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Mostly, though, I was genuinely excited about figuring out what lessons I could share about making a better life as a kid with a past like mine. I knew that I wanted this book to be more than just a story about my early life. I wanted it to be a guidebook for kids like me and the adults who want to help them.

I always felt as a kid that God had something special planned for my life. Now I know what it was. It wasn't to make me a professional athlete; it was to make me a role model for kids who, like me, are missing that person in their lives. He wanted to use me to show the world anybody can be successful, no matter who they are or what their history is. But I had to trust in that plan and be an active, real part of making it happen. I had to believe that it was possible even when it seemed it wasn't, and work for it even when it seemed pointless.

I did, and I think that's what made the difference.

CHAPTER ONE

Begging and Bumming: Life in Hurt Village

You're not poor if you know where your next meal is coming from.

That's one of the first lessons I learned growing up. The lines were pretty clear: There were people who had food, and there were people who had to scrounge. Most of the time--way more than most of the time--I was in the second group.

I think about that now, whenever I sit down to dinner at a nice restaurant or open the refrigerator in my own home, which I always make sure is full. If I pass a homeless person on the street, I try to be pretty generous with what I drop in their cup because I know how it feels to be sitting in their spot.

It's crazy now, as I look at my career and the opportunities I have, to think about how I was living just a few years ago. I had to beg for anything I needed; now I have everything I could possibly want.

But before my happy ending, there was a very sad story.

I THINK IT IS IMPORTANT, before I talk about my life when I was little, to explain how it was when I remember it best. It's going out of order a bit, but I think it will help put everything else in context. In order to understand my life, you have to understand my world.

Like most kids, when I was younger I didn't really understand that my life was not normal. It wasn't until I had a chance to see how other people lived that I realized that the way my family lived wasn't the way everyone else lived. A child can only understand what he or she sees on a daily basis--that's what seems normal. And until I saw another way of life, the things that I was surrounded by seemed totally normal to me, so the problems with it didn't stand out in my mind.

But from the time I was almost eleven years old to the start of high school, I called Hurt Village my home. There were some foster places mixed in, but Hurt Village was always what I considered home. The name fit--Hurt Village. It seemed like everything and everyone there was hurt, broken, depressed, beaten down. And by that point, I was finally old enough to understand that it was a pretty bad place to be and a pretty bad way to live. It was all I had, but I knew I wanted something better. In some ways it looked like every other housing project in every city in America: rows and rows of identical brick buildings that were two or three stories high, busted screens and broken windows, a place empty and boarded up every few units, rusty handrails on cracked concrete steps, broken toys and broken lawn chairs in the little patches of grass outside each door. Even the air smelled greasy, dirty. It was the kind of place that depressed you instantly if you took a wrong turn and ended up driving through it. But most outsiders never drove through it because it was also the kind of place you took a U-turn in the middle of the road to get out of if you ended up there accidentally.

There were some empty lots where the kids played sports during the day and where drug deals probably went down at night, but they were my favorite places to be. Up in the front of the neighborhood was a park--not the kind with swings or a slide or anything, just four soccer goalposts