The first thing he wanted, as a boy in the Bolivian Andes at thirteen thousand feet, was a National Geographic magazine. The second thing, when he finally got one, was a book about Antarctica. His parents — both Americans, both involved in service work — had founded a rural health project in the Bolivian highlands, and Lester Baker Perry spent his earliest childhood wandering on family hikes that started at thirteen thousand feet of elevation and rose to seventeen thousand. He learned to walk on terrain where most American kids learn to walk on linoleum. He grew up watching glaciers that the rest of the world only saw in pictures.
In fourth grade, the family came back to the United States. They landed in Lake Junaluska, the small Methodist retreat-center community in Haywood County, North Carolina, just east of the Smokies. The Bolivian highlands had been replaced by the Southern Appalachians — a much gentler kind of mountain, but a mountain country all the same. Baker took to it instantly. He camped in the family yard when it snowed. He hiked in the Smokies. He kept a NOAA weather radio next to his bed, and on big-snow days he carried it to school in his pocket — and got in trouble for monitoring incoming storms during class. He could, as an adult, still recite every major snowfall event of his Haywood County childhood by date and amount. The kid in the magazine subscription was paying close attention.
He went to Tuscola High School in Waynesville, the consolidated public high school for the western half of Haywood County. He played three sports — basketball, soccer, and football. He was big for his age and got bigger — six-foot-six by his senior year. He was a basketball player who could also handle the ball, a fact that did not entirely fit the conventional NC high school template for a 6'6" power forward. He graduated from Tuscola in 1992, the year Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner won Duke's second consecutive national championship, the year Krzyzewski's basketball program was at its absolute peak.
He had been admitted to Duke. He went to Durham not because basketball had recruited him — it had not — but because he had been admitted academically and Duke was Duke. Once he got there, he did what a small number of similarly self-motivated freshmen every year do at any major program. He went to Cameron Indoor Stadium and asked to try out for the basketball team.