Pee Wee Kirkland
American basketball player
Richard "Pee Wee" Kirkland (born May 6, 1945) is an American streetball player. He was named in ESPN's "Elite 24: Rucker Park legends".
Career
Basketball
Born in Manhattan, New York, Kirkland played varsity basketball at Charles Evans Hughes High School in Manhattan, New York, and was made an All-City guard. He was awarded a scholarship and attended Kittrell College, a community college in North Carolina, and was on the basketball team, averaging 41 points per game. He then attended Norfolk State University and played on the basketball team, teaming up with future NBA star Bob Dandridge. The Spartans won the CIAA title in 1968 with a 25–2 record; they lost in the second round of the NCAA Division II Men's Tournament. The next year their record was 21–4, and they lost in the first round of the D-II tournament.
Draft and arrest
In 1969 he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls with the fourth pick in the thirteenth round. It is speculated that he turned the offer down because he was making more money in current ventures, including being a drug dealer, than he would in professional basketball. At the time, the opportunities offered to him outside of the NBA were far more lucrative, in terms of financial gain and public recognition.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Pee Wee Kirkland” is american basketball player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kirkland, American and basketball, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7160119. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1968 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pee Wee Kirkland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.