The kids Freddie Lewis helped didn’t know who he was. Now, they want his jersey retired.
Freddie Lewis didn’t tell them who he was. Didn’t think it mattered. He never was one to beat his chest, even when he was leading the Indiana Pacers to all three — the only three — championships in franchise history. Freddie wasn’t about Freddie, but about everyone else.
Maybe that’s the reason we’re here, today.
Twenty-five years ago? Freddie was in Washington D.C., living down the street from a community center where a non-profit group was helping kids from the inner city, kids who were slipping through the cracks, toward dark places. This is a basketball story, and that was a basketball non-profit group, and that’s how ABA legend Freddie Lewis found himself walking into the gym to help kids, and coaches, with no idea who he was.
“He didn’t talk about what he’d done,” says Walter Ray, founder of the non-profit Education Goals Opportunities and Sports, and as far as epitaphs, that wouldn’t be a bad one, someday, for Freddie Lewis:
Didn’t talk about what he’d done.
For 25 years Freddie has helped dozens of kids get into college basketball programs, and these aren't those kids. You know, the ones who play on the AAU circuit and get seen by college coaches all year. No, these are the recruits you don’t read about, players who need GEDs to qualify for college and end up at schools like Quinnipiac and Binghamton, Blinn College and South Carolina State.
“Our kids were the marginalized rejects,” Ray says with affection, “a bunch of kids nobody wanted, kids who had given up on themselves, kids who needed second and third and fourth chances.”
Freddie Lewis? These kids didn’t know what that name meant when he walked into their gym. Neither did Walter Ray, now 57. Freddie’s three ABA titles, his No. 6 ranking on the ABA scoring list, his spot on the 30-player All-Time ABA team — nobody knew. Freddie never said. This was the late 1990s.
“Google wasn’t at your fingertips,” Ray says, “like it is now.”
One day a kid got to Googling … and what was this? Freddie did what?
“When we realized who he was, it all made sense,” Ray says. “Our kids were the rebels and rejects and left out. I told him: ‘No wonder you’re here, Freddie! You were with the rebels and rejects in the ABA.”
The rejections still happen.
That’s the reason we’re here today.
Will Pacers retire Freddie Lewis' jersey?
Five banners hang from the rafters at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, legends of the Pacers and heroes of Downtown Indianapolis: George McGinnis. Roger Brown. Mel Daniels. Slick Leonard. Reggie Miller.
These are some of the men who helped turn this town into a city that attracted an NFL franchise, the NCAA offices and a reputation as the best place in the country to hold a sporting event. An event like the 2024 NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 18.
Those banners are getting lonely up there, looking for their first new addition since Reggie Miller in 2006, and one name comes to mind. No, not my mind. Well, not at first. This isn’t one of those stories you see, some media type getting some cockamamie idea and trying to force the issue. No, this started more organically, more innocently than that.
It started with the kids Freddie Lewis helped in that community center near the notorious Clifton Terrace housing projects of Washington D.C. Kids like Troy Hailey, who went to Binghamton, and Derrick Davis, who went to South Carolina State. Kids like Mookie Pierre (Quincy College) and Ronald Timus (Morgan State) and Tony Skinn (George Mason). And Evann Baker (Quinnipiac) and a community member named Goldie Johnson and…
Well, it’s a lot of names.
“Hundreds,” Walter Ray says.
And those kids — men now, coaches and teachers and more — are the ones who put it all together: The 2024 NBA All-Star Game is coming to Indianapolis, where the legends of the game will gather. One of those legends is their guy Freddie Lewis, a reject like them, a 5-10 kid from McKeesport, Pa., who had to talk his way onto the team at Eastern Arizona Junior College, grew to 6-foot and played his way into the national junior college and Arizona State halls of fame before going to the ABA and retiring as the Pacers’ career leader in games and points.
Freddie made it big, and now those kids from Washington D.C. want him to make it bigger:
They want the Pacers to retire his jersey.
“The kids who were teens, now in their 40s,” Ray says, “they’re the ones who picked up the torch and said, ‘Man, Freddie deserves this.’”
And how does Lewis feel about it? He’s still there in Washington D.C., still serving others — he is the caretaker for his 95-year-old mother — but he has a phone and it works.
