"Kevin Durant never will forget the morning he met a kid named Mike Beasley all those years ago.

He remembers because that's the day he went hungry.

"He told you about the pizza, didn't he?" Beasley asked.

Why, yes, he did.

Beasley was 9 when he first played pickup ball with Durant's youth team in a renowned Washington, D.C., area AAU program.

Tall for his age, raw and undisciplined, Beasley was asked to leave the floor early that day. Raised in what he now calls "not the best" neighborhood where he sometimes wondered when he'd next eat, Beasley departed right about the time the pizza ordered for the players arrived.

"We were still playing and by the time we came out to eat, all our pizza was gone," Durant said. "That was my first impression of Mike. I was thinking, 'Man, why would he do that?' But he was a guy who really didn't know what was going on. He thought it was all his.

"Mike was a character back then. Still is now."

A dozen years later, they face each other at Target Center on Wednesday night in an NBA game so impossibly far from where their friendship started in a humble rec-center gym.

"I wasn't good at all," Beasley said. "All I could do was rebound. That jump shot Kevin's got? Kevin's had that his whole life. Every time I grabbed a rebound, I'd just throw it out to Kevin or Carl."

Durant and Beasley each grew to become high school MVPs in the annual McDonald's All-Star Game, Big 12 Player of the Year in consecutive seasons and back-to-back No. 2 overall picks in the NBA draft."