The 2 p.m. check-in time came and went. Fifteen minutes late stretched to 30, to 45, igniting a panicked search in the men’s basketball office. Where the hell was Kyle Lowry? The prized point guard was past due at freshman orientation, and no one had heard from him.
Plenty of people had told Jay Wright not to take the Philly kid. He was too hard-headed, too difficult, more headache than joy. But the coach disagreed, seeing through the bravado to a kid who simply didn’t trust easily but was anchored by a pure heart. Plus Lowry had exactly what Wright thought was missing on his Villanova roster — just the right sort of nastiness.
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Except now here was Lowry, shirking his first official Villanova duty, proving all of the doubters right. “We couldn’t find him,’’ Wright says now, 19 years after that fretful August moment, “because he was in the hospital.’’ Earlier in the day, Lowry got wind of a pickup game at a nearby Philly court and, desperate to squeeze in just a few more minutes of unchoreographed hoops before checking into the deliberate world of college ball, he decided to go play. He wound up tearing his ACL, a diagnosis most sensible people figured would bench him for the entirety of his freshman season. “We had a saying — one man with courage makes the majority,’’ Wright says. “We had that one guy that was always going to be the toughest guy on the floor, and that was Kyle. He only wanted two things — to play basketball, and to win.’’
Now at 37, he is nearer to the last points of his career than the first, and has ceded both the spotlight and minutes to his younger Miami Heat teammates. It has, those who know him well say, no doubt been a difficult pill to swallow. Age sneaks up on everyone but especially on athletes who quickly find the valve of their usefulness slowed down to a trickle.
But as the eighth-seeded Heat head into the NBA Finals with a roster comprised largely of would-be no-names, castoffs, vagabonds and misfits, no one is terribly surprised to see Lowry, with his six All-Star appearances, NBA championship and Olympic gold medal, advising, applauding and, sure, maybe sometimes angling for more minutes (old habits die hard, after all).
He has matured and grown and developed into a wizened NBA veteran. At his core, he remains the same kid who went to the park instead of orientation.
Kyle Lowry still just wants to play ball.
And this might just be his last shot at the biggest win.
Phil Martelli popped into the Cardinal Dougherty gym to watch practice. As the head coach of Saint Joseph’s, it would have been near irresponsible to do otherwise. This was in 2003, and the Hawks were hot thanks to another Philly guard by the name of Jameer Nelson, and Cardinal Dock was loaded, with future D1 players in Lowry, Shane Clark, DeSean White and Bilal Benn on the roster.
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Martelli wasn’t there to make a formal recruiting pitch; more like a casual meet and greet. After practice, he sat with each of the players separately, sharing no more than maybe 15 minutes of his spiel. Martelli could tell Lowry, already being pursued by Xavier, Arkansas, Syracuse and Villanova, was not necessarily feeling it, so at the end of his chat he asked if the guard had any questions. “Yeah,’’ Lowry said. “We about done, dawg?”
Martelli, now the associate head coach at Michigan, laughs as he retells the story. “He denies, but I don’t even have the imagination to make that one up,’’ Martelli says. Now sewn into the fabric of Lowry’s Philly urban myth, the story at the time was told as a warning sign to would-be suitors. From brooding and difficult to downright trouble, Lowry had a reputation that preceded him. “People were like, I don’t know. He might not be a Villanova kid,’’ former Villanova assistant coach Ed Pinckney says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, but he’s kicking everybody’s ass.’’’
Villanova needed an ass-kicker. Three years into Wright’s tenure, he had attracted a top recruiting class and then some but the Wildcats had nothing to show for it. Randy Foye, Allan Ray, Curtis Sumpter, Jason Fraser, Mike Nardi and Will Sheridan were exactly the sort of character kids Wright wanted to build his program’s foundation on, and they had more than enough talent to challenge the Big East. But they needed an injection of attitude. “This was the days of the old school Big East,’’ says former assistant Fred Hill. “Like back when Pitt had grown men.”
Lowry brought it. “For me, I don’t empathize with people who don’t buy in,’’ Sheridan says. “Kyle doesn’t empathize with people who don’t compete.’’ Collectively the staff also came to realize that people had been misreading his personality. Where others saw disrespect in his aloofness, they came to recognize it was a simple lack of trust. Plenty of people offered Lowry things — stuff, usually, in exchange for his basketball prowess — but they always wanted something in return. “The reality is, he’s as straight as an arrow,’’ says Billy Lange, now the head coach at St. Joe’s but then Villanova’s recruiting coordinator. “Unbelievable mind, highly disciplined. Married the girl from high school.” Enamored, Villanova dug in to recruit Lowry.
