[No intro needed here. Phil Pepe, the prolific New York Daily News sportswriter back in the day, fills in most of the blanks on Lucas and his magic act. Pepe filed this magical story for Popular Sports’ 1973 All-Pro Basketball Magazine. Prepare to be wowed by the Lemon, um, Hard-Boiled Egg Trick.]
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There are 144 broken white stripes to the mile in the center of any state highway in the United States, says Ejrry Aclsu. “Except Kansas,” he hastily adds. “In Kansas, there are 148.”
Ejrry Aclsu is Jerry Lucas. Why Ejrry Aclsu? Well, that’s another bag of tricks. First things first. The white stripes. “I won a lot of money with that one,” Jerry Lucas smiles. “In college, we’d be riding in a car or bus, and I’d tell the guy next to me, ‘I bet you I can tell you when a mile is up.’
“The guy would accept the bet, and he’d cover up the speedometer and vary the speed of his driving, so I couldn’t time a mile. Still, I’d win every time. They couldn’t figure out how I did it. I simply counted the broken white lines in the middle of the road. There are 144 to a mile in every state, except Kansas.”
Lucas figured that out for himself as a boy. His father traveled in his work and took his family with him, and Jerry would amuse himself with little tricks like that. Memory games. “The mind is a wonderful instrument,” Jerry Lucas says. “You can train it to do all kinds of interesting and remarkable things.”
It was on one of these auto trips that Ejrry Aclsu was born. That was one of his tricks. “As we drove along, I began reading the road signs,” he explains. “Then I began to alphabetize the words on the signs. Pretty soon, I was able to alphabetize a word practically on sight. Now, I can alphabetize a word as fast as the average person can read it. For example, the New York, Knickerbockers.—E-N-W K-O-R-Y- B-C-E-E-I-K-K-K-N-O-R-R-S.”
He did it that fast. As fast as it took you to read the letters. “Sure,” you say, Doubting Thomas that you are. He memorized how to alphabetize New York Knickerbockers the moment he was traded from the Warriors for Cazzie Russell. Anybody can teach himself to do that.
I, too, was doubtful. But traveling with the Enw Kory Bceeikkknorrs, I found out that the guy actually can alphabetize any word on sight. I tested him time and again. Words I knew he had not had time to memorize.
“There’s one,” I would say. Alphabetize that.”
The sign said, “Eat at Macaluso’s.”
He would look at it and, in a flash, he would come back. “A-E-T A-T A-A-C-L-M-O-S-S-U.”
Soon, I was a believer.
A lot of people became believers in Jerry Lucas, basketball player, during the 1971-72 NBA season. He come from the Warriors in a most unpopular trade. Cazzie Russell was a big favorite in New York, a spectacular shooter and exciting player who was still young, still gave promise of becoming a superstar.
Jerry Lucas was nothing more than a retread. Once, he had been the most publicized high school player in the country. That was at Middletown, Ohio. Then, he was a star at Ohio State, and he led the Buckeyes to a national championship.
He was drafted by the Cincinnati Royals, and he had some good years for them. Three times he averaged over 20 points a game. But there were stories of problems between Lucas and Oscar Robertson, and [new Royals coach] Bob Cousy didn’t want Lucas around and traded him to San Francisco. He averaged 19.2 points a game for the Warriors in 1970-71, but they said it was a deception.
Defense to Jerry Lucas, they said, was simply a word spelled D-E-E-E-F-N-S. And did you notice that Jerry Lucas never played on a winner in the pros, that no team with Jerry Lucas on it had ever gone as far as the NBA semifinals?
By the time the Knicks got him, Lucas was a used-up player of 31 who has seen better days. He was coming to New York for bench strength. He was to be a back-up forward and center. With Willis Reed coming off a knee operation, Lucas would be used to spell Reed. Lucas spelled it D-E-E-R.
Luke was only 6-8, and he hadn’t played center since his early days in Cincinnati. It was a wishful thought that he could play center for the Knicks, one they never wanted to test. You couldn’t possibly go through a season with Jerry Lucas as your regular center and expect to go anywhere in the NBA.
From the start, it was obvious Reed was not himself. He started out playing 40 minutes, then 24, then none. After 11 games, it was decided that Reed would be lost for the rest of the season. Jerry Lucas was to be the regular center and heaven help them. Now the world would see what kind of magician Jerry Lucas was. Let’s see him pull a rabbit out of his hat. Let’s see him make Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Wes Unseld disappear.
The most astounding trick in the magic career of Jerry Lucas came when Willis Reed was sidelined, and it lasted until May. Lucas was far and away the Knicks’ most valuable player. Night after night, he would take on the mastodon centers at the NBA and dazzle them with his magic—a long, looping, one-handed push shot and now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t passing that fit right in with the Knicks’ style.
