Special Report

Losing Luther

Luther Wright, the 7-foot-2 former basketball star from Elizabeth, was lost to the streets. Then he found a road back to a better life in the most unlikely place.
Luther Wright was once a first-round draft pick out of Seton Hall. The 7-foot-2 Jersey City native has battled his personal demons ever since. (Photo by Chris Thelen)

AUGUSTA, Ga. — I open the creaky aluminum door and step onto the screened-in front porch of a single-story brick house. A red-and-yellow Cozy Coupe toy car sits in the corner, the first sign that this is the latest stop on a years-long wild goose chase.

Two wires stick out in place of a doorbell, so I rap my knuckles three times on the storm door. An old white woman cracks it open and looks at me through squinted eyes, and before she can say a word, I know I’m wasting my time.

This is the wrong place. Again.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. I’m not sure if I have the right address. I’m trying to find Luther Wright.”

I had searched train stations in Newark, homeless shelters in Irvington, gymnasiums in Elizabeth. I had heard he was sleeping in an abandoned house, on a park bench, in the lobby of a Dunkin Donuts on one cold winter morning. I had even cruised the streets of Essex County with an off-duty detective in the dead of night, looking for any sign of a legend who had disappeared in plain sight.

Luther Wright. The name was once destined for the list of great basketball players in New Jersey history. He was a 7-foot-2 center with soft hands and freakish athleticism that left one trainer convinced he was working with the next Shaquille O’Neal.

That was three decades ago. He instead became another example of what happens when an athlete can’t harness his potential and overcome his personal demons — a familiar story that, had he settled into a routine post-basketball life, might have been long forgotten.

1992 Press Photo Syracuse University basketball player Lawrence Moten guards #50

Luther Wright had as much potential as any New Jersey born basketball player.Syracuse Post-Standard

And that’s where it seemed headed, too. Wright, a former Seton Hall star and first-round NBA pick, had found peace. He had a home. He had a family. He had turned his passion for music into a deejaying gig and even helped write a book about his life.

Then he abandoned it all, disappearing back to a life on the streets and leaving his friends in the basketball community worried that the next time they saw his name, it would be in a death notice. He would resurface here and there, usually looking for a few bucks, until those unexpected encounters stopped last fall.

No one, it seemed, knew where he had gone.

“Who?” the old woman says through the cracked door before her eyes open wide with a flash of recognition, and I can feel the hair stand on the back of my neck.

“Oh, yeah, Luther. Check around back.”

I leave the porch and walk under a carport to a small cinder-block building that was hidden from view from the street. Again, there’s no doorbell, so I rap gently on the door. A woman’s angry voice cries out, asking who I was and what I wanted, but before I can answer the door opens.

A hulking figure, with a cigarette burnt down to the filter clinched between his meaty fingers, stands in front of me.

“Luther!” I blurt out before I can even introduce myself. “You have no idea how many people are looking for you.”

A troubled prodigy

He welcomes me into a cluttered living room before retaking his spot on a sofa that looks like it belongs in a dollhouse with him sitting on it. Few people on earth will ever encounter someone as big as Luther Wright, and it isn’t just because of his height.

Wright is built more like an offensive lineman than a basketball player these days, with his belly hanging over the waist of his gym shorts. This, his friends have told me, is a positive sign — “When he’s fat, that means he’s doing good” is how one of them put it. Luther tends to lose weight, and lose a lot of it, when he is using drugs.

We haven’t even finished exchanging pleasantries when he catches me staring at his feet. They are covered with white athletic socks pulled high over his massive calves, but they are flat and thick like the end of a sledgehammer.

“They cut my toes off,” he explains before I can ask. “I caught MRSA. I don’t even know how I caught it. It was eating my feet, eating my toes, and they couldn’t save them. I have to be mindful that I don’t have the balance I used to have without my toes.”

It is hard to reconcile that this is the same graceful athlete who was almost a mythical figure in New Jersey grassroots basketball during the late ’80s and early ’90s. That’s where I steered the conversation as he put out his cigarette — to better times, when Wright seemed on a path to athletic greatness.

This was before every dunk was on YouTube or Facebook, when stories about impressive young players still traveled by word of mouth and, in many cases, became even more legendary with each retelling. This was the golden age of high school basketball in the state, when one team in Jersey City would produce three first-round NBA Draft picks.

Luther Wright was heavily recruited out of Elizabeth High but stayed home at Seton Hall, where his potential was good enough for the Utah Jazz to draft him in the first round in 1993. (NJ Advance Media file photos)

“Big Lou” was at the center of it all.

Wright started his career at tiny St. Anthony, the powerhouse near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, but couldn’t handle the rigorous academics or head coach Bob Hurley Sr.’s demanding style. He transferred to Elizabeth High, then the biggest high school in the country, and his new team’s epic matchups against his old one packed the gym and were televised on cable TV.

“He was a physical specimen, but he only liked basketball. He never loved it,” Hurley said. “Anytime there was a problem, he wasn’t going to fight because you only fight for things you love.”

No one saw the warning signs then. Had Wright hidden them that well? Or were the people around him blinded by his talent? He was abused as a child in nearly every way possible — sexually, by an uncle; physically, by his father; emotionally, by the neighborhood kids who bullied him for his size or his wardrobe.

“He was 6-foot-8 in eighth grade, and people would chase him through the neighborhood and I was like, ‘How the hell is this big guy running from these little people?’” said Jerry Walker, a future college teammate who convinced Wright to play basketball.

Walker convinced Wright that, if he just stopped running and yelled at his tormentors, they would leave him alone. That worked for the bullies, but to combat the demons he could not see, Wright turned to drugs at an early age.

