Shane Courtney Battier is an American professional basketball player who currently plays for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association . He has also been a member of the U.S. national team. Battier was born and raised in Birmingham, Michigan, and attended Detroit Country Day School in nearby Beverly Hills, where he won many awards including the 1997 Mr. Basketball award. He went on to play four years of college basketball at Duke, where he captured the 2001 National Championship and swept the major National Player of the Year awards. Battier was selected with the sixth overall pick of the 2001 NBA Draft by the Vancouver Grizzlies (who soon became the Memphis Grizzlies). He was traded five years later to the Houston Rockets, and was then traded back to the Memphis Grizzlies during the 2010--2011 NBA season. He signed with the Miami Heat in 2011. His number has been retired by both Detroit Country Day School and Duke University. He has been recognized for his aggressive defense and has "routinely ­guarded the league's most dangerous offensive players". He is the only basketball player to have ever won both the Naismith Prep Player of the Year Award (1997) and the Naismith College Player of the Year (2001). Career Early years Battier was an outlier from his childhood; by the time he entered Country Day as a seventh-grader, he was already 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m), and was 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m) a year later. He was also the only child in the school with a black father and a white mother. As Michael Lewis put it in a 2009 article, the young Battier "was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black." More specifically in the context of basketball, Lewis noted that "the inner-city kids with whom he played on the Amateur Athletic Union (A.A.U.) circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people." College Battier, who graduated from Detroit Country Day School with a 3.96 grade point average and was named the school's outstanding student in his senior year, went on to attend Duke, where he played four years under head coach Mike Krzyzewski. While at Duke, Battier was often the best defender on the court. He frequently took charges which prompted the Cameron Crazies to chant, "Who's your daddy? Battier!" He led the Duke Blue Devils men's basketball to two Final Fours, in 1999 and 2001, though his team in 1998 squandered a late 17-point lead to eventual national champion Kentucky in the regional finals. The Blue Devils lost to the Connecticut Huskies in the 1999 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, but came back to win the national championship by defeating the Arizona Wildcats two years later. In 2001, Battier swept the major National Player of the Year awards, and subsequently had his jersey number 31 retired by the Blue Devils. Additionally, Battier was a three-time awardee of the NABC Defensive Player of the Year. Battier (778) and Jason Williams on the 2001 national championship team were one of only two Duke duos to each score over 700 points in a season, the other duo being Jon Scheyer (728) and Kyle Singler (707) in the 2009--10 season. Battier graduated from Duke with a major in religion. After the conclusion of his college career, Battier was named to the ACC 50th Anniversary men's basketball team. Battier was a two-time Academic All-American and Academic All-American of the year in 2001. He was second behind Jon Scheyer in the Duke record book for minutes played in a single season as of March 28, 2010, and had 36 double-figure scoring games in a single season (tied for 5th-most in Duke history, with Scheyer, Jason Williams, and J.J. Redick. NBA Battier was selected by the Grizzlies with the sixth pick of the first round of the 2001 NBA Draft. At the time, the Grizzlies were in the process of moving from Vancouver to Memphis. Pau Gasol of Spain was selected in the same draft with the number three pick, by the Atlanta Hawks, then traded to the Grizzlies. Battier is a versatile player with the size to play inside and the range to score from further out (particularly the corner three-pointer). However, he makes his living as a hustle player on the defensive end, where he defends three positions (shooting guard, power forward, small forward) with a high degree of skill, nets a good number of blocks and steals, dives for loose balls, and frequently draws offensive fouls from his opponent. Attribution: Article text available under CC-BY-SA sourced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_BattierCreative Commons image sourced from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shane_Battier_Heat_2012.jpg

• published: 18 Sep 2013
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