamas and let out a wail that could be heard for blocks.

She shouted, “Buuudddyyy!” with a Bahamian accent. “Stop makin’ dat noise and take ya skin home to ya momma!”

Jackie did not approve of her son’s staying out so late, and she detested the fact that he was bothering the neighbors. However, after a series of child abductions and sexual assaults in Eight Mile Rock, a seaside community 14 miles west of Freeport, she had come to the realization that Buddy’s passion could not be controlled and that it was more reassuring to have him nearby rather than three blocks away in the park.

When Hield was eleven years old, Jackie relocated the family into her mother’s house after divorcing his father, Vincent. The home was little. On a queen-sized mattress, Jackie, Hield, and his six siblings slept head-to-foot, with one of them nearly always falling to the ground. Every sibling had a specific area of the room where they could store their clothing and other possessions. Jackie had three jobs, but money was tight.

The family stayed close and together throughout it all. There were prayers (and sometimes a Bible study) each morning before breakfast; chores and homework came before television. If Jackie needed to dole out a spanking from time to time to maintain discipline, so be it. Mostly, though, she was known for her kind soul.

Buddy says he still remembers his mom telling her children to scoot over in the backseat of her van so she could offer rides to strangers walking in the scorching summer heat. And Jackie took pleasure in cooking for kids in the neighborhood on nights when they may not have eaten otherwise.

The example Jackie set rubbed off on her children.

“We’ve never seen the inside of a jail cell,” Jalisa says. “My mom never went to the courthouse because of one of us. No one ever called to tell her one of us was stealing. She raised us the right way.”

Says Buddy: “We were blessed.”

Uncomfortable as the living situation may have been, relatives credit Buddy for creating an environment void of tension and angst. When his sisters began fighting over space in the crowded bed, Buddy would crack a joke to lighten the mood. If everyone seemed stressed out at dinner, Hield would break into song or do an impersonation—anything to make people laugh.”I was the same way around my friends,” Hield says. “People saw me as the comedian, the entertainer. They just thought I was a goofy kid who smiled a lot, a kid who was all about laughing and joking.

“I think that’s why most people didn’t take me seriously. They didn’t know that I had a killer instinct inside of me, where I knew I was going to make it out.”

So obsessed with basketball was Hield that he often paid his siblings (or bribed them with candy) to do his weekly chores so he could spend more time on the court. With only one television in the house, he often woke up 30 minutes early each morning to seize command of the remote control so he could watch highlights from the previous night’s NBA games. “Otherwise,” Hield says, “I’d be stuck watching Nickelodeon.”

Other mornings saw Hield leave his house for the park around 7 a.m. Toting a water jug in one hand while bouncing a ball with the other, Hield would coax friends out of bed along the way and then spend the entire afternoon practicing the moves and footwork he’d seen from stars such as Kobe, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade on TV.

Still, as hard as he worked on his own, Hield realized he needed help. He wanted to learn the X’s and O’s of basketball from high-level coaches who would demand the best from him. That type of tutelage didn’t exist in the Bahamas, where youth-league contests resembled pickup games.

But it was available across the ocean.

Before he even got to high school, Hield was telling his mother the only way he could achieve his basketball dream was to move to the United States. Jackie called Hield’s grandmother, who lived in Naples, Florida, but she wasn’t in a position to take him in. And with so many relatives in the Bahamas, moving the entire family wasn’t a consideration, either.

With no other options, Hield accepted that his best—and perhaps only—chance of training overseas was to get discovered during a basketball showcase that took place each spring in the Bahamas. With numerous college and high school scouts watching from the stands, the event provides exposure to players who would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed.

“I showed up every year,” Hield says. “Eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade. Each time, I’d play well and say, ‘This is the year it’s going to happen for me,’ but then I’d leave and never hear a thing.”

Hield, though, refused to get discouraged.

Instead, he just kept going back.

Notebook in hand, Kyle Lindsted was prepared to scout an afternoon of basketball games when he walked into a Grand Bahama gym in the spring of 2010.

But as he settled into his seat, Lindsted’s attention was drawn away from the court and into the stands, where a group of teenagers continued to erupt into roars of laughter as one of their friends told jokes and danced and bro-hugged anyone in his path. Without ever seeing him dribble or shoot, Lindsted asked around and found out the kid with the charisma was 16-year-old Chavano Hield, a 6’1″, 120-pound guard who was nicknamed “Buddy.”

“It was love at first sight,” says Lindsted, then the head coach at Sunrise Christian Academy, a prep school in Wichita, Kansas. “He was the most popular guy in the gym, and he hadn’t even stepped on the court. People flocked to him. Everyone wanted to be around him. He seemed like a guy you’d want on your team.”

After watching Hield swish virtually every shot he attempted in a scrimmage the following night, Lindsted introduced himself and then drove to Buddy’s home to meet with Jackie. “I’m sorry,” he told her, “but I can’t go back (to the United States) without your son. He’s too good.”

Difficult as it was to allow her baby boy to leave home, Jackie wasn’t going to stop Buddy from chasing his dream. With the agreement that he’d move at the end of the summer, Hield spent the next four months in the Bahamas, waking up at 5 a.m. each day for weightlifting sessions and conditioning drills on the beach with Richard Bryanen, a man whom Jackie had been dating for a few years and would later became Buddy’s stepfather. A construction site supervisor, Richard had become the male role model Hield lacked in his early childhood.

“He told me that I couldn’t be the goofy kid anymore, at least not all the time,” Hield says. “He told me I needed to be mature and focused in everything I do. He said it was time to do what I’d set out to do.”

In August, Jackie and Richard flew with Buddy to Wichita to help him move into his new home. Their initial plan was to spend two nights with Buddy in a hotel suite before returning to the Bahamas. But after the first night, Buddy told them to go ahead and leave, that he was ready to start his new life.

“So we left him there in that room, all by himself,” Jackie says. “He was ready to become a man.”