The list of Arkansas natives that have played or currently play in the NBA is incomplete. It is an error Glen Rice, a three-time NBA All-Star, has tried to fix since his rookie season in 1989-90 when he was selected with the fourth pick by the Miami Heat. Rice was born in Jacksonville and lived with his parents in Benton until the family moved to Flint, Michigan, when he was 12. Rice went to two different elementary schools in Benton, and both of his parents are Benton natives. Still, many are clueless about Rice’s strong Arkansas connection because of a mistake in many of his early bios.
“In a lot of my bios, it says I was born in Flint, Michigan, which is incorrect, and I moved from Benton to Flint,” says Rice, who was in the metro last weekend for three Glen Rice Basketball skills training sessions. “I just spent my teenage years [in Flint]. It was in Flint where my basketball career took off, and I think that is why it has been confused.”
The 6-foot-8, dead-eye shooter who won championships at the high school, college and NBA levels favored football and baseball while growing up in Benton.
“Back then, I was strong into football. I thought I was going to be an NFL player at that time,” Rice says. “Even when I went to Michigan, I stayed playing football until I broke my leg. It’s a strong possibility if I had stayed in Benton that I wouldn’t have played basketball. But there is a chance, too, that as I got older, I would have gravitated toward basketball.”
The broken leg was literally Rice’s big basketball break. Towering over the rest of the class, he was “forced” to play basketball as a sixth-grader in his first year in Flint, but it didn’t take. He refused to play in seventh and eighth grade, but breaking a leg while playing football the summer after eighth-grade prompted him to play basketball full time.
“When I got to Holmes Junior High School in ninth grade, a lot of guys knew me from the park playing,” Rice says. “They were like, ‘Look, man, you are going to go out for the team because it makes no sense for you not to play and make the team because you are too good.’ I was like, ‘I might as well try this.’ ... I decided I was going to give it a try, and man, I started loving it. Things were coming to me so easy. Shooting came easily. I started learning how to run plays. It was like, ‘Wow, maybe I should give this basketball thing a chance.’ From there is where it really just took off.”
Rice became a household name at Flint Northwestern High School. He earned 1985 Mr. Basketball honors in Michigan after leading Northwestern to back-to-back state titles with a roster that also featured Jeff Grayer, who went on to become Iowa State’s all-time leading scorer and an NBA player, as well as Anthony Pendleton, who played at USC, and Andre Rison, who starred on the gridiron at Michigan State and enjoyed a successful career in the NFL.
Rice’s celebrity heightened in 1989, when he led the University of Michigan to the national championship with a win against Seton Hall. Rice earned Most Outstanding Player honors.
The title run enhanced Rice’s NBA stock and took him from a projected first-round choice to a Top 5 pick to the Heat. Rice went on to make the All-Star team three times as a Charlotte Hornet in the mid-1990s and was also a two-time All-NBA second teamer twice. He was the MVP of the 1997 All-Star game and broke Hal Greer’s record of 19 points in a quarter by pouring in 20 on four of five shooting from three-point range.
Rice also won an NBA title in his two years with the Los Angeles Lakers and played a key role averaging 15.9 points with a team-high 84 three-point shots on a team that featured stars Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. In all, Rice played 15 seasons and became the 48th NBA player to score more than 18,000 career points.
For the first time in a number of years, Rice did multiple interviews with metro media outlets and was awarded the key to the city of Benton. Rice is already known as one of the many stars to come out of Flint. Now, he wants to be grouped with Arkansas NBA standouts Sidney Moncrief, Scottie Pippen and Derek Fisher, his Lakers teammate.
“I should [be on the list] because [Arkansas] is where I am from,” Rice says. “Absolutely. For me, when they would talk about the guys that are from Arkansas, I was like, ‘Wow, they really don’t know.’
“That is why I fought so hard to get cards that had me born in Flint changed. Finally, you just say, ‘Well, hopefully, one day they get it changed.’ Now, it is upfront, and I am glad. Better late than never.”
Read Nate’s sports blog at goingdeep.syncweekly.com.