Every story is derived from an older story, and Wendell Carter Jr.’s begins before he was born. His father, Wendell Carter Sr., was born to a convicted felon in Atlanta. Having a child out of wedlock was a violation of her parole, so after the baby was born, she abandoned him in an apartment. Police broke in and found an infant alone, his diapers soiled. He was sent to an orphanage. He was there until he was five or six years old, when a woman adopted him and raised him as her own. That woman’s gravestone is in an Atlanta cemetery.
Years later, Wendell Sr. drove his teenage son to that cemetery. They walked up to the gravestone of his adoptive mother. He immediately broke down. So did his son. That was the moment Wendell Carter Jr. learned his own origin story — how his father had been abandoned, found by police, raised in an orphanage, and saved by a woman who chose to love him. It was the day Wendell Jr. understood why his father was so present, so involved, so determined to never let his own child feel alone. I could have easily ran with the wrong crowd, Wendell Sr. said. But I was so focused on basketball. That was the only thing that kept me going.
Basketball saved Wendell Sr. He grew to 6’6 with a 42-inch vertical and played college basketball at Delta State University in Mississippi. After college, he played professionally in the Dominican Republic. One day in Atlanta, Kylia’s sister introduced them as Wendell was leaving for a summer pro-am game — a league where Dominique Wilkins and Spud Webb played. Kylia came to watch. She was 6’5, a basketball player at the University of Mississippi. I thought he was cute, to be honest, Kylia said. But any excuse to go watch basketball. At halftime, there was a slam-dunk contest. Twenty-six years of marriage later, Wendell Sr.’s dunk contest trophy still sits on the piano in their Atlanta home.
When Wendell Carter Jr. came out of the womb — 11 pounds, 8 ounces, 26 inches long — you could say he was born to play basketball. As a toddler, he ran up and down the floor at his father’s church league games, mimicking everything his dad did. At Pace Academy in Atlanta, he became a dominant force: 22.7 points, 15.5 rebounds, and 5.5 blocks as a senior, a Georgia Class AA state championship with 30 points and 20 rebounds in the title game, the Morgan Wootten National Player of the Year award for character and academics, a 3.8 GPA, the Lance and Shield Award as Pace’s top scholar-athlete, a member of the National Honor Society, and an actor in the school play Thoroughly Modern Millie.
He also seriously considered Harvard. His mother, who valued education above everything, pushed hard for the Ivy League. Carter took his first official visit to Cambridge, enjoyed the diversity and academic environment, and called it a great possibility. In a second-grade class, a teacher had asked students what they wanted to be when they grew up. Carter wrote that he wanted to be a professional basketball player. His classmates ridiculed him. His mother still has the piece of paper. He chose Duke — the compromise between Harvard’s academics and championship basketball.