[Just a quick remembrance of Reggie Lewis, the rising Celtic star who left us way too soon from a fatal heart ailment while shooting baskets. The tragic moment happened in July 1993. Lewis was just 27 years young. Here, Lewis still is very much on the NBA rise, and the great Fran Blinebury tells us how. Blinebury’s story appeared in the 1993 Street & Smith’s Pro Basketball Annual. If you want to read more about Lewis, find Craig Windham’s Quiet Grace, published in 1995.]
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Reggie Lewis was not one of those NBA first-round draft choices who comes wrapped in a bow and wearing the label of a can’t-miss future superstar. His development was more of a slow, natural process, like a tadpole who learned to swim, steadily grew, and now owns the pond.
Everybody always figured there would come a next big gun in line to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Larry Bird. But very few of even the sharpest scouts predicted that it would be the unassuming kid who played his college ball just a couple of miles away from Boston Garden at Northeastern University, toiling before crowds that on good nights might have numbered 500 fans.
Lewis developed as a player always being the fellow out on the edges of the team photograph. He was part of a powerhouse Dunbar High national championship team in Baltimore in the early 1980s, but his was never the name near the top of the list when people talked about the best prospects. There was David Wingate and Tyrone “Mugsy” Bogues and Reggie Williams and Michael Brown and Keith James basking in the spotlight. And, oh yes, there was Lewis in the role of the sixth man.
Now there is Lewis taking his bows as an NBA all-star after jumping onto center stage last season to lead the Celtics to the Atlantic Division title. While Bird nursed a bad back through the season, and time and so many miles finally took a toll on the production of Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, the patient Lewis stepped in and shouldered the load.
“Making the All-Star Team means that all the hard work has finally paid off for me,” Lewis said. “Now I’ve reached one of my goals, I’ve still got another big one left. That’s to win an NBA championship.”
Championships, of course, are something the Celtics have specialized in down through the years, having passed the torch from Bill Russell to Dave Cowens to Larry Bird and hanging a collection of 16 different banners from the rafters of creaky old Boston Garden.
Now it is Lewis who will attempt to carry on the tradition, and if last season was any indication, he is more than capable of doing the job. By the end of the season, not only did Lewis check in as the Celtics’ lead scorer, he also was the first player to lead the team in points, shots, and steals since Cowens in 1978. On the nights when he just had to be part of the overall unit, Lewis fit in nicely. And in the games when the Celtics needed somebody to step up and make all of the big plays, Lewis did that as well.
“It’s been a gradual process with his offense running ahead of his defense,” said Boston coach Chris Ford. “But I’d say Reggie has the complete package. He’s a go-to guy now, and that’s how we’ve always envisioned him. He had a great year, and he’s taken his game to a different level. Reggie’s overall game is right there. It takes a special player to want the big shot, and when you play behind three legends, you get overshadowed. It takes a while for a guy to become what Reggie has become.”
“I knew it would take me some time, but I was playing with superstars, and I still am,” Lewis said. “I’m still learning from them, and I hope they’re all around for a while, because there is still so much more to learn.”
A lesson Lewis understood at an early age was the value of keeping quiet and patiently waiting for an opportunity to come. He lasted until the 22nd pick in the first round of the 1987 draft because he was injured and didn’t perform well at the league’s pre-draft camp. That experience was a lot like when Lewis was in high school and the college recruiters came to town to get a shot at all of his more well-known teammates.
Only Karl Fogel, who was then a talent scout for Northeastern, had any real interest in the skinny kid who played the role of the sixth man for No. 1-ranked Dunbar. Fogel sold Lewis to Jim Calhoun, who was then the coach of the Huskies, and Reggie pulled their wagon to a 75-19 record and three-straight NCAA tournament bids in his final three seasons.
“He just loved to play,” said Fogel, who took over as Northeastern’s head coach in Lewis’ senior year. “Reggie would always be one of the first ones out there. I’d look out my office window and see him shooting around, working on his game, laughing, and joking.”
“Reggie is special,” said Calhoun. “Even when he was quiet, he had a lot of personality. He has a gift. He’s not an egomaniac, but he does have a very strong belief in himself.”
Lewis needed that belief during the early stages of his pro career when former Celtics coach K.C. Jones left him languishing on the bench while he continued to milk more and more miles out of veterans Bird, McHale, and Parish. “I told all of the scouts that Reggie had the perfect temperament for the league,” said Calhoun. “He’s a great competitor, but he’s not a worrier. He didn’t worry when K.C. didn’t play him as a rookie.”
Instead, Lewis kept his head up and continued to refine his game. He never lost his confidence or doubted himself. That is now reflected in the way he can miss four or five shots in a row and keep on firing away, knowing for sure that the next one is going to go in the basket. He doesn’t pout. He doesn’t question the coaching staff. And he doesn’t question himself. He just plays.
“That experience wasn’t all wasted time,” Lewis said. “I made use of the other talent that was at hand. I had a lot of great veteran players that I was able to learn different things from every day in practice. People like Dennis Johnson and Danny Ainge would pull me aside and tell me to just hang in there, because my day would eventually come.”
That day has dawned, and he has turned into the player the Celtics will be looking to more and more for the big plays in the coming years, the same way the kids who live in the inner city of Boston look for Lewis to show them the way. He has become a regular at many gyms and playgrounds around town, and he spent Thanksgiving morning in the neighborhoods passing out turkeys to needy families.
It’s been a long climb for the guy who wasn’t a starter on his high school team. “I thought I should have started back then,” Lewis said. “In fact, I was going to start in the first game of my junior season. But I got hurt, and the coach put somebody else in there instead of me. That guy played well, and I never said anything about it. So I became the sixth man.”
Now when those more celebrated former high school teammates want to find him, they just have to turn on their TVs. Because the skinny kid named Reggie Lewis has become the Celtics’ main man.
From Way Downtown 