The Tribune

RICK Fox, lightning fast in a career that led to three consecutive NBA World Championships, took the long, slow road home, back to The Bahamas.

“In my heart, I never left,” says Fox.

It is Saturday morning and the athlete, actor, businessman, now Ambassador-at-large for the nation, arguably one of the country’s most famous personalities, is having breakfast at a place out west. At a strapping physically fit 6’7, he towers over the plates (yes, plates) of food in front of him. His appetite pales by comparison to that of his former teammates like Shaq, with whom he is still friendly, but this Saturday morning bountiful ritual is his weekly treat to himself, a chance to hang back, chill out and eat scrambled eggs, fruit, a large bowl of granola and more fruit, wheat toast, strawberry jam, please, not orange marmalade, some sort of purple smoothie, no doubt made with more fruit. He eats steadily, relishing it, and we talk for more than an hour.

This is a man who knows exactly what he wants.

And what he wants now is to live his best life in the place where it all began.

The more you talk with him, the more you understand this is all Rick Fox ever wanted. The rest of his well-marked career – the court victories, the contracts, the move from the Boston Celtics to what became the three-peat LA Lakers back to the Celtics (his highest hoops earnings in a year, $4.8 million), the acting career that followed, his businesses – they were all planned, designed to lead up to this goal, getting back home in a far better financial position than he left it.

Fox grew up on Johnson Road. His mother still lives there, refusing to leave the only home she has known for 60 years. She’s as down to earth as a woman can be. Canadian-born and with a natural athleticism and an Olympian herself, she met Rick’s Bahamian father when she was working in an office that was handling arrangements for upcoming Games. Ulrich Fox was passing through.

“My dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade,” Rick tells me. “He was one of 10 kids and he had to make his way. He jumped on ships, went to the Canary Islands, Africa, worked the cranberry fields near Boston.”

At some point, he became a car salesman in Toronto, where the hard-scrabble Bahamian met the tall, blonde athlete, a woman of grit and wit. He courted her as he ferried Fords back and forth.

They married and Rick was born in Canada on July 24, 1969.

He remembers little of life in Canada. By the time he was old enough to walk and talk, the family was back in his dad’s land, The Bahamas, where Rick’s earliest memories, the kind that stick with you like your first kiss, revolve around his dad’s fighting for independence.

“I was on his shoulders when the fireworks were going off,” he says.

Independence wasn’t just a political state of being. It meant a new kind of world for Bahamian businesses and Ulrick Fox jumped at the chance, opening Holiday Ice with a single location that eventually grew into three.

As a youngster, Rick may have learned how to leap and make jump shots from the daily grind of hopping in and out of dad’s truck, delivering ice. He never thought twice about it. Ask him about his childhood now and he says he was blessed. He did not have to fear, like black children in America, that something or someone who did not even know him would want him hurt or worse.

By the time he hit his teen years, Rick had a blueprint for his life. He would model it after the work and the principles for which his two heroes stood. “Mychal Thompson and Sidney Poitier, two men who made us proud,” he says.

It is not lost on the listener that one played basketball and the other was an actor.

After a college career at the University of North Carolina and 13 seasons of professional ball, Fox, who earned a degree in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures turned to film, playing on screen in numerous feature films and hit TV shows.

He’s still in demand. But now, having raised his two children by former wife Vanessa Williams (first black Miss America, 1983), and three stepchildren in the U.S., and his on-site fatherly duties lessened, he is back in Nassau and when Hollywood calls, he is interested, but not jumping on the next plane like he once did.

He learned a lot about what really matters along that long, slow road home and if he loves The Bahamas so much, maybe Hollywood will rekindle its love affair with his beloved country of contrasts – ritzy clubs blocks away from rough and tumble streets, islands bathed in sunlight, construction sites choked in dust, quiet harbours and blasting drumbeats -- at every twist and turn, a possible Hollywood set. If Fox could get Hollywood to come to The Bahamas…

With his famous hair now streaked in silver, and his eyes as piercing as ever, the talented 53-year-old actor-athlete-businessman may just be the calling card the industry needs, an industry now faced with an insatiable appetite to generate content for 24-hour streaming.

At the same time, a Ministry of Tourism initiative is focused on a resurgence of the film industry. That initiative is headed by Sen. Randy Rolle, a colleague of Fox’s.

This is just the beginning of a new chapter of a success story driven by a desire to help his family earn money when the ice business began to melt, its founder’s attention diverted to activism, his profits – and much of Rick’s earnings – going to fund this cause or that.

This is, mark these words, just the beginning of the Rick Fox story.

It doesn’t even touch on the quiet good works the Bahamian from Johnson Road has done, like helping to restore a SC Bootle Secondary School in Abaco after Hurricane Dorian.

It doesn’t touch on what he is doing in a green construction field. It doesn’t even reflect how much Rick Fox respected, admired and wanted to please his father. Or how he let him down, if he did.

More about that another time. It’s Saturday and that’s breakfast treat time, a moment to chill and smile.

Fox is back home where he left his heart those many years ago. And he is good with that.