Early Life
Johnson was born in Nachitoches, Louisiana and raised in south Los Angeles, where he played high school basketball at Crenshaw High School, winning the Los Angeles City Section 4-A Division Player of the Year in 1973. He later attended UCLA, and became a star player on its basketball teams, under the guidance of legendary coach John Wooden. In his sophomore season in 1974–75, Johnson helped to lead the Bruins to Coach John Wooden's 10th and final NCAA Men's Division I basketball championship. Wooden retired from coaching after the season, and Gene Bartow became the head coach. Johnson continued to excel, averaging 21.1 points and 11.1 rebounds per game in his senior season and won the inaugural John R. Wooden Award in addition to the USBWA College Player of the Year as the nation's top collegiate basketball player. Johnson also majored in Theater Arts at UCLA. In 1996, UCLA retired his number.
Read more about this topic: Marques Johnson
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)