If you haven’t seen Gerald Green’s hand or you have and never knew why he’s missing a finger. Let me fill you in.
When Green was in 6th Grade, he went for a dunk on a makeshift hoop, little did he know that there was an exposed nail. Because of this nail, his mother’s class ring that he was wearing got caught on said nail and ripped the flesh on his finger down to the bone. Doctors couldn’t salvage it so they had to amputate the finger. So it’s safe to say that Green has gotten over his traumatic loss of a finger because he’s dunking left and right.
Moving onto now he has managed to have a fruitful NBA career despite the missing extremity. Green has recently said that he used to be shy about it, but has learned to deal with it.
…when selected in the first round of the 2005 NBA draft by the Boston Celtics, came a moment of truth. “If you go back and look at the David Stern tape,” he said during a private moment Thursday about meeting the NBA commissioner, “when I go shake his hand I have my right hand in my pocket. He tells me, ‘Take your hand out of your pocket.’
“I always have been a little shy about that. But I think it’s getting better once I get older. I just want to be able to inspire people with that…
“I think what really hurt me were the aftereffects,” he said, “the getting made fun of, scared to talk about it because I was so ashamed of it, or always hiding my hand in my pocket.
“That was the thing that I had to go through. And as a little kid, obviously kids like to make fun of you because you have this or that. It was something I went through. But it taught me to be who I am today.”
When somebody told me a couple of years ago that Gerald Green is missing a finger because of a dunk that went wrong, I went “whatever!”. Strictly because Gerald Green is a dunking machine! He gets major hops, his windmills belong in The Netherlands they’re that good!
