Thomas, Isiah 1961–

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Isiah Thomas 1961–

Former professional basketball player, team executive, entrepreneur

At a Glance…

A Family’s Last Hope

From College to the Pros

Fame Brings Its Own Problems

Back-to-Back Titles

Retired in Style

Sources

To many sports fans and writers, Isiah Thomas was the best so-called “small” man ever to play professional basketball. The six-foot-one-inch Thomas served as a point guard for the Detroit Pistons from 1981 to 1994, earning a spot on the All-Star roster for 12 consecutive years and leading his team to back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990. Thomas, who joined the Pistons when he was just 19, was a ruthless competitor on the court but dedicated himself to civic causes and social issues in his spare time. The passing of the years eroded Thomas’s playing ability and his reputation as a good-natured, accessible superstar, but most observers agree that his many-faceted dedication to basketball will far outlast his days as a player.

Detroit Free Press columnist Charlie Vincent called Thomas “the spirit and the heart and the soul of a team that wormed its way into our hearts. He came with a smile that made us all think he was a choirboy but showed us, in time, that—on the floor—he could be an assassin.” Vincent added that Thomas “showed a generation of Detroit fans how a winner behaves. He has given us memories of glory and of leadership and courage.” Thomas retired from basketball on May 11, 1994, following months of speculation about his future and a rumored $55-million retirement package. “This has been a great life for me,” Thomas told reporters. “I think I enjoyed myself more than any other player who ever came through the NBA.” Thomas was expected to become a color commentator for televised basketball coverage and to devote more time to his extensive business dealings.

“I’m in love with basketball,” Thomas once told Sports Illustrated. “It’s my release. It’s my outlet. If I get mad, I go shoot. It’s my freedom. It’s my security. It’s my drug; it’s my high.” Thomas’s love of the game has at times bordered on obsession. As a rookie Piston point guard in 1981 he set a goal of being part of a national championship team. At times that goal seemed out of reach no matter how hard he played as an individual. Time and maturity seasoned his game, however, and he finally earned the championship banner—the first ever in Pistons’ history. Sport magazine contributor Johnette Howard wrote: “Like many other superstars—at least the smart ones—Thomas learned long ago that piling up statistics is less intriguing than chasing or craving what he cannot guarantee. Like winning. By that measure, regardless of what anyone else says, he is an unqualified success.”

At a Glance…

Born Isiah Lord Thomas III, April 30, 1961, In Chicago, IL; son of Isiah Lord II (a plant foreman) and Mary (a civil service employee) Thomas; married Lynn Kendall (a teacher), 1985; children: Joshua fsiah, Lauren. Education: Indiana University, B.A., 1987,

Professional basketball player with Detroit Pistons, 1981-1994. Member of U.S. Olympic basketball team, 1980; vice president of National Basketball Association Players Association, 1986-88, president, 1988-94. Vice president of basketball, Toronto Raptors Basketball Club, Inc., 1994—.

Selected awards: Named to NBA All-Star Team, 1982-92; named All-Star Game Most Valuable Player, 1984 and 1986; NBA Championships Most Valuable Player, 1990.

Addresses: Office —Toronto Raptors, 150 York St., Suite 1100, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5H 3S5.

A Family’s Last Hope

Isiah Lord Thomas III grew up in the heart of Chicago’s West Side ghetto, the youngest of seven boys and two girls born to Mary and Isiah Thomas II. “He was well behaved, but spoiled,” Mary Thomas told Sports Illustrated. “I can’t say I didn’t treat him special. He was the baby. He got special attention.” Isiah III was a plant supervisor who pushed his children to read, barred them from watching anything but educational television, and lectured them to stick together and protect one another.

When Isiah HI was an infant, his father lost his job as a supervisor at International Harvester and could not find comparable work elsewhere. He was forced to work as a janitor at extremely reduced wages, and the stress of his disappointment caused friction in the family. “My father was frustrated by his intelligence,” Thomas told Gentlemen’s Quarterly. “He was a black man coming up in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. Being very intelligent and not being able to express that intelligence made him a very angry man. Sometimes he took that anger out on our family.”

Eventually, Isiah II and Mary Thomas separated, and the childrearing duties fell primarily to Mary. She was a strict disciplinarian who required her children to be home by the time the street lights came on. Born a Baptist, she turned the family toward Catholicism and thus came under the wing of a local church, Our Lady of Sorrows, and its schools. Fearlessly protective of her family, there was little that Mary Thomas would not do to shield her children from the gangs that prowled their neighborhood’s streets. Once she chased gang members from her front porch with a shotgun when they came to recruit her sons. Her courage and determination—especially where Isiah III was concerned—were the subject of a 1987 made-for-televi-sion movie.

