Lionel Hollins’ Big Chance

By Jesse F. McClure | Published  02/26/2009 | Sports | Rating:

‘My chance to prove what I can do’ Head Coach Lionel Hollins signals in a play during the Grizzlies recent game against Sacramento, a losing effort that left Hollins far from satisfied. (Photos by Warren Roseborough) An 18-month contract as the Memphis Grizzlies’ headman is very short by NBA standards, an observation that new head coach Lionel Hollins brushes aside with ease. “Look at Terry Porter the former coach of the Phoenix Suns. He had a three-year contract but was just fired long before he finished his first season,” says Hollins. “Even Mark Iavaroni, the man I am replacing had more than a year and a half left on his three year contract.” At 55, Hollins has almost twenty years experience as an assistant coach. Along the way, he’s watched many younger coaches with less experience become NBA head coaches. “I have interviewed for several head coaching jobs before without success. It only takes one person to choose you and this time Michael Heisley (the Grizzlies’ owner) picked me.” Coach Hollins’ ability to whistle often comes in handy. Coach Hollins gives his team instructions after a time out. Young teams have to learn to win, he says. Memphis Grizzlies Head Coach Lionel Hollins (left) attended the Staxtacular event Saturday (Feb. 21) along with his wife, Angie, and his son, Anthony. This, he said, “is my chance to prove what I can do.” For Hollins, the journey to NBA head coach has not been a straight shot. As a guard in high school in Las Vegas, Hollins was a solid player.  Most college coaches, however, thought he was too small to play at the collegiate level. “I thought that the best thing I could do was to get a job at one of the Las Vegas casinos when I finished high school,” he says. Hollins’ high school coach challenged him to take a chance, attend a junior college in Utah, and see if he could succeed at both basketball and academics. Hollins enrolled at Dixie Junior College in Saint George Utah in 1971. In the predominantly white, Mormon community where African Americans such as Hollins were virtually non-existent, he found in Dixie Junior College Coach Doug Allred a “surrogate father” with whom he still enjoys a very special relationship. While he experienced “some racial heckling, the community as a whole was very supportive” says Hollins, who counts the experience in Utah and his upbringing in a multi-cultural environment in Las Vegas as preparation for learning how to respect people regardless of their backgrounds. The lesson learned has helped him in the all-important arena of relating effectively to different players. His task with the Grizzlies, involves coaching coach players not only from the United States, but also from Spain, Serbia, and Iran. After two years of success at Dixie Junior College both on and off the court, Hollins was recruited by a number of colleges that only two years before had ignored him. He’d led Dixie College team to a league championship, netting junior college All- American honors in 1973. Armed with choices, Hollins passed over his hometown college, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and accepted a basketball scholarship at Arizona State University (ASU). Why? It was not very far from Las Vegas but it was far enough away so that his grandmother would not be able to ask him to do chores at home, he says. Coached by the late Ned Wulk, an ASU legend, Hollins became a West Coast college basketball star. He led his team to a conference championship in 1975 and Sporting News named him to its 1975 All-American first team. His play was so outstanding that Hollins was the sixth overall pick in the 1975 NBA draft, going to Portland’s Trailblazers. In his second year with the team, legendary NBA coach, Dr. Jack Ramsey, took over.  The year was a magic one as Hollins along with Bill Walton, Dave Twardzik, Maurice Lucas and others won the 1976-77 NBA championship beating Dr. J (Julius Erving) and the Philadelphia 76’ers in the finals. Soft spoken and heady as player, Hollins enjoyed a ten-year career in the NBA, returning to ASU in 1985, where he completed his bachelor’s degree. “I would have stayed at ASU and gotten my master’s degree, but they didn’t offer the major I wanted,” he says. Instead, Hollins accepted an assistant coaching position with Cotton Fitzsimmons and the NBA’s Phoenix Suns in 1987. In addition to his time with the Suns, Hollins coaching resume includes stays with the Bandits of the International Basketball League, the St. Louis Sky Hawks of the U.S. Basketball League, the Harlem Globetrotters and the Grizzlies. He was the Griz interim coach for sixty games during the team’s 1999-2000 season in Vancouver and later for four games in the 2004-05 season. When the Grizzlies hired Mark Iavaroni as the coach for the 2007-08 season, Hollins found himself on the outside of basketball coaching for the first time in years. At the beginning of the 2008-09 season, the Milwaukee Bucks hired Hollins as an assistant coach and that’s where he was when the Griz gave him a call. Hollins had kept his home in the Memphis area because he did not want to uproot his family. He and his wife, Angie, have a son, Austin, who is junior at Germantown High School, where he’s developing his own reputation as “a very good basketball player.” Daughter Jacqueline is a student at Miami University of Ohio, while son Anthony is finishing his M.D. degree at the University Of Tennessee College Of Medicine and plans to become an orthopedist. Hollins’ eldest son, Christopher, lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. As head coach, meeting the challenge of proving what he can do includes making sure his players are giving maximum effort, even when things are not going well. “I can live with losing a game, but I can’t live with not playing hard,” he says. “We are a young team with a lot of talent; my job is to help them learn how to win. A lot of talented teams and talented players never quite figure out how to win.”