Next up on our list of Olympic memories is Leon Wood, who loves the sport so much that after retiring as a player he became an NBA referee. After scoring 42+ PPG as a high school senior, he demonstrated his versatility by leading the nation in AST as a junior at Cal State Fullerton. After being selected 10th overall by the 76ers in the 1984 NBA Draft he stayed on the West Coast and won a gold medal with team USA at the Olympics in Los Angeles. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to chat with Leon about winning a gold medal and becoming a ref.
As a senior at St. Monica High School you averaged 42.1 PPG and set a California high school scoring record with 2693 PTS: how were you able to be so dominant, and what is the secret to being a great scorer? My mom went to UCLA so I would take the bus over to Pauley Pavilion in the summer and play against older college/pro players. When I was in 9th grade I got to play against Gus Williams/Paul Westphal/Marques Johnson so going into the school year against my peers I had a lot of confidence. The older guys would slack off me so I got to develop my outside shot.
In 1983 you led the nation with 319 AST at Cal State Fullerton: what is the key to being a great PG? When I transferred from Arizona my coach asked me what my aspirations were. I told him that I wanted to play at the next level and he said I would have to become a PG, which was hard for me to hear after being a scorer for most of my career. However, when you have good players around you who can score, it really allows you to enjoy playing PG.
What are your memories of the 1983 NIT (you had 24 PTS/10 AST in a 4-PT loss to ASU)? I was really looking forward to playing in the postseason as our team got better and better, especially with the chance to go up against my AAU teammate Byron Scott. It was a very close game but they just had a little too much firepower for us.
At the 1983 Pan Am Games you won a gold medal as part of team USA: how were you able to overcome the losses of a couple of great players (Chris Mullin was out after fracturing his foot and Michael Cage had to leave early due to an illness in his family)? It was difficult for me because my own foot injury kept me from trying out but they still named me to the squad. Our toughest game was against Brazil and Oscar Schmidt (the greatest scoring forward I have ever seen) and we only won by a few points. Luckily we had some other great players like Mark Price/Wayman Tisdale/Sam Perkins. Oscar was about 6’8” and could get his shot off very quickly so we put Michael Jordan on him and just tried to lock down everyone else.
In 1984 you won a gold medal as a member of team USA: was it extra-special to play in front of your hometown fans in LA, and where does that team rank among the best that you have ever seen? It was very special: I had to try out along with 80 other guys and Coach Bobby Knight said he would push me to the limit. Each time they announced the cuts they did so in alphabetical order so I had to wait until the very end to see if they would call my name, which was very nerve-racking! We had a 10-game tour against the NBA All-Stars (Magic/Bird/Isiah/etc.) and went 10-0, so we had a lot of confidence going into the Olympics.
After getting drafted by Philadelphia in 1984 you sued the NBA regarding its salary cap and draft provisions, but a judge denied your motion for a preliminary injunction: why did you decide to sue, and why did the judge fail to rule in your favor? My agent knows more about it than I do. The 76ers had 3 1st round picks that year and it was unfair that each of us were forced to sign a minimum deal in order to remain below the salary cap. It was just a procedure to force the team’s hand.
In Game 1 of the 1986 Eastern Conference 1st round you scored 5 PTS and Dudley Bradley capped an 18-0 run by the Bullets in the final 4 minutes by banking in a 25-footer at the buzzer in a 1-PT win on the road at Philly: how on earth were you able to make such an incredible comeback, and were you out for revenge against the team that had traded you away only a few months earlier? Philly traded me to Washington and I set new career-highs in scoring during each of my 1st 5 games with my new team. I was the 1st player to wear a headband before the commissioner said I could not wear it! After Gene Shue was fired as head coach, our new coach Kevin Loughery went with the veteran guys and we went on a roll and ended up making the playoffs. Dudley’s shot was amazing.
In Game 7 of the 1988 Eastern Conference semifinals your Atlanta teammate Dominique Wilkins scored a game-high 47 PTS, but Larry Bird scored 20 PTS in the 4th quarter to give the Celtics a 2-PT win to clinch the series: what are your memories of that legendary 2-man duel? Dominique went nuts in Game 6 (35 PTS/10 REB) even though Larry had a hell of a game (23 PTS/11 REB in a 2-PT win), so we went into Game 7 just thinking that if we could win at home we could make the conference finals. I see replays of it on TV every so often. Dominique gave it his all to keep us in the game but Larry just matched him in an old-fashioned shootout: it is rare to have 2 guys involved who played the same position and guarded each other most of the game.
You finished in the top-10 in 3P% twice during your career: what is the secret for making shots from behind the arc? I had been making long shots since grammar school even though we did not have a 3-PT line back then. I always felt comfortable shooting from distance but looking back I would have spent more time working on my mid-range game. It is hard to make them if you come into the game off the bench, but I felt just as good as anybody after I got warmed up.