Thomas spent most of his free time playing basketball at tiny Gladys Park, next to Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway. According to Ira Berkow in the New York Times, the young Thomas was a “prodigy in basketball the way Mozart was in music. At age three, Amadeus was composing on a harpsichord; at three, Isiah could dribble and shoot baskets.” Thomas was tutored by his older brothers, some of whom were top-notch players in their own rights. Thomas recalled those days fondly in Sports Illustrated. “Go anywhere on the West Side and say, ’Meet me at the court,’ and they’d know what you were talking about,” he said. “That’s where I really learned to play. There were some basketball players there. You could always get a game there. Any time of day, any time of night. Me and my brothers used to go over there with snow shovels in the winter so we could play.”

When Thomas was 12, the street gangs began moving in more ferociously, and some of his older brothers succumbed to the lure of drug abuse and crime. Mary Thomas moved the family five miles west to Menard Avenue, but trouble seemed to follow. “Those were probably the worst times as a kid,” Thomas told Sports Illustrated. “We very rarely had heat. We had an oil furnace but no money to buy oil. In the winter, it was always cold, and you had to sleep all the time with your clothes on. Everything broke down in the house once we bought it…. I mean everything was a disaster.” Sleeping in a closet and eating food donated by concerned church members, Thomas was tempted to follow the lead of his brothers and turn to drug dealing as a way out of poverty. His brothers and his mother convinced him otherwise. They told him that he might well lead the family into better circumstances with his basketball skills.

Most of the Chicago area coaches considered Thomas too small to have any significant impact on a basketball program, but Thomas’s brothers persuaded coach Gene Pingatore of St. Joseph High School to give Isiah a sports scholarship. St. Joseph was located in a white suburb of Chicago. Thomas had to commute three hours each way to and from school, taking three buses and arriving home well after dark. He struggled to acquire discipline in the classroom and on the court and, by his junior year, he led St. Joseph to a second-place finish in the state high school championship tournament. As a senior he was one of the most coveted college prospects in the nation.

From College to the Pros

More than 100 colleges recruited Thomas. His family wanted him to stay home and attend DePaul, but he chose to go to Indiana University and play for the brilliant but moody coach Bob Knight. Thomas made All-Big Ten his freshman and sophomore years and was named a consensus All-American in 1981. That year he led the Hoosiers to the NCAA championship game, where Indiana routed the North Carolina Tar Heels, 63-50. With 23 points in the championship match, Thomas was named NCAA tournament Most Valuable Player. Despite his All-Star performance as a freshman and sophomore, Thomas was not happy at Indiana. He and Knight clashed frequently. Finally, in 1981—on the advice of his friend Magic Johnson—Thomas decided to leave college and apply for the NBA draft.

Thomas was selected second in the opening round of the 1981 NBA draft by the Detroit Pistons, a hopelessly foundering organization that had won only 37 of 164 games the previous two seasons. At the tender age of nineteen, Thomas became burdened with the chore of rescuing the NBA’s worst team. A Detroit News headline hailed him as “Isiah the Savior,” and Pistons season ticket sales jumped 50 percent. Even the club brass talked about making the NBA Finals as they announced Thomas’s four-year, $1.6 million contract. Undaunted by the expectations, Thomas turned in a successful rookie season, averaging 17 points per game and leading his team in assists and steals. He improved further in his second season, averaging nearly 23 points and 8 assists per game. Both years he represented the Pistons at the All-Star Game.

Through his first four years in Detroit, Thomas consistently outplayed his teammates. He was the first player in league history to be voted to the All-Star team in his first five seasons, and in 1984 and 1986 his performances in the All-Star game were so spectacular that he was named the contest’s Most Valuable Player. By 1984 he had managed to guide the Pistons to their first winning record in seven seasons, and he was given a new ten-year, $12 million contract that was specifically designed to keep him in Detroit for his entire career. He responded to this vote of confidence in the 1984-85 season by dishing an NBA-record 1,123 assists, an average of 13.1 per game.

Not only did Thomas shine on the court, he also earned the affection of basketball fans everywhere—and especially in Detroit—for his well-publicized anti-crime work, his open dedication to his family, and his accessibility to the media. Howard noted of Thomas in Sport: “Half the beat reporters in the NBA had his home phone number, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to sit for an hour after a practice, talking about some societal issue such as racism or his latest take on the game.” Perhaps inevitably, however, pressures began to mount on the affable superstar as Detroit became a legitimate playoff contender in 1986. A turning point in the evolution of Isiah Thomas occurred during the 1987 Eastern Conference finals against the Boston Celtics.

Fame Brings Its Own Problems

Under new head coach Chuck Daly, the Detroit Pistons improved enough to challenge for the 1987 NBA crown. That year, Thomas averaged almost 20 points per game in the playoffs as Detroit advanced to an Eastern Conference showdown with the Celtics. The winner of the best-of-seven series would advance to the NBA playoffs— something the Pistons had never done. The series was hard-fought and seethed with emotion. By Game Five each team had won twice, and as Game Five neared a close the Pistons clung to a one-point lead and had possession of the ball. With one second left to play, Thomas in-bounded the ball. His pass was stolen by Larry Bird of the Celtics. Bird lobbed the ball to teammate Dennis Johnson, who scored the winning basket as the buzzer sounded. The dramatic loss stunned the Pistons, who went on to lose the series in seven games.

Just after Detroit’s loss to the Celtics, another Piston, rookie Dennis Rodman, told reporters that Larry Bird was “overrated” because he was white. Asked to comment on his teammate’s statement, Thomas responded that while Bird was a “very, very good basketball player,” if he were black he would be “just another good guy.” The backlash among media and fans was immediate. Even though Thomas apologized to Bird at a press conference—and clarified his remarks by explaining that he felt an inherent racial bias existed in basketball—his reputation was severely damaged. Howard wrote in 1992 that in the wake of that controversy, “neither [Thomas] nor his image has ever been the same,” and added: “Looking back on it now, Thomas’ greatest sin might’ve been that his thinking and candor put him ahead of his time.”

Thus Thomas’s honeymoon with the media ended just as his team’s best winning years began. Beginning in 1987, the Pistons adopted surly tactics both on-and off-court that led to their being nicknamed the Motor City “Bad Boys.” With Thomas as team captain, the “Bad Boys” turned in a strong 1987-88 season and capped the year with an Eastern Conference Finals victory over the Celtics and a bruising, seven-game championship run versus the Los Angeles Lakers. Playing with a jammed finger, a bruised eye, facial cuts, and a badly sprained ankle, Thomas threatened to steal the series for the Pistons, especially in Game Six, when he scored 43 points and 8 assists. Los Angeles won the championship in seven games, but the Pistons—and Thomas—had finally shed their losing image. The next two seasons would belong to Detroit.

Back-to-Back Titles

With Isiah Thomas at the height of his ability, the Pistons won the NBA championship in 1989 and again in 1990. These championship teams were often embroiled in controversy, both for their aggressive style of play and for their combative attitudes off-court. Rolling Stone contributor Jeff Coplon wrote that the “Bad Boys” were perceived nationwide as “goons, thugs, terrorists…. When they took the court, a hockey game broke out. Normally placid opponents … blew up bumps into scuffles, scuffles into brawls. In the cultish NBA, if the Celtics were white America’s team, and the Lakers were Club Hollywood, the Pistons belonged to Qaddafi…. Piston-bashing was suddenly a blood sport—especially among those most threatened by Detroit’s rise.” In 1988-89 Detroit compiled the best regular-season record in the NBA, winning 65 of 82 games. A six-game Eastern Conference Final series victory against Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls set the stage for another showdown with the Lakers. This time, the Pistons swept Los Angeles in four games and returned to Detroit with the championship.

Even greater triumph awaited Thomas the next year as Detroit’s “Bad Boys” advanced again to the championship series, this time against the Portland Trail Blazers. In a series remembered for its physical play, the Pistons won in just five games to clinch back-to-back championship victories. Sports Illustrated correspondent Jack McCal-lum credited the strong Detroit showing to Thomas. The Piston captain, wrote McCallum, “kept the tempo at a controlled, even pace, which disrupted the fast-breaking … Trail Blazers. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was creating something from nothing, with long-distance jump shots, body-twisting drives and steals in the open floor…. By the time the Pistons had beaten the Blazers… to clinch their second straight championship… there was only one great guard still playing basketball—Isiah Lord Thomas III.”

Thomas was named Most Valuable Player of the 1990 championships. Returning home to celebrate with his wife, he discovered that he was the target of media scrutiny for alleged gambling improprieties. Although no formal charges were brought against him, the negative publicity only alienated him more from the media and fans he had once courted so gallantly. As regular season play began in the 1990s, Thomas’s statistics fell off somewhat, and he began spending more time alone with his family. He was sidelined in the 1991-92 season after receiving a blow to the head in a game against the Utah Jazz.

