Rickey Hill traveled a rocky road before he could see his childhood dream become a big-screen reality.

As his story is told in Friday’s “The Hill,” being dirt poor in Texas was the least of the obstacles this athletic prodigy had to overcome before he could play Major League Baseball.

“The Hill” stars Dennis Quaid as Rickey’s devout preacher dad, Scott Glenn as the influential baseball scout who decides Rickey’s fate and Colin Ford is teenage Rickey.

Hill’s first hurdle was being born with a degenerative spinal disease; he could only walk with heavy leg braces. Then his dad, spectacularly unsupportive of his son’s most cherished dream, never attending any of his baseball games, decreed that Rickey would become a minister just like him.

Rickey’s uncanny gift as a hitter derailed that plan. “At nine years old I’d never owned a ball,” Hill, 67, said in a phone interview. His brother would pitch a rock and Rickey hit it with a stick.

“I just took my braces off.  I was done with those things. That was my big opening up for a career in baseball, because at nine years old I was just powering them over the fence.

“And that’s unheard of! To do something like that. Because the fences were not short when I was just knocking them out of the park at nine years old. Going from rocks to hitting a baseball. Yep.”

While “The Hill” begins in 1975 with Rickey 19 and hopeful (he signed with the Montreal Expos that year). It was actually when he was playing ball professionally in 1977-78 that his brother “wrote a story about what I had to do to even sign a baseball contract. Signing a major league contract is probably one of the hardest things.

“My brother wrote the story about how I did it, which is what this movie is about. Because it just doesn’t happen this way. But my brother wrote a 56-page story for my family. Just to have it.

“Our church got a hold of it and the next thing you know, they’re offering me $100,000 for my story.  That was just shocking to me.

“I had to turn it down because my father came down with pancreas cancer at the same time. So I could not sell. I wasn’t interested in a movie when my parents are sitting there in serious trouble.”

Which is why the second time around is the right time for hitting “The Hill.”