Thomas Now Becomes a Jurassic Boss of his Dream Team

His brothers became pimps. Two of them. They also dealt drugs. His family lived on a very mean street. When some gang members came toward him with join-or-else in their eyes, his mother stepped out onto the porch with a shotgun. They scattered.

Another day, when he was 12, he was playing basketball. One guy claimed: “I got next game.” A second guy came along and said no, he had the winners next. The first guy went home and got his gun. He came back and began shooting. The 12-year-old boy hid under a car. He saw the body of the second guy drop.

On special occasions, his mother came home from Our Lady of Sorrows church with baskets of food. The minister had passed them out. His mother had nine mouths to feed. He still remembers, “Turkey and all the trimmings. Two days a year, Christmas and Thanksgiving, we always ate good.”

Other days, he had little to eat. He went into a corner grocery and stole some plums. Stuffed them into his pockets. Two of the plums slipped through a hole in his pants, fell to the floor. A cop came and dragged him off to the station house, acting tough, talking raw, terrifying the kid, saying: “Goin’ to Cook County (jail), boy. Gonna throw you inside till you’re old. Gonna be somebody’s girlfriend.”

He cried and cried until his mother came.

Then he cried harder, because he was more afraid of her than of jail.

His could have been a less-than-wonderful life. Last month, however, upon turning 33, he took early retirement from his job. He went into a business partnership with another firm. A multi-millionaire now, a solid citizen, a local legend, a civic-minded individual who once proposed something called “No Crime Day” once a year, he has gone from being captain of a basketball team to a captain of industry. Isiah Thomas is no longer a player. He’s an owner.

Upon investing in Toronto’s new NBA franchise and beating out his longtime friend Magic Johnson in the process, Thomas understands how far he has come. In celebration of his new status, he recalls, chuckling, “It wasn’t that long ago when I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket. When I didn’t have a pocket.”

Long ago and far away. He was this chipmunk-cheeked, precocious pee-wee who led the older boys out onto the creaky floor at Our Lady of Sorrows and then at halftime put on fancy-dribbling exhibitions, so deft at it that he even got featured in Reader’s Digest. In his teens, to stay away from the temptations and turmoil of the neighborhood, he rose before dawn and took public transportation to a far Chicago suburb, to play basketball at a parochial school.

Both he and his childhood buddy Mark Aguirre dropped out of college and went for the money. At a dinner for three, December 1981, atop a Dallas hotel before their first professional game against one another, Thomas, already thinking big, asked: “So, what should we do next?”

Aguirre, thinking bigger, said: “Co-MVPs in the NBA?”

Thomas, laughing, slapping the table, said: “Maybe we could just buy a team.”

He was 20.

After retiring from the Detroit Pistons with two diamond rings, more than 19,000 points, a five-bedroom home with an indoor basketball court in Bloomfield Hills and a promise of a company position for life, Thomas connected with an investment group that was bidding for the NBA’s first expansion venture to Canada. Putting opportunity before old loyalties, he says, “I always imagined that I’d be a Detroit Piston for life. But this was too good a chance to pass up. How many times in a man’s life does something like this come along?”

Last week, when a tin-and-tissue hoop with the Toronto Raptors’ comical dinosaur logo was unveiled, it was Isiah Thomas who came crashing through it. It was Raptor rapture. He did everything but yell, “Yabba-dabba-doo!”

Reports say he owns a nice piece, maybe 10%. Doesn’t matter. Thomas is doing what so many others--Magic, Walter Payton, Reggie Jackson--have dreamed about. He is labor becoming management. He is not only busting through hoops; he is breaking down barriers that have limited ownership opportunities to his people and to his colleagues.

Shooting hoops wasn’t indentured servitude, obviously, yet it had occurred to Thomas early on, “You always wonder if anybody’s going to be willing to treat you with respect, treat you as a businessman, same way they would someone else. Even if you’ve got the money and you come knocking on the door, you wonder, are they going to let you in?”

With self-made wealth, he learned how rich people lived.

One day, early in his pro career, Thomas swears that teammate Bill Laimbeer on an airport runway pointed to a smaller craft and said, “There, that’s just like the one my father just got.”

“Yeah, right. Mine, too,” Isiah remembers saying.

Thomas fought for everything he got. Sometimes literally. He got caught showing an interest in someone’s girlfriend at Indiana University and got punched in the face. He once slapped Rick Mahorn, a foot taller, in the face. Scuffled with Laimbeer, too. Even got into it once with Johnson, who tried to slap Thomas’ face. Of course, before their one NBA championship series together, Isiah also kissed Magic’s face.

After retiring, he said: “It’s hard to believe all that’s over. Him and me, both out of the game. Larry Bird, Laimbeer, (Kevin) McHale. Maybe Charles (Barkley), too. We’re all young men.”

What does he do now?

Find new young men.

Somewhere some other kid is out there, surviving the rough stuff, dreaming the dream. He will never play with Isiah Thomas. But maybe he can play for Isiah Thomas.