Lionel Simmons: Amazing Ability, Modest Attitude

It is hard for La Salle forward Lionel Simmons to look his successes squarely in the eye and accept the breadth of his accomplishments -- including his pending status as the fifth NCAA player to score 3,000 points and the only one to also have 1,300 rebounds.

Perhaps it is because he has spent most of his life flinching from shadows that threatened to engulf him at times. There was the hardscrabble neighborhood that contributed to two brothers going to jail. Simmons escaped the streets through basketball, but even there he often stepped back behind more highly regarded players.

At La Salle, the 21 year old plays home games at the Civic Center, a grand old building that resounds with memories of legendary performances by former Explorers star Tom Gola and Wilt Chamberlain of the then-Philadelphia Warriors. Simmons has held his own. An all-America, he could have had financial security from the NBA last season but decided against going to the pros early -- partially because he was uncertain how he would adapt to the lifestyle.

Now a senior and projected as a lottery pick, Simmons will surely be in the NBA next season, just as surely as he will reach the 3,000-point mark -- he has 2,963 entering Tuesday’s game against Loyola Baltimore.

Both events will push him more into the limelight, but he also appears more willing to meet that light. The man who was on the verge of tears two years ago after being forced to spend 10 days in Italy, now says he doesn’t want to play in Philadelphia, that it’s time to move on and see another part of the country.

Should he end up with the 76ers, Simmons added, “I’ll be highly upset.” A smile flickered on his lips, the joke being that Philadelphia doesn’t have a number one pick in June.

“You look at yourself, at the position you’re in and you just don’t think of being on that level -- you’re amazed,” he said. “I guess all athletes dream of it happening to them but it doesn’t for most. And for me, I’m just -- it’s amazing. Like when people talk about getting 3,000 points; to me I’m just playing basketball, then you look at the people you’re passing and you just don’t think of yourself as the same caliber as them.”

Louisiana State’s Pete Maravich, Portland State’s Freeman Williams, Texas Southern’s Harry Kelly and Bradley’s Hersey Hawkins are the other players to reach 3,000 points, each remembered for outrageous scoring binges. Unlike them, or current LSU guard Chris Jackson who seems able to pick up 40 points at will, Simmons has amassed his total with a layup here and a tipin there.

A starter for every one of his 122 games at La Salle, Simmons averages an economical 18 shots per contest. His 40 points against Manhattan on Feb. 10 was his career high.

At 6 feet 7, 220 pounds, Simmons can put the ball on the floor and make passes from the top of the key to teammates cutting underneath. He’s hit 62 percent of his three-point attempts this season for the Explorers, who are 22-1 and ranked 14th in the nation.

“I think a lot of people growing up want to be like a certain player, emulating him in any way possible,” Simmons said. “I tried to watch and take certain things from certain players and put it all together.

“I’ve always liked to pass -- that may sound weird, with me scoring 3,000 points -- but watching Magic (Johnson, 6-9 guard of the Los Angeles Lakers), an unselfish player who’s willing to pass before he takes a shot and is perceived as being great because of it -- I tried to take that. When Moses (Malone, formerly with the 76ers) was here, he was rewarded for being a rebounder, so I try to rebound as best I can.”

This season, Simmons is averaging 26.1 points, 10.9 rebounds, 3.5 assists, 1.9 blocked shots and 1.6 steals. But while his all-around brilliance and reputation as a thinking man’s player endears him to the pros, it has not catapulted him into the national consciousness like Jackson or, closer to home, Bo Kimble, a friend from the South Philly days who averages more than 35 points a game for Loyola Marymount in Southern California.

Simmons said he believes the lack of attention makes him work harder. Fans in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, where Simmons is sure to win a third straight most valuable player award, obviously know who he is, taunting him with regularity.

When he plays against more renowned schools, whose players and fans don’t look upon him as anything special, that’s motivation to excel. The ploy works, as a Dean E. Smith Center record 37 points against North Carolina attests.

It’s apparent that being unappreciated is one of the few areas that can alter Simmons’s easy-going nature.

Mark Macon, a guard for city rival Temple, reaped most of the attention two years ago by averaging more than 23 points a game and leading the Owls to the top of the collegiate polls during a sensational debut season.

“His freshman year he got all the publicity. My stats were better but because he came in as this high school all-America, blue-chip player it was always, ‘Mark Macon this, he’s the man,’ ” Simmons said.

Playing against older kids during grade school, by all accounts, Simmons was usually the last one picked. At South Philadelphia High School, he led the city in scoring twice but met indifferent recruiting from the national basketball powers.

His coach at La Salle, Speedy Morris, said Simmons “underestimated” his talents in deciding to stay in the city to play collegiately.

What seems clear now, however, is the manifest destiny that brought Simmons, a player looking to stay home, to La Salle, a home looking for a heart.

With players like Gola and former all-America Michael Brooks, and coaches like Paul Westhead, the Explorers have a rich basketball history, but times changed. The allure of the Big Five, the union of city schools La Salle, Temple, St. Joseph’s, Penn and Villanova has crumbled in the face of interest in national conferences such as the Big East.

That led the outstanding talent in Philadelphia to head elsewhere. Kimble and Hank Gaithers (who led the nation in scoring and rebounding last season) went to Southern Cal then transferred to Loyola Marymount; Pooh Richardson, perhaps the best schoolboy guard in the nation, chose UCLA and Brian Shorter picked Pitt.

Simmons and Morris, also a Philadelphia native, have a relationship that seems closer to family than player and coach. The same sense of kinship permeates the La Salle team.

There are only 13 players on the Explorers and, as they stretched in a ragged circle near midcourt before a recent practice, they looked more like guys rapping before a pickup game than a nationally ranked team.

“Yeah, you’d never know that we were (22-1),” cracked team manager Brian Morris, the coach’s son and a freshman at La Salle. Another son, Keith, is reserve point guard.

The music in the background continued to blare when the workout began. The La Salle players drifted in and out of the gym for rest-room stops and to complain about assorted injuries. Speedy Morris began the practice by saying, “Here we go, let’s get it on,” then sat on the sidelines for most of the next two hours, mainly offering asides as assistants Joe Mihalich and Randy Monroe ran drills.

Simmons doesn’t seem any different than the other players, in fact on this day he was the main object of ridicule, his teammates cheering wildly when he was dunked on during a one-on-one drill, then jeering him when he botched a slang phrase.

The looseness does seems odd for a top-20 team and Mihalich said the Explorers “are still searching for our place nationally.” La Salle has a 92-30 record since Simmons and Morris arrived, but in the opening round of the last two NCAA tournaments has lost to Kansas State and Louisiana Tech.

Skeptics point out that La Salle’s gaudy record is the result of the MAAC’s mediocre play, but the coaches point to victories over De Paul, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Temple (its lone loss was 121-116 to No. 18 Loyola Marymount) and say the team not only knows when it’s time to play but also how to play against high-powered opponents.

Simmons said the knowledge that La Salle would be good this season made the decision to turn down the NBA last year easier. A bigger factor, though, was a promise to his mother during his freshman year that he would get his degree. He’s on track to do that in June.

“I think I was a little scared of the work at first,” he said. “I came from an inner-city school, was surrounded by a totally different environment. The students here came from middle-class schools -- I thought there’d be a dropoff with me. I told my mom that I couldn’t do it; she got on me and I got some confidence and I said ‘I’ll bet you I graduate,’ and it’s just stuck with me since.”

That wasn’t the first time mother and son helped pull each other through tough times. The youngest of five children, Lionel watched the effect on Ruth Simmons as his brothers Amos and Roscoe were jailed for a variety of crimes.

“I don’t know why he turned out different,” Ruth Simmons said. “Maybe their experience taught him, maybe he saw the suffering I went through. I told him that I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t go through it again and I guess he wanted to do something better for me.”

Lionel Simmons agreed, adding that another reason was that he was “too scared” of the alternatives to athletics.

That fear has helped place him on the verge of basketball history. A 24-point effort Sunday against Fairfield sent him into sixth place on the NCAA’s all-time scoring list and left him 37 points short of the 3,000 mark.

But unless he’s having a big night and Loyola of Maryland is on the verge of upsetting La Salle, Simmons won’t join that exclusive club in Baltimore Tuesday night. The Explorers host Manhattan on Thursday; the following day, Ruth Simmons is scheduled to take a ski trip to Connecticut.

“She’d miss that ski trip before she’d miss me getting the 3,000th point,” Lionel Simmons said.

“He’s going to get it for me on Thursday against Manhattan,” said Ruth Simmons. “But he’s right.”