Family
Smith is the son of the late Derek Smith, a former swingman of nine-year NBA and University of Louisville fame. The elder Smith was a starting forward on Louisville's 1980 NCAA championship team. He also played for the Cardinals in the 1982 Final Four. He was a second-round draft choice of the Golden State Warriors in 1982 and went on to play for the San Diego and Los Angeles Clippers, Sacramento Kings, Philadelphia 76ers and Boston Celtics before retiring in 1991. His career ended prematurely due to knee problems.
Nolan Smith's father died when he was eight years old, of a heart attack at age 34 while they were on a cruise ship near Bermuda. Nolan said: "I thought he was going to sleep. I saw him from far away when it happened. I got closer, and I saw them close his eyes."
Smith has a tattoo on his right arm, with his father's likeness and the words: "Forever Watching." He said: "When I take the court, I look down at my tattoo. ... I know he's always with me, every game."
Read more about this topic: Nolan Smith
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“There was books too.... One was “Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)