Hello and welcome to the hoop collective podcast. We talk about the NBA pleasure to be joined

on this Tuesday afternoon by my colleague at ESPN and the author of a new book, The

Education of Kendrick Perkins. Kendrick Perkins, nobody calls him Kendrick where I come from.

You call him Kendrick. He looks at you strange and you don't want to look at you strange.

Mr. Perkins, welcome to the hoop collective. We appreciate you having me on my brother. Thank you.

He's joining us from Houston where he lives. Perck, I don't really want to talk that much about

the league right now. You and I do that all day. I want to talk about your career. So, and as a

fascinating one. But when you were a teenager in Houston, you were an absolute stud, right?

Like you were, how many points of game did you have just seen in your high school? So, so I have

is 29 16 rebounds and nine blocks. And I keep telling people when do you you don't just go to the

university or cash without putting up numbers. So this is the error you could go to the NBA right away

and you did. But before you played in the NBA, you did the AAU circuit, right? And who are some of

the teams that you played on out of that? You know, away from where your home was in Houston? So, so

born and raised them on my Texas, I played with the Houston hoops. Majority of my AAU

time, I played with NDEB and landing smith. Just a few names to throw out there. We played about four or

five years together. I played with Oakland soldiers with the bronze and and Leon Pope. And I played

against Braun a lot. It was always the Houston hoops and all how your shooting stars that met up

in the championships of the AAU tournament, whether it was in Orlando, Disney World Wide

of Sports or whether it was in Vegas or the Boo Williams or the Peas jam, we always end up

meeting up in the championship and I always came out victorious. Yeah, I mean, the bronze team was

good, but you know, with all due respect to my Ohio roots, you know, we didn't produce basketball

players like they produced in Texas or in California. You know, the death wasn't there just to be fair.

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