Lucas proved that the hand is quicker than the eye. He became “Luke the Great,” a nickname pinned on him, quite naturally, by Danny Whelan, the Knicks’ leprechaun of a trainer. A lot of people were surprised at Lucas’ sleight-of-hand. Even Red Holzman, who traded for him, found Jerry a better center that he thought he was.
“He’s the best shooting and passing center in the league,” said Holzman, pleased with how Luke’s long-distance shooting magic threw the opposition’s defense into a frenzy and gave fits to centers who refused to go out after him.
Despite knees that would swell up requiring a 10-minute application of ice bags after each game, Lucas played 2,926 minutes in 77 games, was the Knicks’ second-leading scorer with 16.7 points per game, and was their leading rebounder with better than 14 a game.
And he was their best player in the playoffs as the Knicks beat Baltimore and Boston to make it to the finals. Ultimately, Luke was no match for Wilt Chamberlain. With a six-inch height advantage, Wilt played as he never had before, and the Lakers beat the Knicks for the championship.
But for Lucas, it was “my most satisfying season.” Not only had he gone farther in the playoffs than ever before, he also proved something. “It wasn’t satisfying just for myself,” Luke said, “but for a lot of other guys my size who might be given a chance to play center because of the year I had.”
Luke discovered another truism of sports—it pays to play in New York and excel in New York. Combining the Knick craze that has swept the city in recent years, the success of the team, his excellent play, and the publicity regarding his magic, Lucas was signed to do a television show featuring Luke The Great doing his magic for kids.
“My ambition,” says Luke the Great, “is to become the best-known magician in the country. I’ve made a thorough study of magic, I can do anything in magic.”
This believer would not deny that last statement having witnessed some of his tricks. The one that most amazes me is the “Telephone Book” trick. Jerry Lucas has committed to memory the first 52 telephone numbers on the first 500 pages of the Manhattan telephone directories. I didn’t believe it either, until he proved it to me. Several times.
Lucas produces a deck of cards, the cards numbered from 1 to 52. Pick a card. Put it back in the deck. “Is this your card?” asks Luke the Great.
It is.
“The number on the card is 39. Now, pick a number from 1 to 500.”
“Two hundred and seventy-eight,” say I.
“Turn to page 278 in the phone book,” says he.
I do.
“Count down to the 39th name (the number on the card I selected).”
“The telephone number of the 39th name on page 278 is 737-5931.”
It was.
“Pick a card,” says Luke The Great, holding out an imaginary deck.
OK, I’ll go along.
“Put it back in the deck, upside down.”
I did.
“What was the card?”
The Queen of Clubs.
He reaches into his pocket and extracts a real deck of cards. He opens the box, spreads the cards. One card is upside down.
The Queen of Clubs.
The piece de resistance in Lucas’ act is the “Dollar Bill in the Lemon” trick. He was to have done it on the Johnny Carson Show. The rest of the Knicks stayed up late, looking for it. Time ran out on the show. No trick.
The next day, his teammates rode him unmercifully. Luke The Great is a fraud, they said.
“All right,” said Lucas, accepting the challenge. “Tomorrow night. I’ll do it’s for you right here in the dressing room. Come early.”
They did. Luke was there already with his props. A lemon. A dollar bill. A roll of scotch tape. He passed the lemon around to his teammates for their examination. They agreed it was a real lemon, no cuts, no holes.
He produced the dollar bill and asked trainer Whelan to copy the serial number on a piece of paper. Danny did. Luke excused himself and left the room. He was back in a matter of seconds with the lemon, which he asked Whelan to cut in half.
Danny did, but he couldn’t cut through the lemon. There was something inside. Danny removed it. There was a dollar bill rolled up and wrapped in scotch tape. He removed the tape and read the serial number. It was the same number that Whelan had written on the piece of paper. Lucas’ teammates were impressed, but not convinced. “OK,” said Luke. “Tomorrow night, I’ll do the same trick with a hard-boiled egg instead of a lemon.”
His teammates arrived early the next night, anxious to see Luke The Great put to his greatest test. But there would be no show. Something had gone wrong. “I was sleeping this morning when my daughter woke me,” Lucas explained. “She told me she had found a dollar. I asked her where she found it. She said she found it in the refrigerator. ‘It was in an egg,’ she said. ‘I was hungry, so I ate the egg and kept the dollar.’”
Luke The Great’s greatest trick was ruined by a hungry child. His teammates doubt Luke The Great as a magician, but not as a basketball player.
There are still a few of us believers left, however. I must admit, I am somewhat awed and intimidated by Jerry Lucas. He said if he didn’t like what I wrote, he would make the rest of the story disap
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