Henry Crawford Palmer was born in Ithaca, New York, on September 14, 1970, the youngest member of a family whose male line had run through Dartmouth College for three generations. His grandfather had been a Dartmouth man. His father had been a Dartmouth man. His older brother Walker would play basketball for the Dartmouth Big Green a few years before Crawford himself ever set foot in Hanover, New Hampshire. The Palmer family also carried a French bloodline — a piece of genealogy that would not seem to matter very much for a tall kid growing up in suburban Virginia, until it mattered very much, decades later, on a court in Sydney, Australia.
The family settled in Arlington, Virginia. Crawford grew. By the time he was a senior at Washington-Lee High School — the public school in northern Arlington whose alumni include Senator Warren Beatty's sister Shirley MacLaine and a long list of D.C.-area athletes — he was 6'9", lean, mobile for his height, with the kind of feel for the post that came from playing against decent competition in a metro area where the basketball was good. He earned a Parade All-American selection. The recruiting interest came from across the Atlantic Coast Conference and from the elite national programs that had been watching him since AAU. He chose Duke. Mike Krzyzewski had been to two of the previous three Final Fours, was about to make a fifth straight Sweet Sixteen, and had a freshman class incoming for the fall of 1988 that included a kid named Christian Laettner.