Lucas to Coach His Team One Day at a Time

On Christmas Day, little John Lucas kept an upper lip as stiff as Tiny Tim’s. He did not look under his tree. He needed no gift. The 25th of December represented no particular holiday to someone who has been through what he has been through. It was another day to stay strong, another day to endure, another day like any other day.

“How would you sum up everything that has happened to you?” Lucas is asked.

“Oh,” he says, “I’m just another person who has been helped by a lot of people whose last names I don’t even know.”

John Lucas, 39, has been up and down and all around. In his prime as a basketball player, he was a mighty mite who played with perpetual motion and emotion. As a part-time tennis pro, he once partnered with the transsexual ophthalmologist, Renee Richards, in what amounted to the ultimate in mixed doubles.

Then came a descent into drug-dependency hell. And later, the treadmill of recovery. Later still came the establishment of a substance-abuse clinic of his own in which Lucas gave guidance and relief to persons in predicaments like his own, to Roy Tarpley and Chris Washburn and Grant Gondrezick and even to the prodigal prodigy Lloyd (Sweetpea) Daniels, who now plays basketball for the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs and addresses John Lucas as “Coach.”

“Miracles happen,” Lucas says. “I’m living proof of that.”

Exactly one week before Christmas, the Spurs relieved Jerry Tarkanian of his duties and hired Lucas in his place. Neither man had ever coached an NBA club in his life.

The principal difference was that, while Tarkanian had coached a quarter-century of basketball at the college level and certainly understood the way the game was played, he showed no real aptitude for the way it was meant to be played on a higher plane. Whereas Lucas had been involved in professional basketball for most of his adult life, playing for six NBA organizations, scoring nearly 10,000 points and even acting as owner-coach of a championship team on a minor league level, the Miami Tropics of something called the United States Basketball League.

David Robinson, veteran of military and Dream Team service throughout the world, also has been around, and in his opinion: “Anyone with a record like his (Tarkanian’s) is someone you have to respect, and personally I liked him a lot. But it doesn’t matter what kind of personality you have if you don’t have knowledge.

“For coaches in the NBA, everything is timing--when to take the timeouts, when to stop and start the running. There’s a lot more strategy in the pros than in college. And Tark also didn’t know the players in the NBA that well. Twenty games isn’t a fair gauge, I know, and I still think he could have become a hell of an NBA coach. But it’s hard to wait for your coach to catch up. John Lucas understands the pro game right now.”

Lucas, humbly, disagrees.

“These guys handle their own timeouts and call their own plays, same way I did for 15 years,” he says. “It’s their team.”

No, of course it isn’t, and the coach is speaking with typical self-deprecation. This is part of his psychological and spiritual makeup now that he is recovering, and, chances are, it always will be. Yet the truth of the matter is that the Spurs consider themselves a playoff-worthy team that was going nowhere with Tark in the saddle, and believe that Lucas can take them where they deserve to go.

“Tark did the best he could,” forward Sean Elliott says. “But Luke already has us up-tempo more, has us playing more the way we should.”

“And sometimes he’s hard on us,” Robinson adds. “He’ll yell: ‘You’re not giving us anything! You’re not giving me what we need!’ Some coaches say stuff like that, you get mad at them or don’t even listen. With John, we listen. He’s bringing our heads and hearts together.”

Lucas insists that while he let it be widely known to “please consider me” when a coaching position came open, there were certain teams he wanted no part of, teams that demanded a dedicated X-and-O strategist. Instead, he was more inclined to coach players who had enough skills and smarts to get by but were in dire need of some leadership.

Having become something of an uncle to so many younger men attempting to overcome the horrors of substance addiction, Lucas was a good choice in particular for the rookie Daniels, who might otherwise have felt threatened by the exit of his surrogate father Tarkanian. In the Lucas rehab program, Daniels says: “He touched something inside me. He knew me because this was a man who had been there himself.”

The Spurs won their first game under Lucas, then won again on Christmas Day, defeating the Clippers on national TV.

A nice gift.

“No,” John Lucas says. “To be sober is the greatest gift. This is just, you know, basketball.”