Isiah Thomas

Explore about the Famous Basketball Player Isiah Thomas, who was born in United States on April 30, 1961. Analyze Isiah Thomas’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Isiah Thomas dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Isiah Thomas?

Isiah Thomas Biography

Hall of Fame Detroit Pistons point guard nicknamed “Zeke,” who led the team to back-to-back NBA Championships in 1989 and 1990. He was a 12-time NBA All-Star and 3-time All-NBA First Team selection.

He would commute 90 minutes to leave his rough neighborhood to go attend St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois.

Under the guidance of coach Bob Knight at Indiana University, he helped lead the school to an NCAA Championship in 1981, where he was named the Final Four Most Outstanding Player.

He married Lynn Kendall in July 1985 and they had two children together. He also had a son named Marc Dones with a different woman.

Chuck Daly coached him during his back to back NBA titles in 1989 and 1990.

The youngest of nine children, Thomas was born on April 30, 1961 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in the city’s West Side. He started playing basketball at age three and would dribble and shoot baskets as the halftime entertainment at Catholic Youth Organization games.

Isiah Lord Thomas III (born April 30, 1961) is an American former basketball player who played professionally for the Detroit Pistons in the National Basketball Association (NBA). A point guard, the 12-time NBA All-Star was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History and inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Thomas has also been a professional and collegiate head coach, a basketball executive, and a broadcaster.

Thomas quickly had to adjust to Knight’s disciplinarian style. At the 1979 Pan American Games in Puerto Rico, Knight got so mad at Thomas he threatened to put him on a plane home. Knight recalled yelling at the freshman-to-be, “You ought to go to DePaul, Isiah, because you sure as hell aren’t going to be an Indiana player playing like that.” Prior to the start of his freshman year, the 1979–80 season, Knight became so upset with Thomas that he kicked him out of a practice. According to Thomas, Knight was making a point that no player, no “matter how talented, is bigger than Knight’s philosophy.”

Thomas met his future wife, Lynn Kendall, the daughter of a Secret Service agent and a nurse, in the early 1980s while they were both attending Indiana University. The couple married in 1985.

Thomas was selected to the 1980 Olympic team, but like all American athletes he was not able to play in Moscow due to the Olympics boycott. The boycotting countries instead participated in the “Gold Medal Series”, a series of games against NBA teams, a French team and the 1976 Olympic gold medal team in various U.S. cities, recording a 5–1 record (losing only to the Seattle SuperSonics). Thomas shot 22–55 from the field and 14–17 from the line. He led the U.S. in assists with 37 (the next highest total on the team was 17) and averaged 9.7 points per game. In 2007, Thomas received one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the spurned athletes.

The next year, the 1980–81 season, Knight made Thomas captain and told him to run the show on the floor. Thomas responded so well that, as the season unfolded, Knight and Thomas grew as friends. When a Purdue player took a cheap shot at Thomas during a game at Bloomington, Knight called a press conference to defend his star. And 19 days later, when Thomas hit an Iowa player and was ejected from a game, Knight refused to criticize him.

Thomas quickly proved his skills as a player and became a favorite with both Knight and Indiana fans. His superior abilities eventually caused Knight to adjust his coaching style. Fans displayed bedsheets with quotations from the Book of Isaiah (“And a little child shall lead them”) and nicknamed him “Mr. Wonderful.” Because of Thomas’s relatively short stature for college basketball at 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m), coach Knight would call him “Pee Wee”. Thomas and Mike Woodson led the Hoosiers to the Big Ten championship and advanced to the 1980 Sweet Sixteen.

In the 1981 NBA draft, the Detroit Pistons chose Thomas with the No. 2 pick and signed him to a four-year, $1.6 million contract. Thomas started for the Eastern Conference in the 1982 NBA All-Star Game and made the All-Rookie Team.

That year, Thomas and the Hoosiers once again won a conference title and won the 1981 NCAA tournament, the school’s fourth national title. The sophomore earned the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award and made himself eligible for the upcoming NBA draft.

Thomas played college basketball for the Indiana Hoosiers, leading them to the 1981 NCAA championship as a sophomore and declaring for the NBA draft. He was taken as the second overall pick by the Pistons in the 1981 NBA draft, and played for them his entire career, while leading the “Bad Boys” to the 1988–89 and 1989–90 NBA championships.

