Daryl Braden’s journey has traversed quite the winding road.

Peppered with potholes from his past, it is one that’s led him from Memphis to multiple colleges, a lengthy pro playing career, the dark days of drug use and now a platform to preach preparation for life after basketball.

Today, the pavement beneath him much smoother, Braden serves as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes director for the UAB men’s team, ministering daily to the Blazers and weekly to a 10-member group of players from a Birmingham high school.

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His message is both precautionary and profound.

“The ball will stop bouncing,” Braden said, “and you’ve got to have a plan.

“I don’t want them to be like me. I never thought my basketball career was gonna end. How stupid was that?”

‘Identity Crisis’

In the late 1970s, Braden was a Birmingham sports pioneer. By the late 1990s, his life was a wreck. But now, having rebounded from rock bottom, it has purpose.

The Memphis high school product turned the tale into a book, “Identity Crisis,” subtitled “Finding the Inner Strength Within My Struggle.”

Preaching against the pitfalls that sucked him in, Braden references the 2020 autobiography regularly while ministering with a been-there, done-that approach that seems to resonate.

“When I start my story to these kids, man,” Braden said, “and I tell them that I was addicted to crack cocaine for 10 years, I was in prison for three years, that I’ve been homeless, they look at me like, ‘Man, you’re lying.’”

Because Braden doesn’t look the part.

Not anymore.

“They can’t believe it,” he said.

“I never thought my basketball career was gonna end. How stupid was that?”

Daryl Braden

But they should, if only because it’s so sadly true Braden felt called to share.

His book may not have been written if it weren’t for Larry Finch, the late Memphis basketball coach whose time at now-rival school UAB was brief but whose impact in Birmingham is enduring, and late Tigers and Blazers head coach Gene Bartow.

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Finch was on Bartow’s first coaching staff at UAB, which — now in the same conference as Memphis for the first time in more than a decade — beat the Tigers when the two teams met in January at Birmingham.

A rematch is scheduled Sunday afternoon at FedExForum, the Blazers’ first visit to Memphis since they joined the American Athletic Conference from Conference USA in 2023.

“You go back to the early days when UAB got started and Larry Finch was a huge part of this program,” said Steve Mitchell, who played for the Blazers on four straight NCAA Tournament teams in the early-to-mid 1980s.

“He got a lot of those early players into that program,” longtime Tigers television and radio broadcaster Matt Dillon added.

Perhaps no one knows that better than Braden, one of three Memphians — along with Northside High products Larry Spicer and George Jones — who transferred to UAB and spent a season there before the Blazers even played their first game in 1978.

A true trailblazer

The presence of Bartow — who took Memphis to the 1973 national championship game against UCLA, then started UAB’s program from scratch after short stays at Illinois and UCLA — and Finch was the only reason Braden agreed in 1977 to move to Birmingham from TCU, his first NCAA Division I school.

“Growing up in Memphis, playing basketball, I first saw Larry Finch play when he was in the ninth grade,” said Braden, who played at Memphis Tech. “So, he immediately became my basketball hero. The guy to emulate.

“Then … when Coach Bartow took the Memphis team to the final game, every basketball player in the city of Memphis in high school wanted to play for Coach Bartow and wanted to play for Memphis.”

Fast forward: Bartow leaves Memphis and goes to UCLA after a one-season stop at Illinois; Braden transfers from his Oklahoma junior college to TCU, then looks to transfer again after one season at the Texas university.

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“It’s my senior year. And I’ve got one year left to prove myself,” Braden said. “So I’m looking for a place I can go and make a statement.”

A school that’s never played a game seems less than ideal.

“They had one basketball when he went there,” Dillon said.

If that.

Braden was all-in, lured despite the many challenges of not having an actual team.

A true trailblazer.

“We’ve all referred to Daryl Braden as kind of the godfather of UAB basketball,” said Mitchell, who played at Memphis’ Whitehaven High. “There probably aren’t many basketball players that came through here since ’77 that haven’t met Daryl.”

“So we three guys from North Memphis team up, come to UAB. … All we know is Coach Bartow and Coach Finch. We have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into.”

Daryl Braden

Spicer and Jones were in on the ground floor too, as both transferred in from Baylor University knowing — according to NCAA rules back then — they would have to sit out a season before becoming eligible to play anyway.

“So we three guys from North Memphis team up, come to UAB. … All we know is Coach Bartow and Coach Finch,” Braden said.

“We have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into. We come into a place that has no team, no program, no basketballs. We didn’t even have a place to eat. No weight room or nothing, for a whole year. And we’re like three guys on an island, exiled from basketball.

“We didn’t have a thing to practice with. We didn’t have no facilities. We had nothing, man. It was unbelievable, man.”

On the move

Braden’s path from Memphis to Birmingham and back is headshaking too.

His first stop after Memphis Tech was Ada, Oklahoma, where Braden — as he shares in his book — accepted a scholarship at East Central University after a recommendation from longtime Memphis high school and college basketball coach Verties Sails Jr.

The stay didn’t last long.

