Topic: Shane Battier

Shane Courtney Battier (born September 9, 1978 in Birmingham, Michigan) is an American professional basketball player (small forward) with the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association and the U.S. national team.

Battier was born and raised in Birmingham, Michigan, and attended Detroit Country Day School in Beverly Hills, Michigan, where he won many awards including 1997 "Mr. Basketball of Michigan." He went on to play four years of college basketball at Duke, where he captured the 2001 National Championship and swept the major National Player of the Year awards. Battier was selected with the sixth overall pick of the 2001 NBA Draft by the Memphis Grizzlies and was traded five years later to the Houston Rockets. His number has been retired by both Detroit Country Day School and Duke University.

Battier was an outlier from his childhood; by the time he entered Country Day as a seventh-grader, he was already 6'4"/1.93 m, and was 6'7"/2.01 m a year later. He was also the only child in the school with a black father and a white mother. As Michael Lewis put it in a 2009 article, the young Battier "was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black." More specifically in the context of basketball, Lewis noted that "the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people." Battier also noted that his cerebral approach to the game was forged from that time: