Great article about John Lucas and his son

Very touching read:

A family's finest hour

For this father and son, the Final Four is something to savor after a long and troubled journey

The shot went in, and the pandemonium started.

The jubilation that sent the son down onto the hardwood of the basketball court, kicking and screaming with a child's glee.

The celebration up in the stands that filled the bald man who was watching with the kind of tingling pride only a father can know.

They found each other across the arena in the New Jersey Meadowlands, those two faces that look so much alike, their eyes locking, then their arms and legs churning over chairs and over bodies and over all the years that had kept them apart yet so closely linked together.

This is all John Lucas ever wanted for his boy, to see him fulfilled and accomplished in the game they share, to see him happy. This is all John Lucas III ever wanted for his dad, to see him beaming with reflected glory, to see him at peace.

They say the road to the Final Four is a long one, but they never seem to mention that for some it is filled with a lifetime of detours, potholes and obstacles that look impossible to drive around.

What is one half of poor shooting in a college basketball game compared with all those days and nights of wondering if they could ever have a normal life? Any life at all?

John Lucas, ex-player, ex-coach, ex-drug addict, had stood throughout the entire game, watching his son struggle to come even close to the basket in the first 20 minutes against Saint Joseph's on Saturday, then firing in 17 points in the second half, including the difference-maker that sent Oklahoma State to the next stop in the NCAA Tournament in San Antonio. It was the least the elder Lucas could do.

"My boy has seen me do drugs, seen me get fired, seen me win games," he said. "He always wanted to be my point guard. He used to take care of me when he was growing up."

Those were the days when the father could be everything except a father, when he was wrapped up in the clutches of a cocaine addiction that wasted so much of an NBA playing career and so much of his life.

Clean and sober now for 18 years, he established a rehabilitation facility for addicts in Houston called the John Lucas Treatment Center, which became a model for programs around the country. He has also been a head coach in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs, Philadelphia 76ers and Cleveland Cavaliers.

Long before were those nights when John III, as a 4- or 5-year-old, would see his father -- then playing for the Rockets -- heading for the door and would pull on his arms and legs, begging him to stay at home. "Come on, Daddy, lay down and put your head on my stomach, and I'll try to make it better," the son would say. When that failed, he would beg to go along, because he knew his father wouldn't use the drugs in his presence.

There were those days in middle school when John III would have to endure taunts from his classmates. "They would call me `crack baby,' " remembered the son. "I heard all of those jokes about the lines on the basketball court. You know, like lines of cocaine.

"Yeah, I heard them all. But I didn't let them bother me or break me. I would just use all of that to turn around and drop more buckets on the guy who was trying to guard me."

Trouble was, John III could never guard his father from all the demons that chased him from point to point across the map as his playing career, which could have been so brilliant, deteriorated into one disappointment after another.

"I was never gonna stop trying," said the son. "He's my dad. He was my idol. When he was going through stuff, I always said that I was gonna be right there for him." Even after the night he says was the lowest point of all the lows.

"We had to go pick him up in jail," John III said. "We had to wake up at 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning, or something like that. We had to go to downtown Houston to get him out. I've never seen anything sadder or worse."

Yet rather than wear the son down, all those experiences ever did was make him grow stronger and resolute, to love his father even more.

"When I see somebody now who is struggling with drugs or alcohol, who is in trouble, I'll try to talk to them," John III said. "I'll say, `You don't want to go down that path. Believe me.'

"I've seen what can happen to you. You can have everything in one second and then lose everything in the next second."

Through all those years of growing up with the burdens he carried, John III never wavered in what he wanted to be -- just like his father on the basketball court. In recent years, when John got sober, they would work out together and square off on the court, and many times the son would wonder if he'd ever be as good.

"I tell him that I was never the conference player of the year," said the father, referring to the honor John III shared this season in the Big 12 with OSU teammate Tony Allen.

But before he could win those accolades, the son had to struggle to find himself and his proper place in the game. After starting out his college career at Baylor, he was ready to transfer even before the bottom fell out of that program last summer.

Before Carlton Dotson was charged with the murder of teammate Patrick Dennehy and before coach Dave Bliss was fired for engaging in an ugly cover-up, John III had sensed a dysfunction in the Baylor family. There were cliques on the team, divisiveness in the locker room.

"My son needed a place where he could feel like a part of a real family," Lucas said. "I thought that he needed to be under the influence of a real strong father figure."

That, Lucas concluded, was head coach Eddie Sutton, who not only had a long and impressive résumé but had guided his alma mater back from the tragedy of the January 2001 plane crash that claimed the lives of 10 members of the Oklahoma State traveling party after a game at Colorado.

"Eddie had to be strong," Lucas said. "I liked that. He had to bring his team back from all of that grief. My son needed a family after what happened at Baylor."

So there they were in the midst of the joyous orange-and-black throng, smiling, laughing, hugging, celebrating not just a game won, but the longest and hardest of roads traveled to the Final Four.

"You know what I said once I got straight?" asked John Lucas. "I told him I owed him for life."

At exit 16W off the New Jersey Turnpike, a man and his son had arrived.