Cherokee Parks was named after his father’s great-grandmother, who was a member of the Cherokee Nation. He was raised in a deeply unconventional household — his mother was a vegetarian who fed her children mostly from her own garden, and his sister fronted a punk rock band. His parents divorced when he was about three, and he spent the next seven years bouncing between California, Colorado, and Nevada with his mother and two siblings before finally settling in Huntington Beach.
That nomadic, unstructured childhood would haunt Parks for decades. He later said repeatedly that he craved structure, programs, syllabuses — things he never had growing up. By the time he got to Marina High School, he was 6-foot-11 and among the most recruited big men in the country. He was a Parade All-American and, alongside Michigan’s Fab Five, one of the most sought-after players in the 1991 class. Christian Laettner even wrote him a handwritten letter in the summer of 1990 encouraging him to come to Duke.
He committed to Duke, arriving on campus in the fall of 1991 to step into the void left by Laettner’s departure. The expectations were enormous.