Danny Green grew up in Long Island, New York, about 50 miles away from Madison Square Garden. As a kid going to basketball camps though, the NBA felt a million miles away.
Green remembers attending local summer camps that didn’t always have serious instruction that he craved or traveling long distances to attend top-flight camps.
Now, Green hopes to change that for kids in Texas.
He’s traveling almost 2,000 miles within the state to hold four basketball camps around Texas this month. The Danny Green Skills Clinic presented by H-E-B will be in Austin on July 9 and 10, Laredo on July 12, Corpus Christi on July 14 and El Paso on July 16 and 17.
To sign up for Green’s clinics, visit www.dannygreennba.com.
“I wasn’t able to get opportunities like this when I was a kid,” Green said. “I had to really go further out and seek out that instruction. I hope I can give those who are coming some type of inspiration or hope.”
Green has been a regular at Spurs Camps in San Antonio since he became a starter with the team in the 2011-12 season. He has emerged as one of the league’s top defenders, while also shooting a career .403 percentage from 3-point range.
He’s since started his own summer clinics, with this year’s version extending from El Paso to Austin.
The clinics continue a busy summer for Green, as he was in Spain last month on a trip with the NBA, meeting international fans and leading some clinics overseas. He watched Game 7 of the NBA Finals live from London at 4 a.m. while on a layover.
Green said each clinic will feature about six hours of drills with him, along with the chance for campers to ask him about his NBA journey.
He said the clinics are also an opportunity for him to reach out to legions of Spurs fans around Texas who don’t have a chance to come to San Antonio for games.
“A lot of guys have made it from a lot of different places, and not necessarily because they had parents with great genes,” Green said. “They worked really hard, and they used the resources they had as well as they could.”
At a Spurs Camp last month, Green was peppered with questions from teenagers who reminded him a little of himself. They asked all about shooting and defense and about the skills Green gained to go from a D-League player who was cut multiple times to a starter on a championship team.
Green told them that he wasn’t blessed with the size or talent of LeBron James, but he made sure to be one of the hardest workers. He told them, “you have to work when everybody else is sleeping,” and they all listened.
“If a kid’s trying to be the next Danny Green, that’s weird for me,” he said. “That’s surreal, humbling and hard to put in a thought process. Hopefully I can be that inspiration for them, and maybe they’ll be even better than me someday.”
lchan@attcenter.com
Twitter:@lornechan