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rilla hoop. After it held fierce games with Terone Sr. and his friends, it was where kids from the neighborhood would gather daily to play until moms called them home. A respite from an otherwise tough environment that offered all the enticements they were supposed to stay away from. The one time that sanctuary was threatened — a kid the same age as Ronnie brought a gun — it got shut down quickly. Mom took no chances with her children's safety. "She found out and told him that she didn't want him to come back ever again, and he didn't," Ronnie said. There were plenty of battles waged without weapons. Davin Pearson took it upon himself to pick up where Terone Sr. left off in developing Terone and Ronnie as players, and most of that tutoring occurred at that backyard court. Davin, a couple years older than Terone and the son of Rona's sister, never gave either of the boys a break. He'd use his size to physically "beat up" on them, used his skills to make winning individual matchups hard. By the time Terone was in fifth grade, Davin was taking him to play in ProAm games against men. Some of Davin's motivation was forethought of preparing Terone and Ronnie to get out of the neighborhood by using basketball, but that wasn't necessarily the impetus of the initial push. "It was a moment where it could have cracked the family," Davin Pearson said of when Terone Sr. was convicted of drug conspiracy. "With the struggles, basketball is what helped us to get our minds off the negativity and to stay focused on possibly making a better way and A Fee-Based Investment Advisor located in the Purdue Research Park 25+ Years of Investment Management Experience 1241 Cumberland Ave, Suite B West Lafayette, IN 47906 Phone: 765-497-0197 www.bankerinvestmentgroup.com Bill Banker, President Purdue University Alumni 85' Purdue Baseball Alumni 81'-85' 30 IllustrateD volume 24, issue 2 having a better situation. The only thing that kept us going was our love for each other as cousins and brothers and basketball. It kind of distracted us from the time he was gone. We were just focusing on ball and that's what got our mind off of that, and that made time fly because you're so focused on achieving something that by the time it's time for him to come out, he's got something to be proud of." When they ventured away from that backyard court, they only gravitated to another blocks away. Municipal Gardens is one of Indianapolis' oldest recreation centers, but that just means there's been more time for legendary games to have developed and been played. Ronnie saw plenty of those growing up, tagging along. He couldn't wait to see Davin and Terone on the court against some of the city's best players of that time, Jeff Teague, Eric Gordon and Mike Conley. "They would go at it all the time, used to love to watch those battles," Ronnie said. "I feel like our backyard and Municipal Gardens were a big savior." They're where Ronnie honed his skills, too, soaking up everything he saw and heard. Even though Ronnie was the small- f