Doron Lamb, the leading scorer in this year’s national championship game, was probably the least talked and written about of the six players on the Kentucky team that brought home the school’s eighth title. While his teammates grabbed the headlines, Lamb quietly went about his business as one of the nation’s most efficient perimeter players.However, Matt May of CatsPause.com set out to tell Lamb’s story, and it’s quite an interesting one:
In fact, Doron Lamb nearly took a run at becoming the next Michael Phelps at the insistence of his mother, Brigitte Grant.“My mom had me swimming and I used to be a great swimmer,” Lamb said during the Cats’ postseason run. “When I was little my mom told me she watched a movie on Lifetime and some kid couldn’t swim, drowned and died, so she always said when she had a son he would learn to swim.“I liked doing the backstroke. I was fast. I might be a swimmer.”The idea of a future NBA player – Lamb is expected to announce his intention to enter the 2012 NBA Draft in the coming weeks – taking the plunge into the pool seems far-fetched but Lamb wasn’t your ordinary kid growing up in Queens. Sure, basketball was is passion but he never played the game exclusively. He was heavily involved in just about anything his mother could get him signed up for during his childhood. Swimming was the earliest activity.“We would take him to the (YMCA) on 92nd from the time he was 21 months old until he was 10 or 11, every Sunday,” Grant said. “I would hold him in the water. They really wanted him to keep swimming but it was five days a week and took 45 minutes by bus (to get there). “Then he started with baseball because there weren’t any basketball
teams for 5-year-olds. He played with 15-year-olds. I wish I had videos
of it but I just have photos. It was so funny because he thought he was
equal to the 15-year-olds. He had played one game in the park. (The
coaches) told him to go to third base and he had to count the bases to
know which one it was. The second year he was a pitcher. If he had kept
with baseball he would have been really good.”
