On a vocabulary exam in English class at South Stokes High School in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, Kenny Dennard was asked to define the word “hoard.” He wrote: “What a woman might do on Saturday night to make money.” That was Kenny Dennard — the class clown, the wisecracker, the kid who memorized Johnny Carson bits from The Tonight Show and specialized in basic class disruption. Nobody in Walnut Cove saw what was coming next.
Kenneth Stephen Dennard was born on October 18, 1958, in King, North Carolina — a small town in the foothills of the Sauratown Mountains, about twenty miles north of Winston-Salem. The Dennards were a basketball family. All the men were 6-foot-5 or taller. Kenny’s older brother Tommy played at South Stokes and then collegiately at Catawba. But as a sophomore, Kenny was stuck at 6-3, pudgy, with a boyish face topped by a Dutch boy haircut. He seemed to take nothing seriously.
Then, in the summer of 1975, everything changed. A high school classmate who hadn’t seen him in months watched a lean, lanky 6-foot-7 body unfold from a car. Dennard had shot up four inches, slimmed down, started working out, and spent the summer at Wake Forest basketball camp, where he began holding his own against talented high school and college players. “He had decided to be a great player,” the classmate later wrote, “and was willing to do whatever it might take to get there.”
For two seasons at South Stokes, Dennard played at a level few could match in rural North Carolina. He was a 6-8 forward with guard skills — a prototype, in some ways, for the kind of versatile big man that wouldn’t become common for another decade. Duke came calling, and in the fall of 1977, Dennard arrived in Durham alongside Gene Banks — the most famous recruit in program history. Banks was the headliner. Dennard was the running mate. Together, they would change Duke basketball forever.