.
For much of Tim Jr.'s formative years, his relationship with his father was strained worse than the ankles of Tim Sr.'s opponents trying to keep up with his famed "UTEP Two-Step" crossover.
It's not because Tim Sr. was an absentee father, either. The fact is theirs was a close family under the same roof. Tim Sr. and his wife, Yolanda, had been high school sweethearts. Tim Jr. was their oldest child, and they had two daughters.
The rift between father and son developed because of basketball. The game people believed had drawn them together actually tore them apart.
"Those arguments will be something I never forget," Tim Hardaway Jr. said. "You want to forget them, but they happened so much that they're just stuck in the back of my head forever. I just have to live with them and learn from them. And when I become a father, I'll try not to do that."
Eleven-year-old Tim Jr. sat in the back seat crying, trying to figure out how he could give more.
"You're either going to play this game the right way or you're going to quit," his father yelled from the front seat. "You're not performing at a high enough level. You're going to get better, or we'll stop you from playing the game of basketball forever."
So he tried harder, but nothing seemed to be good enough. When his father was in the stands, he felt rigid. And if his father saw him as a failure, he saw himself as a failure.
