Horace Grant’s latest story from childhood is striking on the surface because of what was on the plate. But the real point is what it says about the conditions he grew up in before the championships, the goggles and the NBA spotlight ever arrived.
On a recent episode of All The Smoke, Grant opened up about growing up in rural Georgia and described a level of poverty that shaped daily life in blunt, unforgettable terms. The episode’s official description frames it the same way, noting that before his four titles, Grant was “a kid in Sparta, Georgia hunting squirrel and raccoon just to eat.”
Grant said: “We were so damn poor, we had to move to the ghetto to be rich. That’s how s**t was. Anything came across our front yard, it was dinner. From squirrel, raccoon, even possum, rabbit.”
When Matt Barnes asked him to rank those foods, Grant did not hesitate.
“Raccoon is number one.” Barnes sounded stunned, but Grant kept going, placing rabbit next, then possum, while dismissing squirrel as “too bony.”
He added that the family also ate snake and alligator. The exchange was funny in moments, but the underlying story was not. It was about a household where hunting was not recreation. It was necessity.
Grant’s account became even more revealing when he described the family instability around that period.
“At the age of about 10, my parents split up and we moved to the hood. And the crazy shit about that, my dad moved to the hood, a house down from us.”
In just a few lines, Grant sketched a childhood defined not by comfort or stability, but by improvisation and endurance.
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It is easy to hear the list of animals and react to the shock value. But Grant was really offering something more personal and more serious. Long before he became a four-time NBA champion with the Bulls and Lakers, Grant was learning survival in the most literal sense.
Grant was not trying to dramatize hardship. He was simply describing what dinner looked like when there were no real options. In that sense, the story is not memorable because raccoon came first on his ranking list. It is memorable because it explains, in one raw and unfiltered burst, just how far he had to travel to become Horace Grant.