After one semester, Braden wrote, “I was kicked out of school for stealing.”

From Ada it was on to Carl Albert State College, a juco in Poteau, Oklahoma, where the basketball was good but — in 1975 — not everything else was.

“Racism was alive and well in Oklahoma,” Braden wrote.

So too, in at least one case, was egoism.

“Because my game had been elevated to a place that it surpassed all the guys that were better than me in high school, I became very arrogant,” Braden said.

“Drinking and smoking weed was an everyday occurrence, along with stealing. … I eventually got caught stealing in a local department store. Because I was a basketball player they let me go with a warning.”

Once at TCU, Braden’s game thrived.

He scored 27 points and had 21 rebounds against Ole Miss early in his junior season, played against Kentucky in Rupp Arena, played against then-Memphis State at the Mid-South Coliseum and scored 39 against a Houston team that had heavily recruited him.

But Braden and TCU weren’t a good match, so he sought a new home.

‘An opportunity to plant my flag’

Braden remembers UAB having two gyms at the time of his arrival there.

One, Bell, was allocated for use by new members of the fledgling basketball programs, each of them eager for at least a pickup game. The other, as he recalls, was for the general student population.

“We would have to go down to the Red Gym and recruit two or three guys just to play,” Braden said.

“Another thing: They did not tell me we were not eligible for postseason play. So it didn’t matter how well I played, how well we did, the last game my season was over.

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“There never was a ‘by the way.’ I found it out the hard way.”

But he took the leap, one — considering the circumstances —only Finch and Bartow could inspire.

A chance day in Memphis made it happen.

“Coach Bartow had just got this job at UAB. And he hired Coach Finch,” Braden said.

“So I’m playing in summer league, in Memphis at Glenview, and the whole gang is there. George Klein and all his guys are there.”

Klein — a longtime Memphis radio DJ and TV personality, and a close friend of Elvis Presley from their time together at Humes High until Presley’s death in 1977 — was a big Tigers fan.

“After the game … one of (Klein’s) guys, came up to me and said, ‘Hey, man, if Wayne Yates (Memphis’ coach at the time) don’t give you a scholarship he’s crazy,’” Braden said.

“At that time, Finch walks in the gym and started talking about UAB. I was like, ‘UAB? Birmingham? I don’t think I want to go to Birmingham.’ … But, of course, this is my guy. You know, Larry.

“So the next thing I know my high school hero (Finch) and the basketball coaching icon from Memphis (Bartow) — sitting in my living room, in North Memphis.”

Braden was an easy pitch.

“I’m like, ‘I’m gonna put all my eggs in this basket,’” he said. “I always wanted to play for Coach Bartow, and I’ve been looking up to Finch since he was ninth grade. ‘I got one year left, so it’s roll the dice. That’s where I’m going.’

“It was giving me an opportunity to plant my flag and start to be a part of a program that had never had a program before. Part of the history. So, long story, that’s what got me to UAB.”

On the move again

Braden joined Finch and Bartow to help build the base for a UAB program that, with its heavy Memphis influence, made seven straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 1981-87.

Finch’s time in Birmingham ended when he left UAB to join Dana Kirk’s Memphis staff as an assistant coach.

Finch’s Birmingham legacy includes a long list of Memphis high school players — Braden, Spicer and Jones, Mitchell, former Hamilton High star Jerome Mincy, Northside’s Archie “A Train” Johnson, White Station’s Leon Morris, Oakhaven’s Raymond Gause and Booker T. Washington products McKinley Singleton and Anthony “Big Jack” Gordon all among them — who made their way to Bartow’s program well into the 1980s.

Braden looked forward to a pro career coming out of UAB, where he played on a winning team in the program’s first season.

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But he went unpicked in the 10-round 1979 NBA Draft, his past perhaps catching up during an era in which players didn’t transfer nearly as much as today.

“No matter how talented you are,” Braden wrote, referencing his draft year, “if you attend four schools in five years, it tends to throw up a red flag showing a lack of character and instability.”

So Braden packed his bags.

Again.

He played his first pro season in Belgium, went to training with the Chicago Bulls in 1980, headed to Argentina after failing to stick with the NBA team, then played in Mexico the season after that.

Braden, who would return to UAB as a 50-year-old to finish his bachelor’s degree, went to camp and played exhibition games with the San Antonio Spurs. But he was waived before the regular season, and soon returned to Mexico.

Several NBA summer league appearances followed, but none led to actual roster spots.

So Braden moved around — to Venezuela; to Israel, where one of his teams was the famed international club Maccabi Tel Aviv; to France, Spain, Turkey, Italy and even Switzerland; to a couple stateside stints in the CBA; and eventually back to Venezuela.

After his last NBA bid (with the New Jersey Nets) failed, Braden returned to Mexico to wrap up an international career that lasted more than a decade and a half.

Trouble followed 

As he traveled the globe, Braden was a citizen of a basketball world in which drug usage ran rampant.

“At the time … freebasing was off the chain, man,” he said, referencing the smoking of cocaine in its purest form. “I had a lot of friends, and a lot of guys I knew, whose careers was derailed for freebasing.”

