![]() “Not that he was averaging ‘x’ amount of points, or he had in a big fourth-quarter explosion in a … fourth game of a championship. “You know, those significant team accomplishments, I think, is how he’d want his obituary, you know, for the basketball game,” Papile said. ![]() The BABC stresses a “we, not me” mentality, something Papile has watched Brown carry to the pros, as he has stayed in touch with many of his early teammates. ![]() Papile said Brown will be in his program’s hall of fame. Since then, the BABC has included future NBA players like Brown, Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing, Georges Niang of the Philadelphia 76ers, Terance Mann of the Los Angeles Clippers and others. Leo Papile founded the Boston Amateur Basketball Club, a youth program, in 1977. So that’s the plan.’ And that’s pretty much what happened.”Īlthough he played high school ball outside the city, Brown’s legacy in Boston is much the same as it is in Wakefield. Hopefully, we’ll have you for a couple of years, but some prep school’s gonna scoop you up, you’re gonna reclassify and then you’re gonna go to a DI school. “And I said, ‘You can’t stay at Wakefield, I know how it works. I’m gonna watch you on TV someday.’ I was thinking Division I college basketball, I wasn’t thinking professional basketball,” Simpson said with a laugh. “I sat him down and I said, ‘Bruce, this is how it’s gonna work, if you don’t know this already. One day, before practice in Brown’s freshman year, the coach had a foretelling conversation with him. But in that short time, Simpson already had an idea of what kind of player Brown would become. “’cause I won it when Bruce switched schools and came to Wakefield.”īrown spent only two seasons at Wakefield before heading off to Vermont Academy and eventually the University of Miami for college. “So, I don’t play the lottery anymore,” Simpson said. But when Brown’s mother was told there wouldn’t be enough room on the bus for both Brown and his younger brother, she sent them to Wakefield instead. ![]() The Dorchester native’s foundation started on courts in Boston and Wakefield, where he spent his first two years of high school, and where many friends and coaches knew he’d be special.īrad Simpson was the longtime head coach at Wakefield when Brown came there through the METCO program, though Simpson says Brown was originally going to enroll in school in Milton. Approaching game 5, Brown was averaging 11.8 points per game coming off the bench for Denver in this year’s NBA Finals against the Miami Heat, including a scorching Game 4 performance last Friday where he racked up 21 points, including 11 points in the fourth quarter, on 8 of 11 shot attempts and made two free throws to help put the Nuggets within one win of the franchise’s first ever NBA championship.īut just like any NBA player, Brown’s success didn’t start in the arena. “And I just remember immediately texting the head coach saying, ‘We have a problem.’”īrown, now a key member of the Denver Nuggets, has plenty of stories just like that in his journey to the NBA Finals. “So, I go to the Wakefield gym, I sit down, and literally just as I sit down, steals the ball on defense, goes the length of the court and just goes up and slams it in, dunk - as a freshman,” he said. Kent, who is now the director of athletics for Wakefield Public Schools, was on the coaching staff at Melrose High School when he was assigned to go scout rival Wakefield Memorial High School during Brown’s freshman year there. The first time Brendan Kent laid eyes on Bruce Brown on a basketball court, he knew he was in trouble. ![]()
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