J.R. Giddens says his past has been somewhat overblown.

AP / Charles Krupa

J.R. Giddens used to get asked about things other than his dark past, such as basketball.

When this was true, it was in the small suburban town of Yukon, Okla., where he was first embraced by a community that was wowed by his talent and potential. His family would host block parties and sleepovers, and on the basketball court townspeople saw glimpses of what Giddens told everyone he would become: a star.

And back then, his character was never in question like it is today, tomorrow, and forever.

He is in the NBA now, his destiny having been achieved since he told his fifth-grade AAU coach he would play in the NBA one day and even have his own shoe.

The NBA-champion Celtics took Giddens with the 30th pick in the draft June 26. Leading up to his selection, the NBA and the media asked him about an incident at an Oklahoma City Wal-Mart, getting stabbed at Kansas, and his suspensions at New Mexico. After the draft, it was the same. It will be that way for some time.

“After a while, it gets kind of old — people asking about your past. I’ve showed I’m a great teammate and I’m a great player,” Giddens said.

Some former coaches say Giddens’s character concerns and brushes with the law are largely because of his transfer from Yukon to what was then considered the worst academic and most gang-ravaged school in the state, John Marshall High School.

Wanting to win

Giddens played sparingly his first two seasons at Yukon because of small-town basketball etiquette: sit on the bench as a freshman and sophomore, earn your time as a junior, and then start as a senior.

When he did play, it would be off the bench in the second half and he’d go on scoring barrages — sometimes finishing with 25 or more points — but it did not increase his playing time.

He wanted to play, to get noticed, and to win, which Yukon was not accustomed to doing. An administrator at the school said in her 26-year tenure, she didn’t recall any basketball state championships.

“I needed to go to another school to play basketball,” Giddens said.

Giddens went on to a two-year stay from 2001-03 at John Marshall, a high school in the northwestern quadrant of Oklahoma City, an area with a disproportionate amount of subsidized public housing compared with other parts of the city.

The lower class made up the majority of the area and likewise there was more crime in that area, said Howard Kurtz, who has taught criminology at Oklahoma City University for 30 years.

Kurtz, who lives in Yukon, knew the young Giddens. He was Giddens’s AAU coach from fifth grade to eighth grade and is writing a book about the 1996 season when his team — the Oklahoma Magic — advanced to the national AAU tournament.

According to information compiled by Kurtz from the Justice Department, the FBI, and the State Department of Education, John Marshall’s number of gang members is 28 times higher than the state’s public school average. John Marshall’s dropout rate is four times higher than the state average. In 2007, the school made the Department of Education’s ”dropout factory” list as an institution at which no more than 60 percent of incoming freshmen make it to their senior year.

Giddens admitted there were gang element, saying that it was a part of everyday life.

“At Yukon, people would back down from me. At John Marshall and those neighborhoods, people would never back down, so I always had to hold my own and fight and fight no matter how hard somebody plays. When you don’t have the luxury of having a lot of necessities in life, all you have is your pride.”

Giddens always had that. Kurtz compared Giddens’ childhood personality to that of the young Muhammad Ali. And Giddens said some of that John Marshall aggressive, pride-first mentality rubbed off on him.

“Definitely,” he said. “We’re all products of our environment.”

During his senior year, Giddens, then 17, was arrested Dec. 19, 2002, and charged with four felonies in connection with a plot to steal nearly $4,000 in electronics from an Oklahoma City Wal-Mart. The charges were dropped after a diversion agreement in which Giddens paid restitution and performed community service.

John Martin was hired as basketball coach for Giddens’s senior year and saidhe was warned about Giddens.

But Martin said he never had any problems with Giddens. His star guard scored 22.1 points per game and averaged 10 rebounds. Giddens won McDonald’s All-America honors, was named Oklahoma’s Gatorade Player of the Year, and led his team to a state title.