About 3 out of every 10,000 high school basketball players go on to play in the NBA. But since the 1972-73 season, 1 out of every 52.7 players to suit up for Kinston High School's varsity squad has reached the league, meaning the odds to do so in Kinston are, since the early 1970s, about 63 times greater than the national average.
The town boasts 10 gyms, countless playground parks, more than 60 youth teams, innumerable church leagues, industrial leagues and rec leagues, and endless pickup games that on any given night feature homegrown NBA stars, NCAA All-Americans or old-heads pushing 60 who just won't quit. Some don't quit until they flatline right there on the court; it has happened often enough to form something of a tradition.
Holloway Recreation Center rises from Kinston's east side, a squat, redbrick gym where toddlers dribble in diapers and almost every local standout honed their game. On a late August afternoon, Skeet Davis descends into a metal chair with a worn, padded bottom near the wooden doors that lead to the court. He's 65 and has diabetes and a defibrillator in his chest and a back that has never healed from an old football injury, but for seven days a week since 1974, Davis has been here, coaching basketball and keeping tabs. He figures he has seen about 10,000 players pass through Holloway's doors, and if they kept them open until 3 a.m., he says, there'd still be action on the court. The same holds true at Kinston's five other recreation centers. And as Davis sits in that metal chair, pondering the question of which player might be the best he's seen, suddenly, from a back room, emerges Maxwell, the longtime Celtics forward and 1981 NBA Finals MVP.
"How can Kinston, North Carolina, have somebody in the NBA for the last, what, 35, 40 years?!" Maxwell, in a blue T-shirt, shorts and sneakers, booms from the lobby. "There's 21,000 people in this town. You got all these other bigger towns around here, bigger cities ... and they couldn't touch Kinston!"