Braden names one after another.

“Everybody was doing it,” he said. “Even in the CBA. … That was the culture.”

Forty years old, finally done with basketball, Braden’s personal drug usage — it dated back to smoking his first joint when he was a junior in high school and snorting his first line of coke the season he was sitting out at UAB, he said, and got worse during his pro career — caught up with him.

His life soon spiraled.

“Being home in Memphis provided a new challenge I wasn’t prepared for,” he wrote, adding that he was perceived to be a successful neighborhood hero but hinting he was far from ready for the fall that would follow.

“My false identity had been shattered, and I had an insatiable hole I had to try to fill.”

Braden turned to blow. It cost him dearly.

“After all my money was gone,” he wrote in “Identity Crisis.” “I started selling all my so-called treasured possessions I had accumulated from my travels.”

Rolex watch, gold jewelry, Louis Vuitton luggage: all gone.

Relationships too.

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Braden was on the go again, working at UAB as a graduate assistant coach under Bartow, attending a college in Missouri, working various jobs in Memphis, in and out of rehab, unable to kick his habit.

“Soon I would be looking for an escape,” he wrote. “I knew I had to get out of Memphis, thinking that was the solution to my problem. The bigger problem was everywhere I went, I took me with me.”

Turning point 

For a while, Braden lived in Nashville.

Certain times were good.

Other times he slept on the street, in a graveyard, in crack houses, even in solitary confinement at a maximum security prison after stealing one too many cars.

Drugs and thievery were his biggest vices. God was his salvation.

Braden writes openly about his shortfalls and transgressions, and about his comeback.

“I never thought about the pain on the people that cared about me. People that loved me.”

Daryl Braden

His moment of clarity was a visit to Memphis from his brother, Phillip, who was living in Denver at the time.

“I had got out of prison. I was back home, and I was still getting high,” Braden shared Friday, March 1, as he drove through Mississippi from Birmingham on his way back to his hometown for Sunday’s game.

Throughout his playing career, according to Braden, he frequently helped his brother financially.

“I’m in that crack-addict state of mind. He had a great job. So, in my mind, he’s coming home, I ain’t got to dig for no money to get high,” Braden said.

“Because he owed me. … All the money I done gave him, everything I done did for him in his life, he truly can’t refuse me nothing.”

Or so Braden thought.

The two argued before Phillip left Memphis.

“Because he refused to give me some money. And I was like, ‘Man, all the money you owe me?’ And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Braden said.

Phillip was crushed.

“The whole time during my drug use, because I wasn’t married, because I didn’t have no kids, I never thought I was hurting nobody but me,” Braden said, double negatives abound.

“I never thought about the pain on the people that cared about me. People that loved me. And when I looked in his face at that moment, I saw how much pain that I was causing him. And it hurt.

“I said, ‘Man, all this time I thought it was just me. I’m killing my little brother.’ And I love my little brother. I didn’t want nothing bad to happen to him. Everything I did was to try to make his life be better.”

Clear head and strong faith

The episode was perspective-changing.

Life-altering, too.

Braden checked into Harbor House, a Memphis residential treatment center, in 2003. It wasn’t his first trip to rehab. But ever since then, Braden said, he’s been sober and drug-free.

From 2004-16, he worked as a neighborhood director for the religious youth outreach organization Memphis Athletic Ministries.

And after a few years ministering on his own and working as a local gym director, Braden said, former Ole Miss and current UAB coach Andy Kennedy asked him to come to Birmingham as the Blazers’ FCA director.

Though not employed by the UAB athletic program, and paid only by funds he’s able to raise himself, Braden now shares the gospel there with the goal, he said, of leading young men “to the cross of Jesus Christ.”

He teaches the value of character, sprinkling spiritual advice with nuggets of his basketball wealth.

But it’s not just that.

Life skills, career planning, financial literacy: In the modern era of NIL earnings for college athletes and NCAA transfer portal freedom, Braden helps fill whatever gaps might need filling.

Potholes and all.

“He’s at all the practices with these kids,” said Mitchell, now the athletic director at a Birmingham prep school and the Blazers’ radio broadcast color analyst.

Part of what Braden tells those with open ears is that no one is above life spinning out of control if they don’t set out with a plan.

“I didn’t come from a broken home. I had two parents that loved me,” he said. “They raised me in the church. They made me go to school. I was a straight-A student.

“Being a crackhead and going to prison — it ain’t just reserved for people who come from broken homes and broken family. I had it great in life.”

Then he didn’t.

Now he does again, proof to Braden that with a clear head and strong faith redemption — no matter how far off course one may wander — is reachable.

So Braden makes that known, no matter who may need to hear— and heed — his message.

“When I’m in Memphis, I still go to the crack houses,” Braden said. “Because some of the guys, some of the people, I used to get high with — they’re still getting high.

“And I go around them, so they can see what God has done in my life. And I let them know, man: ‘You know how bad I was; look at me now. Same thing can happen for you.’”