“I feel good about it,” he says. “I think it should have been done a long time ago.”
Yeah, you read that right. For 60-plus years Freddie has advocated for others. Now 80, he’s ready to advocate for himself. And he has a battalion behind him.
NBA legends advocating for Super 14
Says Rick Barry: “I’m hoping they’ll do right by him. There are guys with far less accomplishments than Freddie Lewis in other arenas whose jerseys are retired.”
Says George Gervin: “Freddie’s taking the lead, and he’s making somebody better. He knew how to win.”
Says George McGinnis: “He’s done a lot of great things and he was the absolute leader of the team.”
Says Artis Gilmore: “Freddie was absolutely one of the many (ABA) players that were not acknowledged (enough).”
Hall of Famers, those guys, every one. Those comments are on a video for everyone to see, a video edited by another grateful young man in Washington D.C., John Pitt, part of a Freddie Lewis documentary that will be shown for the first time Feb. 16 at Indianapolis Moose Lodge 17 on East 16th Street. That’s the Friday before the All-Star Game, when more than a dozen kids in Walter Ray’s program will be in town for the weekend.
It’s 14 kids, to be precise, because Ray loves the number. They do more than play basketball at his community center. He’s always getting 14 kids to see a museum or a college campus, and he’ll bring 14 to Indianapolis for the All-Star weekend, a number Ray chose a long time ago to honor the man who helped make it possible.
Freddie Lewis wore No. 14 with the Pacers. That’s the jersey these folks are hoping the Pacers will retire.
From 2017: Where does Freddie Lewis rank among greatest Pacers of all time?
Voices from the grave advocating, too
Get something straight: The case for No. 14 isn’t because of his community service. That’s the reason for the push, sure, but if this were a court of law, the evidence would start and end where it should — on the court. Sixth in ABA history in scoring (11,660 points), fourth in assists (2,883), MVP of the 1972 ABA Finals and the 1975 ABA All-Star Game.
Slick Leonard, coach of those championship teams, surveyed his roster of greats and chose Freddie Lewis as his captain.
"He was our steadiest performer and leader in the playoffs," Slick once said of Lewis. "He plays good defense. He does almost everything well. You can't let him shoot. And he'll drive on you. There's really no way to stop him.”
Lewis made the 30-player ABA All-Time team announced in 1997, voted on by a 50-person panel including ABA media, referees, owners and front-office executives. Sixteen of the 30 players are in the Naismith Hall of Fame, and Lewis received more votes (38) than four of them. Also on that all-time team: Roger Brown, Mel Daniels and George McGinnis. For the ABA’s all-time top coach, Slick Leonard received more than twice as many votes (34) as everyone else combined (16).
Those are four of the five men already in the rafters at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. That seems to be working against Freddie, the sheer star-power of his time. Thus far Freddie has been on the wrong side of “how many” and “too many.”
“Slick was the coach and Roger was the guy,” says local filmmaker Ted Green, an Indiana historian whose documentary topics include Leonard, Brown, Eva Kor, Carl Erskine and Crispus Attucks. “Mel comes and wins a few MVPs, and then George was George. But Freddie was the guy who drove that train, and he drove it to great heights.”
When I ask Green if he’s heard about the push to get Freddie’s jersey retired, he laughs.
“Yeah,” he says. “For 15 years. Everyone has wanted this.”
That includes some of the most prominent people in Pacers history. Months before he died in 2021, Slick Leonard asked Pacers owner Herb Simon one last time to retire Freddie’s No. 14. Months before he died in December, McGinnis was lobbying for the same during an interview on that documentary to be unveiled Feb. 16. Slick’s widow, Nancy, the general manager of those Pacers teams, is lobbying now.
“We don’t win any of those championships without Freddie,” she says. “It’s too bad Bob isn’t here, because he would have really pushed for it now, too.”
Doyel in 2021: 'Slick' Leonard's greatest gift was making you feel special
Doyel in December: Only after death do we learn of George McGinnis' true greatness
This is a movement decades in the making, a thank you note from kids and coaches and teammates Freddie Lewis served, all those people he pushed to greatness. They are the ones serving him, pushing him now.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Why Freddie Lewis' No. 14 jersey should be retired by Indiana Pacers