Lange especially worked to chip away at Lowry’s armor. The son of a New Jersey high school coach, Lange felt like he could connect via their lifelong commitment to the sport. The two talked hoops, and slowly Lowry let Lange in. On a recruiting trip, Lange remembers turning on his car and the CD player springing to life with New Edition. “(Lowry’s mother) Marie belted out every word,” Lange says. “That was a good sign.’’ Lange also promised Lowry that Villanova would provide a genuine commitment to him, and not just a transactional relationship.
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On Nov. 13, 2003, Lowry chose Villanova.
Four months later — before Lowry even got to campus — Lange got the head-coaching job at Navy. “He didn’t talk to me for seven years,’’ Lange says.
No one can quite remember how word got back to them, but at some point the news trickled into the basketball offices at Villanova. “We kept hearing how great Kyle was looking,’’ Wright says. “We were like, ‘What? What are you talking about? He’s hurt.’ He was playing pickup with students at Saint Mary’s gym. He wasn’t even cleared to practice.’’
A week after Lowry injured his knee in the pickup game, Villanova put out a release announcing that their prized recruit would have surgery and would be sidelined indefinitely. ACL recovery typically runs around six months, and since Lowry was only a freshman, Wright saw little reason in rushing. He could redshirt and return with all of his eligibility. Lowry had a question: “Why did you do that? I’ll be back.”
The idea of sitting out did not compute in Lowry’s brain. Raised in a rough neighborhood in North Philly, Lowry was not the sort of kid to give his mother worry because she always knew where to find him. He was either on the playground or in a gym somewhere playing ball.
He still is. In the offseason, Lowry returns like a swallow to his Capistrano, working out at Villanova — arriving long before the college-aged players get to a summer workout, and staying well after they vacate. “Feel free to insert the dinosaur reference to the former Raptor, or whatever, but guys my age that are still getting after it? I have nothing but respect,’’ says his former Villanova teammate Will Sheridan. “People talk about the money, and yes, there’s a huge financial payoff, but this is Kyle just being his authentic self. He’s always loved basketball.”
Age won’t stop him now; a surgically repaired knee would not get in the way then. “Oh he rehabbed but it was his own way. Poor Jeff Pierce,’’ Wright says of the team’s athletic trainer. ACL rehab ordinarily is brutal in its monotony, a slow progression meant to not just build strength but also help quiet a nervous mind that fears reinjury. Lowry had no such fear. His coaches begged him to sit still and observe practice, use the time to better understand the nuances of Villanova’s system and intuit what Wright wanted.
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Instead, Lowry would go off to a side basket and shoot, stretch, run through offensive sets or just mindlessly throw the ball off the glass over and over again. “It was mind-boggling,’’ Hill says. “I kept telling him to pay attention, but he was always off to the side doing something — usually something he wasn’t supposed to be doing.’’ In between he’d pester Wright with questions, ask why he would do things this way and not that way, or insist he was ready to play. Wright shooed him away, backed by doctors who told him there was no wiggle room; Lowry couldn’t play.
Undeterred by doctors’ orders, Lowry instead found games that the doctors and coaches didn’t know about — until Wright did and threatened to boot him from the team. Much to Lowry’s chagrin, the season went on without him. Villanova weathered a fairly easy early schedule with just one hiccup — a loss to Temple.
Somewhere around early December, team physician Rob Goode, who performed Lowry’s surgery, pulled the head coach aside. “I don’t know how to tell you this,’’ Goode said. “But his knee is fine. He can play.’’ Lowry dressed for the Wildcats’ game against Penn on New Year’s Eve. In 17 minutes, he scored seven points, collected three rebounds and dished an assist.
What else could he ask for?
“Am I not explaining myself right?” Exasperated and exhausted, Wright turned toward his assistants to see if he was, perhaps, being unclear. He was running a simple drill — pivot off one foot, drive to the basket with the other. Lowry kept ad-libbing.
Consider Villanova in its prime under Wright — the pump fakes, the jump stops. Elbows out, knees bent on a catch, or defensive position mastered to perfection, like widgets on a basketball assembly line. Masked by his upbeat personality, Wright was no picnic to play for. He was deliberate and exacting. Little things mattered. There was room for athleticism and creativity, so long as the fundamentals were executed properly, and they were mastered with precise drills in practice. “Except Kyle just wanted to win,’’ Pinckney says. “Win the drill, win everything. He could do it. He just thought his way would win.’’