After retiring you became 1 of a handful of ex-NBA players to become an NBA referee: why did you decide to become a ref, and how do you like it? Some guys kind of talked me into doing that after playing overseas in the Philippines: they thought that since I was an ex-player (like Bernie Fryer) I would make a good ref. I signed up to do it for 1 season at the high school level: I found that I liked it but thought it was too slow. The next year the NBA invited me to work some summer league games: it was kind of funny to end up officiating games involving some of my former teammates! After getting hired/having to make calls and then watch Michael Jordan laugh at me was tough: I was not sure if he was making fun of me or not. Now I feel comfortable because the guys from my 1st few years as a ref have retired, but guys like Byron/Doc Rivers went on to become coaches. Most players go into coaching but the ref gig just fell into my lap.
Puppet Ramblings: The “Bathroom Law” Boycott Will Accomplish Nothing!
For starters, I don’t like it when sports, particularly college sports, are used as a political tool by political leaders who have nothing to do with sports. I obviously love college basketball, but I also love international soccer. If anything, it is refreshing to be able to not harp on your different political ideologies, but rather set them all aside and collectively enjoy something that belongs to all of us. This is definitely true with international soccer, but I feel that it is true for all levels of sport, including college basketball. Given the current climate of this country, we need more shared experiences, not less of them, and for better or worse, sport appears to be one of the vehicles where we can have a shared experience with people who have very different views and opinions, but during that experience feel like we are the same.
I need to say that we, as a staff, do not like to talk politics on Hoops HD. This is not a political site. Although we all have political opinions, we do not express them here or use this site as a vehicle for our own political ideologies. I am not writing this as an attempt to change or criticize anyone’s political viewpoints or opinions, but rather to criticize the methods New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has chosen to use in response to the HB2 laws (ie the Bathroom Laws) in North Carolina. More specifically, the impact those methods have on the college basketball programs in the state of New York (and Albany in particular), as well as college basketball as a whole.
This past March, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order banning all state sponsored non-essential travel to the state of North Carolina. He did this, presumably, because he felt that the HB2 laws were discriminatory toward the LBGTQ community and wanted to disassociate himself from that discrimination. Is this nothing more than disingenuous political posturing on his part?? I don’t know. Does he actually think this will be effective?? I don’t know. Did he ever consider how it was possibly unfair not just to the intercollegiate teams in the state of New York, but to the people in the state of North Carolina who strongly oppose the HB2 laws?? I don’t know. I don’t know what is in his heart or in his head, so I won’t even try and guess. I will say this, though….
This method is both unfair and ineffective. Albany was scheduled to open the upcoming college basketball season at Duke, and has now been made to back out of the game. The only people that are really directly impacted by this are the players and coaches on both teams, and none of them had anything to do with the HB2 laws. In addition to that, Duke is a private institution, so it is not tied to the state of North Carolina. Not only that, but as an institution Duke was strongly opposed to the HB2 laws. I fail to see how not allowing Albany’s basketball team to play at Duke, which is a private institution that opposes the HB2 laws, will do anything change the laws. If anything, I think that going there and playing the game would create an assembly of people where the vast majority of them also oppose the law, so in a way not going to play the game results in less opposition to the Bathroom Laws, not more of it.
STATEMENT FROM DUKE “DEPLORING IN THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS” THE HB2 LAWS
Taking this a step further, in addition to Duke being strongly opposed to the laws as you can read in the link above, it is my understanding the majority of the people in the state of North Carolina are opposed to the laws as well. So, what is accomplished by disassociating yourself with them?? What is accomplished by deciding not to engage them in an inclusive and shared experience such as a sporting event?? I understand not liking bigotry. I also feel that if you want to combat bigotry, then alienating people who are not bigots (which the vast majority of college students and student-athletes are not), but happen to live in a state with laws that you feel are bigoted, is not the way to go about it. Rock & Roll, Soul, and R&B acts that toured the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement accomplished a lot more than they would have by boycotting those states. Seriously, if Governor Cuomo genuinely feels opposed to the HB2 laws and isn’t just doing this for political posturing, then why isn’t he ENCOURAGING the New York college teams to go to a place like Duke who is also openly opposed to them?? This boycott is unfair. This boycott is ineffective. And, to take it a step further, this boycott is arguably COUNTER-productive. How so?? Well….
We’ve seen sports boycotts before. The 1980 and 1984 Olympics comes to mind. I cannot think of a single example where a sports boycott had any sort of a meaningful impact. Not one. Now, having said that, I can think of multiple examples of where NOT boycotting had HUGE impacts. Jessie Owens did not boycott. Tommy Smith and John Carlos did not boycott. If you’ve ever seen the movie Invictus, Nelson Mandela seemed to do the exact opposite of a boycott. Like I said at the beginning, sports allow us to have shared experiences with people that are different than us, and during that event make us the same. In many cases, it may be the only time we feel that we are the same. Is that bad?? I sure as hell don’t think so. If anything, we need more of that, not less of it. You’re not going to change peoples’ hearts and minds by ignoring them. You have to engage them. You have to find common ground. And, sport IS common ground. It’s one of the few common grounds that we have. It is a shame that there aren’t more, but at least sports gives us something
So, Governor Cuomo, please, keep your political differences out of college sports. Do not be unfair to the individual student-athletes who played no political roll in the HB2 laws, and who probably disagree with the laws themselves. Do not deny people with different political viewpoints and ideologies the chance to have a shared experience with one another. Sports brings us together, and it will do more to make us better than it will to make us worse. This boycott will accomplish nothing.