BERNIE MAC MADE A MAN BY WOMEN IN HIS LIFE

Bernie Mac was attracted to the story of Pride about inner city Philadelphia trouble makers who were inspired to make something more of their lives by a swimming coach, because he had his own coaches and mentors growing up in the rough neighborhoods of Chicago.

Bernie says he owes his mother and grandmother for instilling positive values in him, even if he learned the hard way with a whipping.

“If my grandmother or mother heard something that we were out of line we were in trouble. Oh yeah, whippings was very popular in my day. My grandmother would come and get you in the street. We had to be when the streetlights were on and if you were missing you got whippings. I wouldn’t say beat but we got the belt and that was that time. And my mother would come to school and if I was misbehaving my mother gave me a whipping in front of my class.”

Even though his grandmother was strict Bernie says she made a man out of him.

“They didn’t never let us do anything less than 150 percent. If we started something she said we had to finish. She never let us quit. We had rules. We had guidelines. All the time I thought she was a warden. But she wasn’t. It made me a man, it really did.”

Bernie will be seen this summer reprising his role as Frank Catton in Oceans 13 and the Sci-Fi action adventure Transformers.