WILBERFORCE — He said she happened to see the CBS broadcast of his Southwest Missouri State team playing Nevada-Las Vegas in the NCAA tournament.
He was a slick, sure-handed guard back then as his team nearly pulled off the monumental upset, losing in the final seconds.
“About two weeks after the tournament I was back at school and I got a call,” said Central State basketball coach Doug Lewis. “It was a woman’s voice and she said, ‘May I speak to Doug Lewis?’
“I said, “This is him,’ and she said, ‘This is your mom.’... And all I could think of was, ‘My mom? I haven’t heard from you since fourth grade.’ ”
In the most out-of-the-blue, unimaginable way that day in 1988, Lewis found out that dreams sometimes do come true in the NCAA tournament.
Now, more than two decades later, his 22-5 Central State team has made the NCAA Division II tournament for the first time in school history — regional pairings will be announced Sunday, March 7 — and that, too, is almost unimaginable when you know the whole story.
But as he sat in the deserted Beacom-Lewis Gym late the other night after practice, he found himself thinking about that other NCAA trip so long ago.
He said his parents had him when they were teenagers and that his mom eventually left: “I didn’t grow up with a mother. She was prostituting and doing other street stuff.
“From first grade on I remember seeing her only that one time. It was at my grandma’s funeral. After that, I never saw or talked to her again until I was a senior in college and got that call.
“My dad had custody of us and he did the best he could. He worked in a factory but couldn’t read or write and we were pretty poor.
“Later on, guys at the barbershop told me, ‘We knew you were gonna be a good basketball player ’cause you always played out there on the playground wearing street shoes.’ I did it because we didn’t have money for tennis shoes.”
And the barbershop guys were right.
After leading his Milwaukee prep team — Rufus King High School — to the 1984 Wisconsin state basketball title, the 6-foot Lewis played two seasons at Mesa Community College in Arizona and was regarded as one of the nation’s best junior college guards.
Then came two seasons — and two trips to the NCAA tournament — playing for Charlie Spoonhour at Southwest Missouri State.
After graduating, he began coaching at Washington High School in Milwaukee, then spent five seasons as a college assistant at Wisconsin-Milwaukee before Michael Grant asked him to join his staff at CSU in 1998.
When Grant left for Southern University five years later, then-Athletic Director Theresa Check took a chance on Lewis, who had no head coaching experience.
As it turned out, some of those hardscrabble lessons growing up paid off for him.
“The way I was raised,” he said, “it made me able to endure anything.”
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