Junius Lewis was taking those auditorium steps three at a time as he strode through an audience of appreciative students Wednesday morning at South Middle School.
“Hold up, hold up,” the Morgantown minister and former WVU star called over the happy din, as he carried a cordless microphone.
“We’ve got a question over here.”
A lot of the queries were fun, and Lewis repeated them into that microphone, so everyone could hear.
“How tall am I? I’m 6-11. How tall were my mom and dad? My mom was 5-10 and my dad was 5-9. I don’t know where my height came from. The shower head in my house? Ten feet. There’s a lot me to wash.”
And some of them were serious: “When did I decide to become a minister? I was in Paris, France, playing pro ball and I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy. So, I started listening to my inner voice.”
Listening was the whole point of his appearance at South.
He was there as part of the K-12 Speakers Bureau of the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative, which advocates for the intellectual advancement of students in the Mountain State, from pre-school to college.
Lewis, who pastors through his Greater Love Family Outreach Ministries, preached to the South students about having faith in themselves, first.
You know, he said: So, you can listen to the good messages out there while filtering out the bad.
“Who speaks in your life?” he asked.
“Let me see who you’re hanging with. Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.”
Jumping in late
Back home in Richmond, Va., in the early 1970s, he was a bit of an anomaly, he admitted.
At least as far as the conventional sports wisdom of the day went.
That’s because the self-described “tall, skinny Black kid” – by the time he was the age of the audience he was talking to at South, he was already scraping the archways at 6-7 – didn’t much care for the sport that would make his name in the Mountain State.
Not at first, he said.
Coaches and other youth leaders, though, started watching him for his potential, he said.
Some worked him on the fundamentals of the game.
One made him jump rope for four weeks before he even picked up a basketball. In an inspired bit of vertical resourcefulness, said “rope” was actually a 10-foot electrical extension cord to accommodate his height.
“You could get a scholarship,” they said. “You could go to the NBA.”
At first, he told his audience he was thinking more about the former than the latter.
His mother was a beautician and his dad drove a truck. He wasn’t “poor,” he remembered, but there weren’t a lot of extra dollars to go around, either.
A scholarship would take the burden off his parents, he reasoned, so he worked hard.
Coaches noticed him at a basketball camp in Pennsylvania.
He didn’t go out for the varsity at Huguenot High School until his junior year – and by his senior year, he was one of the country’s top college prospects in the country.
Duke came calling.
So did N.C. State, Notre Dame, Louisville and scores of others.
WVU won out.
Let’s go, Mountaineers
He liked the laid-back vibe of the little, land-grant burg nestled in the Appalachians and Morgantown was still close enough to Richmond and his family.
“Hey, I’m a Mama’s Boy,” he said. “I didn’t want to get too far away.”
He settled in at his dorm room in the Towers residential complex, where physical plant employees during his first week on campus welded two bed frames together so he could rest comfortably.
He would need it, because he worked hard on the court, in the weight room and, most importantly, in the classroom, he said.
“I had the same dorm room all four years,” said Lewis, who graduated in 1979 with degrees in physical education and safety management degrees.
“And I had my books with me on all the road games.”
His time as a Mountaineer basketballer, first with head coach Joedy Gardner then Gale Catlett, was distinguished with solid, consistent play from the 6-11 center.
There were plenty of moments for the highlight reel, also, including that fierce dunk against Notre Dame on a snowy February afternoon in Morgantown in 1977 that still makes him smile.
That’s when the Mountaineers took to the heavily favored, and nationally ranked Irish, 81-68.
“No one expected us to win,” he said.
Game changer
Which, he said, are the voices not worth listening to – “Don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t good enough. Don’t let anyone define you.”
The tallest order of all, he said, is keeping an open heart and an open mind on the journey.
He started as a kid who wasn’t thinking about basketball. Then, he got pretty good at it.
While the NBA was elusive, he still had fun with the game – and he got to live and travel in Europe as part of the deal.
Later, he heard the call to a rewarding life in faith and ministry.
“The voice that you listen to that’s the strongest is the voice in your head,” Lewis told his audience for the day.
“Make sure it’s a good voice. Things might not work out like you initially wanted, but it can also end up being more rewarding than you ever dreamed.”
