<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Canton, Ohio, is home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but it's got some nasty spots, too, and that's where Keith McLeod grew up, playing basketball against older kids, dodging the broken beer bottles and worse that littered the outdoor courts. "Drugs, fighting, seeing a lot," the Utah Jazz point guard says of his youth. McLeod, a soft-spoken 26-year-old, says he won his share of the fights that cropped up on those old courts. "Guys fouling and talking, but that was just how it was. I won some ? won a lot. Lost a few." He had enough sense to back off when one particular big guy threatened him. "It wasn't really a fight," he recalls. "He fouled me real hard, and I was a little guy, so I kinda got out of there. I wasn't crazy." Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who plans to give McLeod a third straight start tonight at 6 in the Delta Center against streetball-style king Allen Iverson and the Philadelphia 76ers, admires McLeod's toughness. He has an affinity for the way the undrafted third-year man came up through the USBL, CBA and Italian League, having to work and scrap for all he has. "He's had to work very hard to get here. He didn't have a free ride," Sloan said. "He knows how to compete. He might make a (poor) decision or might miss a shot, but he's not going to drop his head down and say it can't be done. He's got some toughness and had to work hard, and those kinds of things ? you can't make somebody do it. They have to want it bad enough to want to do it." "Oh yeah, I don't have a problem with that," McLeod said. "I'm not going to back down from nobody. I ain't the big talker, but I ain't one to back down, either, if I believe in something. "Where I grew up, I couldn't be soft, or I'd get walked on," said McLeod, "so I kind of developed that early. I played with a lot of older guys. They was going to knock me around anyway, so I couldn't back down."</div> <div align="center">Source</div>
