Clyde Drexler
basketball player
Personal Information
Born June 22, 1962, in New Orleans, LA; son of Eunice Drexler Scott; married Gaynell Floyd (an attorney), 1988; children: Austin, Elise.
Education: Attended University of Houston, 1980-83.
Career
Guard for Portland Trail Blazers professional basketball team, Portland, OR, 1983--. Selected fourteenth in first round of 1983 National Basketball Association (NBA) draft. Contract with Portland extended through 1995-96 season. Member of 1992 United States Olympic basketball team.
Life's Work
Portland Trail Blazer guard Clyde "The Glide" Drexler is considered a phenomenon in professional basketball: a championship-calibre player, he toils in a small market and never seeks to call attention to himself. Compared at every turn to the better-known Michael Jordan, Drexler has progressed year by year as his team has become a playoff contender. His skills during the 1991-92 basketball season earned him All-NBA First Team honors and a position on the United States Olympic basketball team. Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent Mike Bruton commended Drexler for his "silky-smooth style that ranges from explosiveness when he assaults the hoop on the fast break to the utmost in finesse when he softly launches a three-pointer or beats his man on a baseline drive." Bruton added: "The Glide is not just a nickname, it is what Clyde Drexler does on a basketball court."
Drexler is stalking greatness, but his fame outside Portland and his native Houston is limited. "I am just uncomfortable talking about myself or my family," Drexler told the Sporting News. Nor does he appear to be consumed with the desire to win national championships, even though the Trail Blazers advanced to the finals in 1990 and again in 1992. "I want to win it all, but I'm not obsessed with it," he said placidly just before the 1992 NBA Championships. "It won't mar my accomplishments."
These accomplishments have accumulated slowly in a professional career that began in 1983. Plagued in his early years by a reputation for wild play on the court and stubbornness with coaches and staff, Drexler went on to mature emotionally and physically. He attributes his success in the NBA not to raw talent but to hard work. "It's a slap in my face to credit everything I've done to my God-given abilities," Drexler told the Sporting News. "I never felt I was a very good player. At Houston [in college], when everyone else was partying, I was in the gym ... at 2 a.m., practicing. I've always had keys to the gym. My edge isn't my talent; it's the fact I'm always in shape."
Drexler was born in 1962 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He spent most of his childhood in Houston, Texas, in a neighborhood known as South Park. Sporting News contributor Paul Attner noted that Drexler has described himself as a "chubby preteen who was too slow, couldn't jump and was always picked last on his playground in Houston." That assessment might not be completely fair. The middle of seven children, Clyde spent hours on the front porch of his home, drilling the ball off the roof to his older brother, James. Clyde told Sports Illustrated that his six-foot-plus brother, whose athletic career was cut short by work responsibilities, was talented and a good teacher. "The funny thing is that James had one of these picture-perfect jump shots, high arc, perfect form, the whole thing," Drexler said. "Exactly what my jumper doesn't look like." Drexler's mother told the Oregonian of her younger son: "Clyde didn't care about shooting. All he wanted to do is dunk."
At the age of twelve, Drexler enrolled in a martial arts class at the urging of a neighbor. The class helped him to develop discipline, and by the time he entered high school he was a "gym rat," playing whatever sport was in season and doing well in all of them. Basketball seemed to be his best game, so his coaches encouraged him to give up football and baseball. "All you heard back then was to concentrate on one sport, and I think I got caught up in that," Drexler told Sports Illustrated. "My one regret is that I didn't get a chance to play two sports at a pro level. Baseball, maybe, or even football, as a quarterback or wide receiver."
Drexler's family was upwardly mobile. Both his mother and his stepfather, Manuel Scott, worked full-time jobs. Most of his siblings went to college. He was not pushed into a sports career by financial need or by the desire to help his parents out of difficulties--although he has provided funds to help his mother retire early from her position as a cashier at a supermarket. As Jack McCallum observed in Sports Illustrated, "When Clyde went to the University of Houston ... he wasn't escaping from anything, didn't feel angry or trapped, and never thought he had to become a professional athlete to be a success." Nevertheless, Drexler entered the University of Houston in 1980 and helped make its basketball team an NCAA powerhouse in just two short years.
At Houston Drexler combined with Akeem Olajuwon and Larry Micheaux to form the "Phi Slamma Jamma" front line. The trio was nearly unstoppable through several college seasons, and the University of Houston made the NCAA Final Four twice--in 1982 and 1983--while Drexler was there. Even though he only played through his junior year, Drexler set records at Houston for scoring 1000 points, snagging 900 rebounds, and making 300 assists over the course of his collegiate career. He was voted Houston's most valuable player as a sophomore and averaged 15.9 points per game as a junior. Also as a junior he was named Southwest Conference player of the year. These were the crucial seasons in which Drexler honed his 43-inch vertical reach with late-night workouts in the Houston athletic center. Expectations of a professional career suddenly became a real possibility, and he worked hard to make it happen.
After his junior year of college Drexler announced his availability for the NBA draft. It was a calculated move. The Houston Rockets had the first and third picks in the draft that year, and Drexler hoped to be chosen by his hometown team, a franchise that he had followed avidly. Instead, the Rockets took Ralph Sampson and Rodney McCray. Drexler was drafted fourteenth in the first round, by a team more than a thousand miles away--the Portland Trail Blazers. "I was upset," Drexler told the Oregonian. "I came out [of college] a year early with the idea that the Rockets would grab me. When they didn't, I was disappointed."
