Glen Rice attacked the game of basketball with supreme con dence on its biggest stages.
In high school, he led Flint Northwestern to back-to-back state Class A championships in 1984 and 1985.
In college, he stepped up as a senior leader and scored 184 points during Michigan’s 1989 NCAA championship run,
a tournament record that still stands.
It was during a nationally televised game against Orlando while playing for the Miami Heat that he scored 56 points,
an NBA season-high for the 1994-95 season.
He managed to get enough shots playing with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal to average 11.5 points in the 2000
NBA Finals, helping the Los Angeles Lakers win the championship.
These are not the accomplishments of a shrinking violet who gets rattled when the spotlight shines the brightest. And,
yet, Rice was once a shy kid who was reluctant to test his playground skills in organized basketball.
It took some prodding by a player who would become a high school rival, Flint Central’s Terence Greene, to get him
started when the two future stars were in elementary school.
“We were attending Garfield Elementary,” Rice recalls. “He made me go and play on the team. That’s how our
friendship began, as well. I liked basketball, but I wasn’t in love with it at the time. I was just trying to play baseball and football. It kind of grew from there, because I just got better and better. Each time, people had to almost push me to go out for teams.”
Rice didn’t even play organized basketball in seventh and eighth grade. It took further coaxing to get him to go out for the team at Holmes Middle School when he was in ninth grade.
said. “I always had a shy personality, so I guess that kind of held me back from just nose-diving into it right away,” Rice
By the time he entered high school as a sophomore in 1982, powers of persuasion were no longer needed to get Rice to play basketball.
