Victory has never been given to Bruce Thornton. Not when he grew into Georgia’s Gatorade Player of the Year as a senior in high school, not when he climbed into the role of a team captain during his freshman year at Ohio State and certainly not when he was racing his mother to the mailbox as a toddler.

A two-year letterwinner for the Georgia women’s basketball team, Tiaunna Briggans helped the winningest Bulldogs team in school history capture the 2000 SEC championship and then the 2001 conference tournament. So when her 2-year-old firstborn son had to turn everything into a competition, Briggans and Thornton’s father, Bruce Sr., had a message for him:

If you want to win, win. But don’t expect us to just let you beat us.

“How competitive was Bruce? It got to the point where I couldn’t race him or do anything because I wasn’t going to allow him to just beat me,” Briggans told The Dispatch. “It was like, you’ve gotta win. If you’re not the best, you’re not gonna win. One day we raced to the mailbox and I beat him and his feelings were just so hurt, so I was like, ‘I’m done, because I’m not going to let you win just because you wanna be first.’ ”

That competitiveness was embedded in the younger Thornton’s DNA. In addition to his mother's athletic background, his father played football for Georgia, where he switched from running back to cornerback and was named a team captain during his final year. A fourth-round pick by the Dallas Cowboys in the 2004 NFL draft, he would spend four seasons playing professionally.

So, yeah, there was some healthy rivalry within the family.

“They didn’t make it easy,” Thornton said with a smile. “They didn’t allow me to win no games, nothing, so I had to earn it. And when I started winning, they stopped playing. That was around eighth grade.”

It wasn’t surprising, then, that the younger Thornton absolutely, positively, had to have a ball in his hands wherever he went. He might’ve been an infant, and it could’ve been a gumball for all it mattered, but he had to have a ball in his hands. He graduated from a gumball fairly quickly, Briggans said, because her parents bought a Little Tikes basketball hoop for the Thornton's home in Denver.

“Bruce started jumping off the couch to dunk the basketball and he was, like, 2,” she said. “He might’ve even been 1. He just grew so fast. He was always more mature than what his age was.”

Thornton and his younger brother, Bryce, were both born in Denver but moved to Dallas when their father was drafted by the Cowboys. When he signed with San Francisco in 2005, the family opted to make the Atlanta area their full-time home. And it was there that his athletic career took off in earnest thanks to a youth basketball program that started at age 2.

Those 6-foot rims and a gym where he could just dribble for the entire session were natural fits for Thornton. And when actual games were added to the mix, his path was set.

“They started having games and then it was like, well, I like basketball, I want to play basketball,’ ” his mom said.

Upbringing helped bring out Bruce Thornton’s competitive drive

The gymnasium at Renaissance Middle School is a model of efficiency. Its multi-purpose court has side basketball hoops that fold down. Just one side of the court features seating, and those eight rows of bleachers are covered by a dropped ceiling.

It was here, in Fairburn, Georgia, that Thornton’s athletic nature and competitive spirit was honed. Davin Carmichael, a boys’ basketball coach and also the head custodian at the school, first met Thornton when he was playing against his son in a basketball tournament. Carmichael quickly became a mentor for the Thornton boys by virtue of their shared love of football and basketball, and since he had access to the building at all times, the coach started opening the gym for before- and after-school workouts.

They were, in a word, challenging.

“I’m very, very high on conditioning,” he said. “I knew that my training was a little different from what they had been used to. I remember many times, they’d be ready to almost quit because we did so much running. But I always told them, there’s a purpose for everything that we do, and if they embraced it, they worked together and worked hard, greatness would come out of it.”

It wasn’t just running. Carmichael said he’d occasionally have the boys physically wrestle each other so they could understand the competitive spirit needed to excel. It was an environment in which Thornton thrived. There was no “jaw-jacking” on the court, as he put it. Just work.

“He would just suck it up and get to it, but even when it came down to running, he would set the tone,” Carmichael said. “If anybody was close to beating him, he’d kick it in an extra gear. Even if we’d be challenged, he’ll tell me, ‘Coach, we’ve got it. I’ve got it.’ And he would put the team on his back, and they’d follow his lead.”

At this point, though, Thornton remained a multi-sport athlete. It wasn’t until the end of his freshman year at Alpharetta Milton that he focused on the hardwood, and it came partially out of a tough conversation with mom.

“I had to tell him, like, with football you can be good and still get you a D-I scholarship,” she said. “But with basketball, you’ve gotta be great. People gotta want to come see you. You’ve got to be great to play basketball. He said, ‘I’ll be great.’

“He’s been playing basketball ever since.”

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Homecoming on tap for Bruce Thornton

Thornton's journey will take him back home this weekend when Ohio State takes on UCLA in the CBS Sports Classic. The annual traveling event was in New York City last year, but this year it will be played for the first time inside State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

A significant crowd will be in the stands to witness Thornton's homecoming. A captain as a freshman who is serving as one this season (the Buckeyes haven’t yet officially named captains), Thornton leads Ohio State in scoring average (18.5), assists (43), steals (16) and average minutes played (31.3). He also leads the Big Ten in assist-to-turnover ratio at 5.38.

He has started his first 45 games for Ohio State, the most for any player since Michael Redd started all 96 games of his three-year career from 1997-2000. Saturday’s game at Penn State moved him past Jared Sullinger and Zach Williams, whose tenures began with 44 starts.

In describing Thornton, Ohio State coach Chris Holtmann has frequently used language similar to how Carmichael still speaks of the guard.

“His greatest leadership attribute right now is his everyday approach,” Holtmann said after Thornton scored 26 points in a Dec. 5 win against Minnesota. “When you’re led by a guy who’s coming to practice every day to work, that’s who you want to lead your group, the guy who does that and cares about your team. I credit so much to his everyday approach that’s allowed him to have a level of consistency that’s been really high-level.”

Now the head custodian at Seaborn Lee Elementary in South Fulton, Georgia, Carmichael is coaching junior varsity basketball at a nearby charter school and planning to be at the arena on Saturday. Briggans said they were checking with Thornton's teammates to see who might not be using their ticket allotment to try and get as many people into the building as possible.

For some, the game is secondary. They are just hoping to spend time with Thornton. Briggans understands why.

“I’m very proud of him for the person that he is,” she said. “I told him, whatever’s at the end for you, you’re going to get it (by) being who you are. You can’t be nobody but who you are.”

It’s worked out pretty well so far.

ajardy@dispatch.com

@AdamJardy

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Early family competition propelled Ohio State's Bruce Thornton