In the opening round of the 1984 NBA playoffs, Thomas and the Pistons faced off against Bernard King and the New York Knicks. In the pivotal fifth game, Thomas scored 16 points in 94 seconds to force the game into overtime, but then fouled out, and the Knicks held on to win.

In the 1985 NBA All-Star Game, Thomas was joined on the Eastern Conference squad by star rookie Michael Jordan. Jordan wound up attempting nine shots, relatively few for a starting player. Afterward, Thomas and his fellow veteran East players were accused of having planned to “freeze out” Jordan from their offense by not passing him the ball, supposedly out of spite over the attention Jordan was receiving. No player involved has ever confirmed that the freeze-out occurred, but the story has long been reported. Thomas has ridiculed the idea that he masterminded the supposed freeze-out as “ludicrous”, pointing out that he was a relatively young player on a team that included Larry Bird, Julius Erving and Moses Malone. During Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction, in which Thomas introduced John Stockton, who was also being inducted, Jordan dismissed the claims about a freeze-out having taken place, saying “I was just happy to be there, being the young guy surrounded by all these greats, I just wanted to prove myself and I hope that I did prove myself to you guys.”

Two months before Thomas’s marriage to Lynn Kendall in 1985, Jenni Dones, a woman from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, filed a paternity lawsuit against Thomas claiming that she was pregnant after having had a three- or four-month “intimate, exclusive, ongoing relationship” with him. Her child, Marc E. T. Dones, was born in 1986. After a long-running legal dispute, Thomas agreed to pay a settlement of about $52,000 and provide a monthly payment of $2,765 until Marc Dones reached 18, with Marc getting a final lump-sum amount of $100,000 at 18. In a case Dones filed in 1995, she was able to get additional financial support for her son and his college education. Marc Dones is an aspiring writer and poet who has been described by the literary site thedetroiter.com as “a talented writer and poet”.

In the 1985 NBA playoffs, Thomas and his team went to the conference semifinals against the 15-time NBA champion Boston Celtics led by future basketball Hall of Famers Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, and Dennis Johnson. Detroit would not shake the Celtics in their six-game series, eventually losing.

In 1987, following a playoff loss to the Boston Celtics, Thomas was asked if he agreed with Dennis Rodman’s comments that Larry Bird was overrated because he was white; Thomas agreed that if Bird were black he “would be just another good guy” instead of being portrayed as the league’s best player. Thomas later said he was joking and just supporting his teammate.

Thomas graduated from Indiana University with a B.A. in 1987. Isiah Thomas and Lynn Kendall had a son, Joshua, in 1988, and a daughter, Lauren, in 1991. Thomas has a third son from an earlier liaison, Marc Dones, born in 1986.

Also in 1987 Thomas posed for a poster sponsored by the American Library Association with the caption “READ: Isiah Thomas for America’s Libraries”. Thomas is shown dressed in a Sam Spade type outfit while reading a detective novel.

During his playing career, Thomas paid college tuition for more than 75 students. When he was a Piston, in 1987 Thomas organized the “No Crime Day” in Detroit. He even had the help of Detroit Mayor Coleman Young to call for a moratorium on crime in the summer of 1986.

In the 1987 NBA playoffs, Thomas and the Pistons went to the Eastern Conference Finals and faced the Celtics again. It was the furthest the team had advanced since moving from Fort Wayne. Detroit was able to tie the Celtics at two games apiece, but its hope of winning Game 5 at Boston Garden was dashed by Larry Bird with just seconds remaining: Thomas attempted to quickly inbound the ball, Bird stole the pass and hit Dennis Johnson for the game-winning layup.

In 1988, the Pistons’ first trip to the Finals in 32 years saw them face the Los Angeles Lakers, led by Magic Johnson, James Worthy, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Before the series, Thomas and Johnson exchanged a courtside kiss on the cheek prior to tip-off as a sign of their deep friendship. After taking a 3–2 series lead back to Los Angeles, Detroit appeared poised to win their first NBA title in Game 6.

