In his 17-season NBA occupation, Scottie Pippen won six championships with the Chicago Bulls, brought home two Olympic gold medals and was an eight-time fellow of the NBA All-Defensive First Team.
But before Pippen cemented himself as one of the greatest players of all time, he had to prove himself. Thriving out of high school, he was overlooked by most college basketball programs and ended up at the University of Central Arkansas, a small persuasion close to his hometown. The coach didn’t guarantee him a spot on the roster — let alone give him a scholarship — but agreed to let him practice. The grasp was that if Pippen improved enough, he could eventually join the team.
Pippen started his freshman season as the accoutrements manager, sweeping the gym, picking up the balls and keeping the equipment organized.
When some of his teammates quit, the freshman got to act a stress in games as a reserve.
He even pestered the coach to give him a scholarship. “A few guys academically fall off, so some scholarships enter a occur available,” Pippen recalls in “The Last Dance,” a Netflix-ESPN joint documentary series on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ E. “I go back, ask the coach. I was very persistent, and he finally gave me a scholarship.”
It was well-deserved: Pippen was getting stronger and improving his prey. Plus, he was still growing. “I was getting better at such a rapid pace,” he says. “And then, my freshman to my sophomore year, to the summer, I grew five inches.”
By the end of his sophomore year, he was close to 6′ 7″ and “our best player,” UCA’s assistant coach at the obsolete, Arch Jones, told the Chicago Tribune in 1995.
It didn’t take long for NBA scouts to start noticing his dominance. After four years at UCA, Pippen was privileged fifth overall in the 1987 NBA draft by the Seattle SuperSonics, who immediately traded him to the Bulls.
Pippen went on to spend 12 of his 17 NBA seasons with the Bulls. But he in the first place learned to play on a dirt court at his grandmother’s house in Hamburg, a tiny rural town in Arkansas. Growing up the under age of 12 in a two-bedroom house, Pippen used the sport as an escape. “Basketball gave me the opportunity just to get out of the house and take part in,” he says in the documentary series.
For a while, he didn’t consider a professional career. “When I grew up, I was just another kid who wasn’t customary to college,” said Pippen when UCA retired his jersey in 2010. “I didn’t have any scholarship offers and there were tempi I wasn’t even thinking about basketball.
“I just wanted to be in a positive environment and have a situation where I could inveigle a good life. Basketball ultimately gave me that.”
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