Kendrick Perkins on growing up poor — to making it in the NBA

Former NBA star Kendrick Perkins was just 2 when his father, Kenneth Perkins, abandoned him and his mother and moved to New Zealand to play basketball, never to be seen again. Three years later, in December 1989, his mother, Ercell Minix, would be dead, shot in the neck by her best friend as she worked in a beauty salon. The pair had reportedly been arguing for a while when things took a violent turn.

“It’s not something to get over — it’s a loss I carry with me to this day,” writes Perkins in his new memoir, “The Education of Kendrick Perkins” (written with Seth Rogoff, St. Martin’s Press). “Before she was killed, it was just the two of us. She wouldn’t go anywhere without me.”

With his father absent and his mother dead, Perkins was taken in by his maternal grandparents, Mary and Raymond Lewis, at their home in Beaumont, a small port city in southeast Texas. 

Raymond worked as a janitor while Mary earned $40 a week cleaning houses. Money was tight; Perkins was determined to make it in basketball, just so he could provide for his grandparents. 

Indeed, it’s the very reason he didn’t go to college. “My priority was to make sure my grandparents were straight,” he writes.

With a father measuring 6ft 6” and a mother of 6ft 1”, it was almost inevitable that Perkins would follow in his dad’s footsteps. By eighth grade, he was already 6ft 7.

But while his height made Perkins the standout performer on Ozen High School’s basketball team, it also presented problems.

With his grandparents strapped for cash, his rapid growth spurts meant his shoes were always too small, as was his altar boy’s outfit when he attended Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church. “My pants, even when newly bought, would quickly become too short, rising over the ankles to become the dreaded ‘highwaters,’ at the time an embarrassing sign of poverty and an utter lack of style,” he writes.

In 2003, at the age of 18, Perkins left Beaumont and drove to Boston in the 1993 Lincoln Town Car his old trainer, Coach Butte, had given him. After a summer where he averaged over 700 practice shots a day, Perkins was the 27^th pick in the first round of that year’s NBA draft — LeBron James was the first pick — and while the Memphis Grizzlies took him, they traded him to the Boston Celtics. 

Now Perkins had a base salary of $900,000, rising to $1.2 million in his third year. By the time the Celtics took him for a fourth year, his annual wage had hit $1.7 million (“A lot of lettuce in 2006 for a not-yet-twenty-two-year-old kid from Beaumont, Texas,” he writes.) The money allowed him to fulfill his childhood promise. “I took care of them right away,” he says, of being able to provide for his grandparents after signing his first contract.

By the 2006/07 season, though, Perkins had bagged “some serious NBA money” — a four-year deal worth $16 million.

And he enjoyed it.

There were five-figure bets with his teammate Paul Pierce, including one to see how many push-ups he could do — in the snow. Then there was the ‘billionaire’s table’ on the team plane, reserved for him, Pierce and Celtics’ legend Kevin Garnett. 

And there were some big nights out. “There was one epic night in Memphis when a bunch of us hit up a club and didn’t leave until we’d collectively dropped around $75,000. You’ll have to imagine the rest of that story,” he says.

When Perkins and the Celtics beat Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers in 2008 to take their first NBA title in 22 years, he headed straight to the car showroom with teammate Rajon Rondo. “When our championship bonuses came in, I decided it was time to blow some cash,” he says. “Rondo and I went to a Boston area car dealership and spent our entire bonuses on new Bentleys. I got myself a blue four-door and Rondo pulled off the lot behind me in a sleek two-door black model.”

But it’s not just a story about sporting stardom. Throughout the book, the ESPN analyst charts his life and career against a backdrop of poverty and inequality, of discrimination and blatant racism. From the Jim Crow laws through to the Great Migration and the civil rights movement that shaped his upbringing, he highlights the perpetual struggle of black men in America, from slavery right through to the present day. “For many readers, Beaumont, Texas, of the 1930s and 1940s might seem like ancient history, but to me it might as well be yesterday,” he writes. “For eighteen years, I saw this history etched into my grandparents’ faces. I saw the effects of it around me. I still do.” 

For Perkins, the memory of his mother continues to spur him on — and it still hurts. 

After one game in 2007, he was driving with his wife Vanity when he thought how special it would have been to share his “absolutely blessed life” with his late mother. “The yearning I had was so intense I thought it might split me open. 

“Before I knew it, I was crying like I’d never done before. Decades of living with the tragedy of her death came pouring out of me as Vanity sat beside me, holding me, keeping me steady. 

“My mother’s presence in my soul, even in her absence, is a North Star.”