How Jerry Lucas perfected his unstoppable hook shot
The ’62 alum spent thousands of hours alone on a court, crafting a move that defined his career and baffled defenders. It’s now immortalized in bronze at the Schottenstein Center.
The way Jerry Lucas tells it, his mind craves engagement. When he first learned to count, for instance, he counted everything. If he walked into a room with a chandelier, he counted the pieces of glass. If he was sitting in the back seat of the family car …
“Maybe you don’t know this,” he says, “but there are 132 paint stripes for every mile of highway.”
In the winter of 1949-50, Lucas began his basketball career playing as a fourth grader on a sixth-grade team in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio. By then, he knew he loved the game, and he dedicated himself to mastering it. He spent the summer of 1950 (and many subsequent summers) by himself on a basketball court, usually the one at Sunset Park. He shot, and he studied.
Seventy-five-plus years later, the fruit of his labor and the product of his leafy brain have been synthesized in bronze. On Nov. 14, a statue of Lucas was unveiled outside of the Schottenstein Center, the home of the basketball Buckeyes. He will become the fourth man associated with the Ohio State athletic program to be commemorated with an on-campus statue, the others being Jesse Owens, Woody Hayes and Archie Griffin. That’s quite a Mount Rushmore.
“Words cannot describe how honored and humbled I am,” Lucas says. “It’s the biggest honor I’ve ever had in my life.”
The new statue stands outside the northwest rotunda entrance of the Schottenstein Center. (Photo by student DJ Pelles)
Lucas is the only basketball player to have a statue on campus. The artist who made it, Alan Cottrill, also created Ohio State’s Woody Hayes and Jesse Owens statues. (Photo by student DJ Pelles)
That is saying something, because Lucas was LeBron James before LeBron James. His accolades must be condensed to fit into the world wide web:
Lucas scored 97 points in a high school state tournament game in 1956. His Middletown Middies teams lost one game in his three seasons (to Columbus North, in a massive upset in the state semifinals in 1958).
His NBA career brought him seven All-Star appearances, a championship with the New York Knicks in 1973 and a place in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. He was ranked among the top 50 players when the NBA celebrated its 50th year and among the top 75 when the league turned 75.
In between, his years at Ohio State distinguished him as one of the greatest college basketball players of all time. Lucas in his three years with the Buckeyes averaged 24.3 points, 17.2 rebounds and registered 78 double-doubles. Playing in an era when freshmen were ineligible to play varsity, he led the Buckeyes to their only NCAA basketball title as a sophomore in 1960 and took the team to the championship game in 1961 and ’62. Twice he was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. There’s an Olympic gold medal (Rome, ’60) in there, too.
It all traces back to Sunset Park.
Lucas estimates that he spent “thousands and thousands” of hours shooting by himself. He came up with an acronym—“DAD,” for direction, arc and distance—to guide him. He imagined a clock on the rim and practiced shooting over the “6” (the front of the rim, wherever he was situated on the court). He spent some of the days purposefully missing shots to see what happened when the ball came off different quadrants of the imaginary clock. At night, he would put his head on his pillow, close his eyes and cycle through everything he learned.
The new statue shows Lucas rising up off his left foot, his other leg bending behind him, his right arm fully extended. It was his iconic hook shot, one of the deadliest weapons in the history of the game. The ball is coming off the tips of his fingers like a raindrop off a cool, green leaf.
Lucas asked for the statue to be of his hook shot. Likely, it is based on a famous photo of him shooting over Cincinnati center Paul Hogue.
It all traces back to Sunset Park. “I began to realize there was a total difference from shooting a hook shot and shooting a jump shot or a free throw or anything else,” Lucas says. “When you’re shooting a jump shot or a free throw, you’re pushing the ball, and your wrist is involved in activating. And with the hook shot, I never bent my wrist. Ever. I just lifted and rolled the ball off the end of my fingers. I shot it so much. I’d shoot it 15-20 feet out, hour after hour after hour. I got to the point where I could shoot it very well.
“I could shoot it anyplace, anytime. I never got a hook shot blocked, not ever in my life. Because what I did, normally, was I took a step away with my left foot, planted it and then it came out. It was my favorite shot. I just loved it. You couldn’t guard it.”
He will shoot it forever outside the Schottenstein Center.
A display board near the statue lists Lucas’ achievements. (Photo by Skyler Schmitt ’11)
