Casual fans of the Boston Celtics may not be aware just how much family has shaped the contours of veteran guard Marcus Smart’s life on the basketball court, but for a player with as tough of an origin story as anyone in the league, family for the Flower Mound native has been everything.
And for Smart, even family has been tinged with pain in a life that has known far too much of it. Like many in the league he now plays in, he came from humble ends with the hurt it sometimes inflicted infusing his life with bitter moments his siblings and mother helped lighten.
And fate had cruel designs on even those isolated islands of solace.