Growing Up ... Darnell Jackson

In today's Growing Up, the man they call "D-Block" talks about how he rose from the Boys and Girls Club in Oklahoma City through the college ranks and landed with the Cavaliers ...

I wouldn’t say … I had one particular great coach coming up. I just took bits and pieces from every coach that taught me something – starting out with my first AAU team. The coaches with that team, they helped me a lot – showing me how to post up and showing me how hard I had to work.

From AAU, I moved on to … Athletes First and Coach Holmes and then my high school coach, Coach Gary Wright. They showed me a lot. They showed me what I had to do to get ready.

Growing up, a lot of people thought … I wasn’t going to make it in basketball. A lot of people never thought I’d go D-1, so I turned all that negative stuff into a positive.

I didn’t start playing until … freshman year of high school. And when I wasn’t playing at a young age, people were saying that I was a waste of height. But now I turned my life into something.

I didn’t want to be that guy … who came back to the gym and said, ‘I used to do this, I used to do that.’ I wanted to be that guy who said I graduated high school, got my degree in college. I went on to win the National Championship and made it to the NBA and now I’m playing with the one of the league’s best teams that’s contending for the NBA Championship.

In the eighth grade I was just playing football … and my mentor at the Boys and Girls club said he wasn’t going to let me waste my life. So every day, he’d come pick me up at the house and take me home after the gym. And he’d make me play every day.

If I got into it with one of the guys in the gym … he’d take me into the back to fight. He said you should never back down from anybody. And I think that helped me out a lot, it gave me the courage not to be scared of anybody – on the court or off the court.

I had my growth spurt … in ninth grade. When I got there, I was 6-6 and I’d say by the end of my freshman year, I was 6-8. I was already big. Yeah, I was a very fat, fat boy.

I have … two sisters and one brother. One sister is older than me and my little sister is still in college. She’s 20. And my brother, Evan, is 18. My brother played football for a little bit, but it just wasn’t him. You can’t force him into something he doesn’t want to do – it’s his life.

I remember the first time … that I dunked. I was at the Boys and Girls club in McKinley, Oklahoma. We were just playing around and my mentor, Cory, threw me a lob and I dunked it. The place went nuts. And when I got to Northwest HS, in my freshman year and got my first dunk, that’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to dunk every time. I didn’t want to do anything else but dunk.