Portland might have seemed like a foreign country to Drexler when he arrived late in 1983, but he was determined to make his mark on basketball there. Attner wrote that in his early years as a professional, Drexler was "an immature, undisciplined natural talent with just five years of playing experience and an unrealistic opinion of his game. Amid the spectacular plays were too many wild shots and too much selfishness." Among Drexler's noted weaknesses were lapses in ball handling and decision making. His scoring average as a rookie was only 7.7 points per game, although he played in all 82 of the Blazers' games.
Drexler established himself in Portland as a man of few words who guarded his privacy intensely. Still, he was not able to insulate himself entirely from the probing eyes of media and fans. As his ability increased--he made his first All-Star appearance in 1986--he began to clash with some of his coaches. Mild disagreements with his first Portland coach, Jack Ramsay, gave way to deeper arguments with Ramsay's replacement, Mike Schuler. All the while Drexler was improving on the court. His 1988-89 scoring average of 27.2 points was a Portland record, and he was voted Portland's most valuable player by his teammates. McCallum observed, however, that Schuler "considered Drexler a negative influence on the team, a player who didn't give his all in practice and who, despite streaks of brilliance, made bad decisions on the court." The schism ended when Schuler was fired--the Trail Blazer front office decided to take the side of their budding superstar.
Traces of the controversy linger to this day. "I would never say Clyde didn't practice hard," assistant coach John Wetzel told Sports Illustrated of the Schuler years. "But I would say he is a little more focused now, more knowledgeable about the right things to do. He doesn't feel he has to prove himself every day, and that's led to a more constructive approach to his game." Under current Portland coach Rick Adelman, Drexler's ability has steadily improved. His shot selection, passing, court vision, and defense put him on a par with Michael Jordan, and he has--after some reluctance--become the Trail Blazers' team captain.
As Drexler improved, so did the Blazers. The team appeared in its first NBA championship series in 1990, losing to the Detroit Pistons in five games. In 1992 the Blazers advanced all the way to the championships again, losing in a heartbreaking six games to the Chicago Bulls. For Drexler, that defeat was particularly disheartening. He had come off his best season yet, leading his team in both scoring average and assists and guiding the Blazers to an 11-4 post-season record before meeting the Bulls. National media attention poured down upon him when he finished second in voting for the league's most valuable player behind Michael Jordan.
The bittersweet ending to the 1992 professional season had a footnote, however. Drexler was not among the players initially named to the United States Olympic basketball team. He was stung by the omission, but he told the Los Angeles Times that he didn't dwell on it. Fortunately for Drexler--and the United States--the selection committee had left one spot open to be filled by a player who excelled during the 1991-92 regular season. In the spring of 1992 Drexler was given the call to join the Olympic team in Barcelona for the summer games. The low-key guard gave the credit for his selection to the Portland fans. "I think the fans on the local level started the whole support system, and that was a great feeling," he told the Los Angeles Times. "They were behind me all the way and they wanted to see justice done. The committee finally made a good decision."
The flip side to the coin is that Drexler will no longer toil in relative anonymity in Portland. His spot on the Olympic team will assure him the national status that his quiet behavior and small-market team membership have allowed him to avoid. "I've always had recognition, coming out of college," Drexler said. "The mega-mega-superstar recognition I haven't had, and that hasn't bothered me at all. I've got a lot of respect from people all across the country, get plenty of fan mail and that's a lot. I'd hate to go to the next level, where you're what I call a commercial superstar." Drexler backs these words up with actions: to date he has few of the high-paying commercial endorsements so prized by other NBA superstars, although his Trail Blazer salary is competitive.
Attner called Drexler "the NBA superstar we know the least about." Although active in the Portland community and a connoisseur of African-American art, Drexler prefers to protect his privacy and to shun controversy. He only explains himself when asked about his nickname, "The Glide," and his seemingly effortless work on the basketball court. "From my perspective, I'm scuffling out there," Drexler told The Oregonian. "I'm struggling. I'm barely making it. So when somebody says I make it look easy, that's funny." He elaborated in the Los Angeles Times, noting that on the court, "I'm going, 'If I make this move, my ankle's going to kill me, if I make this move my knees may bend wrong.' I'm out there struggling. But I'm trying so hard, before you know it, the play's made. It's like something you've done a million times before, so you just let it happen.... You never have time to think, 'I'm just going to glide.'"
During the off-season Drexler lives quietly in Portland with his wife, who is an attorney, and their two children. He studies foreign languages, dabbles with computers, and is an avid reader. "Each year, I try to expand my learning experience by taking on a new challenge," he told the Sporting News. "I don't want to become stagnant as a person." Drexler's contract with the Trail Blazers could keep him in Portland until the end of the 1995-96 basketball season. Attner concluded that Drexler will continue to shun the public cauldron of attention, unwilling to participate in the fuss being made over him. "In Drexler's abstract world," the reporter wrote, "winning and losing are not the measure of success. Living that balanced life, so basketball doesn't dominate--now, that is success."
Awards
Named to NBA All-Star team, 1986-92; named to All-NBA Second Team, 1991; named to All-NBA First Team, 1992.
Further Reading
Sources
- Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1992.
- Oregonian, May 27, 1992.
- Philadelphia Inquirer, June 2, 1992.
- Sporting News, May 18, 1992.
- Sports Illustrated, June 11, 1990; January 27, 1992; May 11, 1992.
— Mark Kram
