Page 13 - Will Smith: A Biography of a Rapper Turned Movie Star

Getting Paid to Party
13
father would get committed, because if he were in an insane
asylum, then we wouldn’t have to finish the thing.”5
To Will and his brother’s dismay, Willard Smith Sr. spent
a good part of the summer and fall supervising their
building project. The work was drudgery, and it took them
six months until the wall was finished. Afterward, Will and
Harry were proud of their job, as was their father. Will
recalled, “Dad told me and my brother, ‘Now don’t you all
ever tell me you can’t do something.’ I look back on that a lot
of times in my life when I think I won’t be able to do
something, and I tell myself, ‘One brick at a time.’”6
In spite of his venture into wall building, Will still
preferred music to masonry. When he was about ten, he
received a stereo system as a gift from his parents. His
favorite record albums—there were no compact discs in
those days—were by funk groups.
Will had all sorts of other hobbies, too. He loved sports
and admired the basketball stars Wilt Chamberlain and
Julius Erving, who played for his hometown Philadelphia
76ers. Will also enjoyed playing chess, a game he had
learned from his father when he was just eight years old.
Will was especially fascinated by dinosaurs. He
memorized facts about the geological eras in which
different dinosaurs lived and thought the most interesting
dinosaur was the stegosaurus. He was intrigued by
science-fiction stories, too. He later said, “It’s not so
much as an actor that I love it, just as a kid growing up,
science fiction was my genre. I loved the imagination of