Idris Lee’s Best-Case Scenario Gets Him Drafted This Week

Northern Wisconsin is a much better place to be lost than to be found. Al Capone and others of his ilk had hideaways in the deep woods.

As a land of opportunity, it ranks right up there for hunters, fishermen and lumberjacks . . . but not for aspiring professional basketball players.

Ladysmith, a lumbering, slumbering community of 4,000 at the intersection of U.S. Highway 8 and State Highway 27, is home to Mount Senario College, a homey liberal arts institution with a student body of 400. Mount Senario, in turn, is home to the Fighting Saints, a nomadic basketball team which has won three National Small College Athletic Assn. championships in the last six years.

“It’s kinda remote,” Coach Ed Andrist said. “When I’m talking to kids, I have to assure them that they won’t be eaten by bears.”

One of Andrist’s “kids” is Idris Lee, a 24-year-old guard from Flint, Mich., a veritable metropolis when compared with Ladysmith. Having survived the bears, he is so bullish on his chances of an NBA career that he has declared himself eligible for Wednesday’s draft.

Idris Lee?

You probably did not catch him on ESPN. And you probably won’t hear his name when the draft is conducted.

“What are my chances?” he asked. “I don’t know. Coach tells me what’s going on and he says a few teams have been in contact with him.”

It could have been out of curiosity. What is Mount Senario, where is Ladysmith and who is Idris Lee? And, perhaps, why has Idris Lee declared himself for the draft?

“I sized myself up,” he said, “and I felt like the time had come. Ever since I was little, people have been telling me stuff about playing in the NBA. I’ve played a lot of pickup games with pros.”

That was at home in Flint, where he will await word of his fate in the draft. He couldn’t have encountered too many pros in Dodge City, Kan., where he played community college basketball, nor at Western Michigan or Northern Michigan, where he did not play basketball at all. It’s quite unlikely that many pros “hang” in Mount Senario’s gym, because there isn’t one. The home court is at Ladysmith High, though the Fighting Saints rarely play there.

And exactly which NBA teams are sizing up this 6-foot-2, 200-pound guard?

“I’ve talked with the Toronto Raptors, and the Indiana Pacers have called,” Andrist said. “The Denver Nuggets and Utah Jazz have asked for tapes. The Harlem Globetrotters are interested too.”

The Globetrotters would probably be perfect for Lee, given his propensity for roaming as well as the usual Mount Senario schedule.

“I’ve got a lot of transfers on my transcript,” he conceded.

He was not heavily recruited at Flint Northern High, because he was, by his account, the sixth man on what was an average team. After two years at Dodge City, where he averaged “12-something” points a game, he ended up at Western Michigan in Kalamazoo.

“I didn’t do nothing there,” he said, “because I didn’t do nothing in school. I ended up working construction for one of my uncles.”

His next stop was Northern Michigan in Marquette on the Upper Peninsula. He seemed to be getting further and further from any dream of playing professional basketball, both geographically and athletically. He never played a game for Northern.

“I think it was a chemistry problem,” he said. “They had five guards and the others were local guys who were established in the area. I was the new guy. I only stayed one semester.”

Andrist thought Lee might have had more of a “comfort” problem than a chemistry problem in Marquette.

“Northern Michigan’s predominantly white,” Andrist said, “and I don’t think Idris was a good fit for the school. He fit down here.”

Ladysmith is not, to be sure, any more racially balanced than Marquette, there being few minorities in the woods of the Upper Midwest. However, according to Andrist, 32% of Mount Senario’s student body is minority.

“I’m comfortable there,” Lee said. “I’m playing ball and getting good grades.”

The area is beautiful, although the environment is foreign to much of the student body.

“We get a lot of inner-city kids who get here and, at first, think they’ve died and gone to hell,” Andrist said. “It doesn’t take them too long to feel that they’ve actually gone to heaven. Police sirens and murders aren’t a part of everyday life around here.”

Good grades are probably easier to come by because of the lack of distractions. Lee says he reads and listens to the radio in his spare time. They do have television in Ladysmith, he said, but he doesn’t watch it.

Given improving grades, a 2.9 grade-point average in business, and a healthy attitude toward life, Lee found his flagging basketball career on the upswing.

Interestingly, this aspiring NBA player was probably not the best player on his team in the 1995-96 season. Lee averaged 15.2 points a game, but teammate Damian Springer was named small college All-American for the second time.

What skills does he bring to the table?

“Versatility,” he said. “There isn’t any one key to my game.”

Says Andrist: “He’s very intelligent and plays very hard on both offense and defense. I don’t really see that he has a weakness, except maybe that he doesn’t know how good he can be.”

That being the case, might Lee be a bit premature in declaring himself for the draft?

“It’s absolutely OK by me,” Andrist said. “If he gets into the right system, he’s only going to get better and better. If he doesn’t go, he’ll come back and use his last semester of eligibility.”

“In a heartbeat,” Lee said.