The journey to the top of the NBA’s 3-point leaderboard began without lunch.

On Saturdays around 8 a.m., before his parents rose, and while the men living Davis Bertans’ dream snoozed an ocean and two seas away, young Davis and his older brother, Dairis, would scoop up the gym keys and disappear. It had become ritual, a weekly jaunt to a natural habitat, through serene streets under a rising Baltic sun.

“Being on a basketball court,” Davis says, “was like for anybody else going to school.”

So on weekends, when actual school ceased interfering, they would play and play and play … so absorbed in a foreign game that had captured their imagination that they’d often forget to eat.

“They” were local children, Bertans’ neighbors, some of whom shared his NBA dream. But this was a tiny northern Latvian town that had never facilitated it. Nor, realistically, could it. At the time, no Latvian had ever played more than 89 NBA minutes, much less one from a village constituting 0.16 percent of the country’s population. A 1.9 million-person country, by the way, that had never qualified for a FIBA world cup. And still hasn’t.

In other words, the mere notion of the journey, to any sane individual, was preposterous.

And that’s before Bertans lost half a finger on his shooting hand.

Before he moved 1,000 miles away as a teenager for basketball, only to be told he couldn’t play.

Before he tore the same ACL twice.

And before he became the longest-lasting puzzle piece in a trade that has colloquially been named after two different players, neither of which is him.

Bertans’ story is a wonder of both the modern basketworld and the human psyche. And on a Friday afternoon amidst a six-game San Antonio Spurs win streak, the NBA’s second-most accurate long-range assassin took a break from slinging 26-foot daggers to tell it.

The birthplace of Bertans’ drive

Rujiena, Latvia, is one of those places where everybody knows everybody. Where the woman at the convenience store is either a classmate’s mother or a parent’s doctor or a neighbor’s friend. Where nobody is actually born, because the local hospital is inadequate, but where community is tangible. And where strong, healthy boys like the Bertans brothers would be called upon to help out. They’d pick tomatoes and potatoes for townspeople, the currency of their reward not dollars or euros or lats but rather … tomatoes and potatoes. With the family living “paycheck to paycheck” off two meager gym-teacher salaries, Davis (pronounced DAH-vis) remembers, “sometimes we’d just eat four weeks in a row of different styles – either boiled or baked or fried potatoes.”

Rujiena wasn’t big enough to support even a semi-professional basketball team, so the boys would travel to 25,000-inhabitant Valmiera to watch their father, Dainis, play. It was there, inside a cramped gymnasium, that ambition ignited. As a kid, Davis was dad’s biggest fan. And in between sideline shrieks, a thought seeped into his developing mind: I want to play like them. I want to be there. Sometime after watching next-day highlights of Michael Jordan’s Bulls on Latvian television, the thought narrowed. Want became will.

“I told ‘em I was gonna play in the NBA,” Bertans says. “They” – parents – “might’ve thought it was a joke back then. But I didn’t think like that.”

What he thought he meant, and what he meant he often said. Sometimes that meant trouble. Dainis kicked 9- or 10-year-old Davis out of multiple youth basketball practices because, as Davis freely admits now, “I used to tell people what to do.”

The juvenile dictating earned him nicknames like “direktors” and “priekšnieks,” the latter loosely translating to “boss.” But the bossiness blended into a determination that has fueled the journey. It kept him coming back to 1-on-1 basketball battles with Dairis, who with three extra years of physical maturity would invariably win. It compelled him to stick up for himself when older peers picked on him. One time, when a fraternal dispute boiled over, Dairis recalls: “All of a sudden, he runs to the kitchen. And I hear the drawer open, where all the knives are. ... And I see him running at me with a knife.”

“Yeeeeah,” Davis laughs. “I was never going to do anything with that knife. But him being three years older, that was the only way I could scare him.”

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