![]() “I didn’t get some money and then be like, oh, you know what? Let’s move to Beverly Hills, baby, we’re going to Palisades, we’re going to the city. And every time somebody in Chino Hills look and see a nice-ass car, guess who’s in it? Me or my boys. “I didn’t get some money and then be like, oh, you know what? Let’s move to Beverly Hills, baby, we’re going to Palisades, we’re going to the city,” LaVar said. He is no less bullish on his resolute vision to build a self-described empire worth $1 billion, saying the presence of the family’s Big Baller Brand, which currently moves its apparel, hot sauce and shoes online, could be felt locally soon, eyeing potential plans to buy storefronts, build a basketball training facility and sell rims, tires and bottled water. Predicting the level of championship success his sons attained as prep teammates, he says he has spent this NBA season trying to tell Michael Jordan, the NBA icon-turned-owner of the Charlotte Hornets, who drafted LaMelo third overall in November, to add all three brothers to their roster. ![]() “When you hear that Ball name, just like you hear the Hiltons and the Rockefellers and all that, when I’m dead and gone, you going to remember that Ball name,” he said. When the NBA season began in December with all three brothers on training camp rosters, their father remained in the family’s estate, tucked atop one of the city’s canyons, planning what he says will be a next act that will plunge the family’s roots even deeper into this affluent bedroom community of 82,000 in San Bernardino County’s southwest corner. Guaranteed.”įive years after the brothers turned that prediction into reality, rising to national prominence by running Chino Hills High’s opponents off the court en route to an undefeated state championship -all while their father’s soundbites made him one of basketball’s most talked-about figures - the Balls and the city remain as intertwined as ever. I was like, man, Chino Hills going to be known for the Balls. LaVar was clear about one thing: “I told people back in the day I was going to put us on the map and people thought it was like, he just talking. “I just looked at him like, well, that’s interesting that you have that goal already and they’re only toddlers.” “ said, ‘Yeah these two are going to be in the NBA,’” Spitzzeri recalled. Paul Spitzzeri, a museum director who knew LaVar from a local gym, and who came from a basketball coaching background, visited the Balls’ house when Lonzo and LiAngelo were only a few years old. LaVar Ball moved to Chino Hills nearly 25 years ago to start a family with wife Tina. Sports Photos: LaVar Ball and family through the years From here, he told anyone who would listen that Lonzo, LiAngelo and LaMelo would become outliers, and not only in a geographic sense. The plan had been to move to West Covina. The first time his parents visited, and asked where the mooing sound was coming from, LaVar pointed to a herd grazing a nearby hillside. “I said, ‘Why in the hell did you move us way out here?’” Ball said. When she picked him up at Los Angeles International Airport to show him the house they’d discussed buying while he was spending part of the 1995 NFL season on the Carolina Panthers’ practice squad, the drive east through suburbia took three hours in weekday traffic. That and the distance from South L.A., where he’d grown up. These hillsides were the first thing Ball noticed in 1996 when he and his wife, Tina, moved to Chino Hills. ![]() The faster they climbed here, he said, the easier they’d fly down the basketball court. He brought his three sons to the trailhead and had them run all the way up. When LaVar Ball first saw this stretch of dirt, the difficulty of reaching the top was less daunting than it was intriguing. Not one who passed through the bustling north entrance of Chino Hills State Park dared to veer from Bane Canyon Road to go up the dirt path on the left side, the one snaking up the ridgeline at an incline steep enough that the trail eventually disappeared from view. The lucky few hikers who found a parking spot along Elinvar Drive on a recent morning pulled on down jackets against a biting wind and headed uphill, forming a steady line.
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