Before he became a force of nature on the hardwood, Ben Wallace experienced working on cotton fields in the sweltering backwoods of Alabama.
Wallace grew up in White Hall, a small town named after a plantation in the state’s ninth-poorest county (Lowndes County) with a current population of fewer than 750 people and a poverty rate of 37%. It was a place where he and his family—Wallace is the 10th of 11 children—depended on neighbors to make it.