Worse, Thomas was probably the best-known NBA player who was not selected for the celebrated 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team, allegedly because of pressure from reigning basketball superstar Michael Jordan, with whom Thomas had long feuded. That omission was particularly difficult for Thomas, because he had been a member of a 1980 Olympic basketball team that was forced to boycott the Olympics by President Jimmy Carter.

Through these and other controversies, Thomas remained the Pistons’ team captain. He also served a four-year stint as the president of the NBA Players Association. As he ended his eleventh season in the NBA, Thomas reflected on his career in Sport magazine: “You gotta understand,” he said. “I’m 6-1. If I was 6-9, 1 could be ’nice.’ If I was 6-9, or 6-6 and could jump out of the building, I could be nice. But being 6-1, having to try to be successful in a league where everyone else is 6-7, 6-8, 6-9, you’ve got to have a little fire in your gut, or you’ll be like every other 6-1 guy is supposed to be in the league—average. I didn’t want to be average…. You have to do what you have to do. And I had no problems doing that.”

Retired in Style

The Pistons’ fortunes ebbed as those of the Chicago Bulls rose. The Pistons were defeated by the Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals in 1991, crushing their hopes for a third NBA title and prompting calls for “rebuilding.” In December of 1993, rumors suggested that Thomas was about to embark for the New York Knicks. Instead, on January 7, 1994, the Pistons called a press conference to announce that Thomas had signed a long-term contract that would take him past retirement. “This is one of the happiest days of my career, and one of the happiest days of my life,” Thomas told the Detroit Free Press when the agreement was announced. Soon after the contract was signed, more rumors circulated that Thomas would retire at the end of the season.

On April 19, 1994, Isiah Thomas played his last game as a Detroit Piston, though his retirement would not become official until May 11. Thomas left his final game in the third quarter with a torn Achilles tendon, after scoring 12 points and serving up 6 assists against the up-and-coming Orlando Magic. Reflecting on his years in the NBA, Thomas told Vincent, “I have no regrets. As a basketball player, you gave everything to your sport, gave everything to the organization and to the team you played for. You leave it all out on the floor. So it’s not disappointing to me at all.” Following his retirement party, Thomas ended rumors about his taking a front-office position with the Pistons franchise, telling reporters, “All the jobs were full.”

Thomas met many of the goals he set for himself as a rookie in the NBA—and exceeded even his own sky-high expectations. The leader in every category in the history of the Pistons’ franchise, Thomas also left the game as the fourth all-time NBA leader in assists and steals, and the 28th all-time leader in scoring. He retired with 18,822 career points, 9, 061 assists, and 1,861 steals in 979 games. Thomas told Jet magazine: “I’m living the dream I had since I was a little boy. How many kids, especially kids who grew up as poor as I did, ever live to see their dreams come true? I’m just lucky I’ve had the opportunity.”

On May 24, 1994, Thomas shocked the sports world with the announcement of his newest basketball/ business venture: he had taken over basketball operations for the Toronto Raptors, the 28th team in the NBA and the first NBA franchise outside the United States. As vice president of basketball for the Raptors, Thomas will play a key role in shaping the young team, which will make its debut in the 1995-96 regular season. “I’m honored to have been presented with this fabulous opportunity in Toronto and I’m very excited about the challenge of helping to build the Raptors from the ground up,” Thomas stated at a press conference in Toronto. “I think it’s the dream of most professional athletes… to make this kind of cross-over once the playing days are over…. I’m so excited to get on with the job at hand,” he exclaimed, “developing the best possible on-court product for basketball fans in Toronto and across the country.”

Sources

Boston Globe, November 1, 1981; April 26, 1985; June 7, 1987.

Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1987.

Detroit Free Press, April 25, 1987-, April 28, 1987; January 4, 1994, p. D1; January 8, 1994, p. B3; April 20, 1994, pp. 1E, 6E; May 12, 1994, pp. 1A, 6A, 1C, 8C-10C.

Detroit News, October 11, 1981.

Dollars & Sense, May 1994, pp. 21-22.

Ebony, May 1990.

Gentlemen’s Quarterly, February 1988, pp. 190-193, 238-242.

Inside Sports, April 1984, p. 64; November 1987, p. 21; June 1994, pp. 38-39.

Jet, December 11, 1989, pp. 36-38; October 22, 1990, p. 48; October 14, 1991, p. 49; January 31, 1994, p. 48.

Los Angeles Daily News, June 19, 1988.

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June 6, 1987.

Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1986; June 7, 1988; June 11, 1988; June 20, 1988.

Newsday, June 2, 1987; May 30, 1988.

Newsweek, December 14, 1981, p. 130.

New York Times, April 27, 1981; June 2, 1987; January 8, 1994, p. 32; January 9, 1994, sec. 8, p. 5.