Dempsey’s family was certainly not wealthy. But neither do they seem desperately poor, nor far outside the American mainstream. His Dad, we learn in the video segment, worked for a railroad and in construction, his Mom was a nurse, his sister was a high-level tennis player, and Clint eventually hooked up with the Dallas Texans elite youth club before spending three years at Furman University (an excellent private liberal-arts school in South Carolina). His family did indeed have to make sacrifices, which Clint claims included giving up their boat and selling some of their gun collection, and he did have to scrap to develop his game in the backyards and parks of Nacogdoches. But overall this could also be spun as a very "normal" American story—a hardworking family leveraging their resources (and spending a lot of time commuting) to provide opportunities for a talented and motivated child who learns to improvise by necessity.