# Collison's parents wanted him to follow in their footsteps



## girllovesthegame

by running track....

*Hornets No. 1 pick Darren Collison stubbornly went against his parents' wishes, and diligence took him to the top*



> All his life, it seems, Darren Collison has been focused and goal-oriented. The son of two world-class track athletes from Guyana -- his mother, June Griffith, represented her country at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, father Dennis ran in the Pan American Games -- Darren's gene pool was seemingly his equation for success, the roadmap to sport's riches.
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> Problem was, dad was hoping for a sprinter in the mold of his 200-meter career, or mom's 400-meter specialty.
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> "I felt that if you had a double-dose of those genes," Dennis Collison said, "you had to be good at track. I was trying to push him toward track. But he had a love of basketball so bad . . ."
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> This obsessive infatuation was so intense for young Darren that Dennis built a basketball court in the backyard of their suburban Los Angeles home, and the youngster shot into the wee hours of the morning, the endless thump of a basketball resonating, filling his every thought.
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> Darren Collison's dreams were large.
> 
> But they remained consistent, despite the gentle prodding of his mother, who initially believed her son's expectations were a bit unrealistic.
> 
> "I never envisioned this for him," June Collison was saying, one day after her son became the Hornets' first-round draft choice. "But he would say to me in junior high school, 'Mom, I'm going to get me a basketball scholarship to go to college.' And I always tried to put it in perspective. There are so many kids in this country, there are so many and only X-amount of basketball scholarships. I tried to keep him grounded, should it not have happened. Then I would sit him down and I'd ask, 'What do you want to do when you grow up?' 'I want to play in the NBA.'


http://www.nola.com/hornets/t-p/index.ssf?/base/sports-4/1246167386192830.xml&coll=1


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## Chan Ho Nam

who's collison?


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