In the Eastern Conference Finals of the 1991 NBA playoffs, the two-time defending champion Detroit Pistons faced the Jordan-led Chicago Bulls in the playoffs for the fourth consecutive season. The Pistons had eliminated the Bulls in each of the three previous years, but this time they suffered a four-game sweep at the hands of the Bulls (who would win the first of three consecutive, and six overall, NBA championships between 1991 and 1998). The series was marked by a number of verbal and physical confrontations. With 7.9 seconds remaining in the fourth game, Laimbeer organized a walk-out and Thomas and all of his teammates—except Joe Dumars and John Salley—walked off the court, refusing to shake hands with the Bulls. In 1992, Thomas was passed over for the Dream Team apparently because of his strained relationship with Jordan.

After retiring, Thomas became part owner and Executive Vice President for the expansion Toronto Raptors in 1994. In 1998, he left the organization after a dispute with new management over the franchise’s direction and his future responsibilities. During his four-year tenure with the team, the Raptors drafted Damon Stoudamire, Marcus Camby, and high schooler Tracy McGrady.

After Tim Hardaway left the team due to injury, Thomas was named to Dream Team II for the 1994 World Championship of Basketball, but did not play due to his Achilles tendon injury that eventually led to his retirement. He was replaced by Kevin Johnson.

In the 1988–89 season, Thomas, along with teammates Joe Dumars, Rick Mahorn, Vinnie Johnson, Dennis Rodman, James Edwards, John Salley, Bill Laimbeer, and Mark Aguirre, guided his team to a 63–19 record. Detroit played a brash and dominating brand of basketball through the playoffs that led to their nickname “Bad Boys”. First they defeated Boston, which had been suffering persistent injuries. Michael Jordan and the up-and-coming Chicago Bulls fell next in the Conference Finals, setting up an NBA Finals rematch with the Lakers. This time the Pistons dominated, sweeping the Lakers in four games to win their first of back-to-back championships. The following year, Thomas was voted NBA Finals Most Valuable Player of the 1990 NBA Finals after averaging 27.6 points per game, 7.0 assists per game, and 5.2 rebounds per game in Detroit’s victory over Clyde Drexler’s Portland Trail Blazers. The Pistons continued to play well between 1991 and 1993, but found their road back to the NBA Finals blocked by the emerging Bulls dynasty. An aging and ailing Thomas tore his Achilles tendon on April 19, 1994, forcing him to retire a month later.

Isiah Thomas was involved in allegations about gambling, an accusation outlined in the 1997 book Money Players.

In 1998, Thomas founded Isiah.com, a company serving consumers, retailers, and corporations with online gift certificates and other i-commerce products. Isiah.com’s first venture was i-gift, a one-stop, online shopping service center for gift certificates. i-gift was praised as unique because it could drive e-commerce while supporting and expanding brick-and-mortar merchants. He brought the next generation of gift certificates to The Somerset Collection in Michigan, which houses exclusive department stores and retailers. Isiah.com’s mission was to “harness internet technologies and leverage business transformation processes to create new business ventures that both produce profits and benefit under-served sectors of the community.” Isiah.com also had a partnership with the NBA store.

In 1998, Thomas founded Isiah.com, a company serving consumers, retailers, and corporations with online gift certificates and other i-commerce products. Isiah.com’s first venture was i-gift, a one-stop, online shopping service center for gift certificates. i-gift was praised as unique because it could drive e-commerce while supporting and expanding brick-and-mortar merchants. He brought the next generation of gift certificates to The Somerset Collection in Michigan, which houses exclusive department stores and retailers. Isiah.com’s mission was to “harness internet technologies and leverage business transformation processes to create new business ventures that both produce profits and benefit under-served sectors of the community.” Isiah.com also had a partnership with the NBA store.

In April 1999 Thomas became the first African American elected to the Board of Governors of the Chicago Stock Exchange. He served until 2002.

In 2000, Thomas was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Two years prior, Thomas was inducted into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.

From 2000 to 2003, Thomas coached the Indiana Pacers, succeeding Larry Bird, who previously coached the Pacers to the Eastern Conference title. Thomas attempted to bring up young talents such as Jermaine O’Neal, Jamaal Tinsley, Al Harrington, and Jeff Foster. But under Thomas the Pacers were not able to stay at the elite level as they went through the transition from a veteran-dominated, playoff-experienced team to a younger, less experienced team. In Thomas’s first two seasons with the Pacers, the team was eliminated in the first round by the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Nets, both of whom eventually made the NBA Finals.

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