Isiah Thomas's college recruitment story is pretty wild. As a premier recruit, he had a lot of offers and basketball programs to choose from, but in the end, it wasn't him who decided where his next destination on the path to stardom would be. Growing up on the west side of Chicago, Thomas was a basketball prodigy, and the offers rolled in from every direction. DePaul, the local powerhouse, seemed like the obvious choice.
"I was supposed to go to DePaul," Thomas recalled , describing how he and fellow Chicago stars Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings dreamed of creating a dynasty in their own backyard.
But the process was far from simple. College coaches were relentless, and some didn't play by the rules.
"Everybody was offering us everything. Playing time, you're going to start your freshman year, everything else," Thomas said. Then came the moment that would define his recruitment and his family's values.
"One coach came in, I won't name the school, but he came in, had a briefcase, opened up the briefcase. And now he said it was a hundred thousand dollars in there. My mom got up, walked over to the briefcase, closed it and said, 'My son's not for sale.'"
The temptation was real for a family "poorer than poor," with no lights in the house and a jug of water in the fridge. But Mary Thomas's principles were stronger. "She kicked them out," Isiah remembered.
When Indiana's Bob Knight came calling , the approach couldn't have been more different. Knight arrived not with promises or cash but with a message for Mary Thomas.
"Coach Knight came to the house and, you know, he sat down and during the whole time that he was recruiting me, he never talked to me. He was talking directly to my mother," he said.
Knight's pitch was simple.
"I'm offering you and your son three things. A, he's going to be a gentleman. B, I'll teach him everything that I know about basketball. And C, he'll get a great education," coach Knight said to Zeke's mother.
The decision, as Isiah tells it, wasn't really his.
"My mom called the press conference. Me and her were sitting there. She said, 'My son has made his decision. He's going to Indiana University'," he remembers. "No, I wasn't even smiling. I was sitting there, my head was down. I was like, what?"
For Isiah, the choice to leave Chicago and play for Knight was a shock. "Going from the west side of Chicago out to St. Joe's, it felt like that trip took us two hours to get out there," he said.
But Mary Thomas saw something in Knight's promise of discipline , education, and manhood, a path out of poverty and into greatness. Isiah's college career at Indiana would prove her right. In his two seasons there, he became a national champion and a campus legend and had the perfect foundation for a Hall of Fame career. But it all started with a mother's conviction that some things, like her son's future, could never be bought.