Once Lowry returned to practice, Wright figures he tossed him out of it at least twice a month — usually when his need to win ran in direct contrast with Wright’s need to do things his way. In a lot of ways the two are a lot alike — fiercely competitive and slightly stubborn. They’d meet in Wright’s office in search of common ground. Detente was not easily achieved. There were days Wright swore Lowry was going to drive him mad, and days when Lowry thought about leaving.
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But Wright also understood what drove Lowry. Before he got to campus — and before he tore his ACL — Lowry offered up an opinion to his would-be coach. “You should start me because I’m better than anyone you have,’’ he said. “But you won’t because those guys are your boys.’’
Wright admits he backed his older guys. He always told his assistants that if a freshman could beat out a sophomore it was more a reflection on the coaching staff not doing its job than the player himself. By the time Lowry arrived, Foye and Ray were entrenched as starters. Lowry went after the player he figured was most vulnerable — Nardi, who was only a year older. “These two dudes, they would go at it every day,’’ Ray says. “It got to the point where coach told them they couldn’t guard each other anymore. We all went hard, but they were on a different level. Kyle wanted Nardi’s spot. That’s all it was.”
During these NBA playoffs, Lowry has started exactly once. He is averaging 25.2 minutes per game, the fewest in more than a decade. No one who knows him well thinks he’s necessarily loving the diminished role. Yet everyone also argues that he understands it. Ask people to identify Lowry’s biggest asset as a basketball player. “His basketball IQ is off the charts,’’ Pinckney says, parroting the refrain. Despite seemingly doing his own thing during rehab, Lowry jumped into the Villanova season and immediately knew exactly what he was supposed to do.
By the end of his freshman season, Lowry wound up in the starting lineup, albeit out of necessity. When Curtis Sumpter tore his ACL in the Sweet 16 against Florida, Wright was forced to reinvent his team, inserting Lowry and using a four-guard lineup. In the regional semifinals and the Elite Eight against North Carolina, Lowry scored 33 points, pulled down 12 rebounds, dished out five assists and swiped five steals. “He’s in there against Jo freaking Noah grabbing rebounds,’’ Pinckney says in wonder. “And this is after he tore his ACL. This dude, he was just unreal. He did whatever he could to help us win.’’
Watching Lowry in his limited role with the Heat, those who know him spy the same motivation. “He’s over the hill,’’ Nardi says with a laugh. “No, I’m kidding. But think of the emotional intelligence that it takes to put your ego aside like that. It’s like he knows what he can contribute, and he understands this is what will help his team win.’’
Still the head coach at Navy, Lange traveled to, as most head coaches do, the Final Four in 2011. The games were in Houston. Lowry was in his third season with the Rockets. In the seven-year chasm, the two had exchanged a high five when Lange returned to Villanova for the team banquet following Lowry’s sophomore season. Otherwise no contact. “He sent my wife a rookie card,’’ Lange says. “Not me.’’
Figuring he had nothing to lose, Lange sent a text message, asking Lowry if they could meet. To his surprise — and delight — Lowry agreed. Lowry drove to the hotel, and the two drove around town for close to an hour, clearing the air and putting the past behind them. The next night, Lange went to watch Lowry play against Atlanta (Lowry had 17 points, eight assists and three rebounds).
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Lange always understood Lowry’s cold shoulder — the coach had made a promise and then he broke it — just like he always understood what motivated the player. The two are thick as thieves now — the sort of friendship where their kids are friends with one another. Lowry has grown up. He has not, however, changed. As Lange gathered his St. Joe’s team for the start of summer school, he showed them a video of Lowry from the Heat’s series with Milwaukee. During a timeout, Lowry walked directly on the court and over to Gabe Vincent, the player who essentially has taken his starting spot. He put his arm around Vincent and started explaining something in his ear. “That’s who he is,’’ Lange says.
Funny enough, Lange isn’t the only one who noticed. Martelli, who never begrudged Lowry his attitude, has watched from afar, too. “He’s a pro’s pro,’’ he says. “Not everybody can say that. What he’s doing right now, it’s a tribute to Villanova and how he was raised on the court, but it’s a real tribute to him and an absolute lack of entitlement and an ability to look at the broad picture. Not everybody can do that. Everyone says they want to win more than anything else; not everybody really means it.’’
(Top photo: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
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