![]() It wasn’t until 2010, when she was watching Karl’s career highlights during his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, that she realized how great a player her dad had been. Kadee didn’t really know either, even though she was known as the “Mail Lady” on the girls’ basketball team at Cedar Creek School in Ruston. “And I was, like, ‘Yeah, that's my dad.’” “I really didn't see his game until, like, I moved down here and everybody's, like, ‘Your dad is Karl Malone?,’” K.J. It wasn’t until after Karl retired from the NBA in 2004, when the family moved back to north Louisiana-in part, to teach their children about “Southern hospitality”-that their kids began to realize who their dad was and what he had accomplished on the court. “ We'd just make it a routine,” she says. That way, they’d be in bed before the adrenaline of his job rubbed off on them. When Karl played home games with the Jazz in Salt Lake City, Kay would bring the kids home from the Delta Center at halftime. Where others had their doubts, Shirley would encourage her ambitious son.Īnd not keep them up too late on school nights, either. Dream on,’” he says, “except my mom.”Ī commercial truck driver? A colonel in the Marines flying a Harrier jet? One of the best players to ever set foot in the NBA? “I was that little boy that everybody, including family members, said, ‘Yeah, boy, get on. Shirley also encouraged Karl, the youngest of her nine children, to chase his dreams, as wild as they seemed to most around him. And that's what I've always tried to do.” “But be prepared to jump their butt, jump the janitor's butt, just like you would anybody else, and vice versa. ![]() “Why can't we treat them accordingly? Simple things. “What, in our mind, we consider the lowest person on the totem pole, in their mind, they're not,” he says. “And I also saw the way successful business people treated the lowest person on the totem pole.”Įven for a tower of power like Karl Malone, it came down to the little things. “My mom had a little country store, but I saw the way they treated people,” he says. ![]() Long before Karl groomed his game in Ruston, he learned the basics of business from watching how his mother, Shirley, handled hers. At the time, Karl was, in his words, a “little snotty-nosed kid from Summerfield,” about an hour south of where the seat of his budding Bayou empire now rests.Īfter leading Summerfield High School to three Louisiana state championships, Karl took his talents to Tech, where he was the Southland Conference Men’s Player of the Year as a sophomore and a National Association of Basketball Coaches All-American as a senior. Karl first came to Ruston in 1981, when coach Andy Russo recruited him to play college basketball at Louisiana Tech. “And to be able to come back home, things still don't seem real.” “It's just one of these places that have allowed me to grow and thrive as a young man,” Karl tells CloseUp360 this summer, while granting access inside his life in Ruston for the first time. Behind that, a sprawling luxury apartment complex-complete with a pool, barbecues, bonfire pits, a rec room and a gym.Īll owned, and most operated, by Karl Malone and his family. Across the way, a strip mall featuring a Teriyaki Grill, an Eskamoe’s Frozen Custard & More, and a 5.11 Tactical store. Down the two-lane street, Legends Cigar and Vape. There’s the Arby’s along Farmerville Highway. It stretches all the way to the Jiffy Lube on North Trenton Street, but its true epicenter rests right where East Kentucky Avenue fades into Burgessville Road, on the northeastern edge of Ruston, Louisiana. You’ll find it about a mile off Interstate 20, where road signs rise higher and higher, like trees in the forest canopy competing for sunlight. Some folks in town call it “Malone Land.”
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