“You look back at Luther and think about what he could have accomplished and never did.”
Ben Candelino, former Elizabeth High coach

He started smoking marijuana in high school and using harder drugs when he arrived at Seton Hall, the college team he picked so he didn’t have to move away from his ailing mother. He often clashed with P.J. Carlesimo, the hard-driving Seton Hall coach who had led the Pirates to the national championship game the year before his arrival.

“He was probably -- not probably -- he was the one with the most pure talent of anyone we ever recruited,” Carlesimo said.

The word that always appears in old newspaper stories about Wright is “potential.” The entire basketball world, it seemed, was waiting for him finally to fulfill his, and ignoring the problems that kept him from doing so.

“You look back at Luther and think about what he could have accomplished and never did,” said Ben Candelino, his coach at Elizabeth. “But in some ways, it doesn’t surprise me because other people wanted Luther to be more successful in basketball than Luther wanted it.”

He ignored the advice of his longtime AAU coach, Sandy Pyonin, and entered the 1993 NBA Draft after his sophomore season at Seton Hall. “He wasn’t ready,” Pyonin said, but the Utah Jazz didn’t care. They saw him as the final piece to a championship puzzle with legends John Stockton and Karl Malone in their prime.

They picked him 18th overall and signed him to a five-year, $5 million contract before he suited up for a single practice. He was in a draft class with his former teammates, Bobby Hurley and Terry Dehere, and future NBA stars like Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway and Allan Houston.

Wright couldn’t pick out Utah on a map, and after spending his entire life in urban New Jersey, it was an awful fit. He would later write in his 2010 autobiography “A Perfect Fit” that he befriended a Mexican drug dealer who would deliver a package of weed to his new suburban Salt Lake City mansion with cash — the one with the massive in-ground pool in an all-white neighborhood — once a week.

He would play in just 15 games in the 1993-94 season, scoring 19 points, and his off-the-court problems became a headache for a button-down franchise. He adopted a Rottweiler puppy during a road trip to Miami and tried to sneak it home on the team plane. He walked off the court during warmups before one game and started playing drums with a pep band.

It all looked like minor, silly stuff, but in reality, Wright’s life was unraveling.

Luther Wright

Luther Wright matches up against NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal in a rare appearance during his only season in the NBA. (Associated Press)

The tipping point came on Jan. 24, 1994, when Wright was found shirtless at a Utah rest area after smashing in the windshield of a car. It was 4 a.m., and he was banging on garbage cans, hoping that police would come and find him. He knew he needed help. He was arrested and spent the next six months in a mental institution.

The diagnosis: bipolar disorder.

“What Luther is is not of his own making,” his former agent Sal Fazio said. “And that’s what frustrates me. People don’t understand that. I wish people would understand that Luther Wright is a victim of his illness. He’s not living this way by a matter of choice.”

Fazio worked out a deal with the Jazz to pay his contract in $15,000 monthly payments for the next 25 years. He should have been set for life with the support of the NBA and the New Jersey basketball community to get the help he needed and move onto a new chapter.

That’s when he became homeless.

The first time.

Living on the streets

Wright sits up on the edge of the couch and takes two big gulps from a coffee mug. He is the one asking questions now. Who won the NCAA Tournament? I tell him Baylor. What about the women? He is surprised to hear Stanford.

“I don’t have cable so I don’t watch much (basketball) anymore,” he says.

The Masters is underway a few miles away at Augusta National, but you’d never know that in a part of town that sees little benefit from all the golf-loving tourists who flock here each April. That I would find him here, a short drive from a tournament I cover each spring, is almost impossible to believe.

I had heard that Wright was back on the streets in March 2019, and when efforts to find him through his friends in the basketball community failed, I enlisted the help of Jerry Ramos. He has since retired from the Irvington police, but had gotten to know Wright during his 25 years as a detective in the city.

“Everyone knew Luther,” he said.

They knew him because, sometimes, they would need to use three sets of handcuffs before arresting him. They knew him because, other times, he would wander into the police station at night, a smile on his face, and ask for a few bucks.

“Crack came before everything else in my life. I threw away so much. I threw away the opportunity to be great, to be the one they talk about long after I’m gone.”
Luther Wright

Ramos offered to take me out late one night that March, when Wright was more likely to be on the prowl, to see if we could find him. He pulled his SUV onto Springfield Avenue and checked his usual haunts — the KFC, a local diner, the bus station.

“I heard from another cop that they saw him this morning at Dunkin’ Donuts,” Ramos told me, but the clerk behind the register on this night had no information.

A security guard at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark did. Wright, he said, had just wandered past about an hour ago. We drove through the neighborhood streets, looking for any sign of him, but the trail had gone cold. How could someone so large disappear in plain sight?

But, then again, he had before.

After the Jazz abruptly cut Wright before training camp in 1995, he arrived back in New Jersey and started using drugs heavily. He used them to escape from the childhood demons that still haunted him, from his failures as a basketball player, from the demands of his family.

“Crack came before everything else in my life,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I threw away so much. I threw away the opportunity to be great, to be the one they talk about long after I’m gone.”

He lived in a rat-infested abandoned house in Irvington, using his celebrity to borrow a few bucks to get his daily high. When that didn’t work, he would steal whatever he could — bikes, small appliances, anything he could sell — for the cash he needed.

Luther Wright, left, with former Seton Hall teammate Jerry Walker at an after school program in Jersey City in 2008. Wright found solace in music and public speaking after living on the streets for seven years.

His mother had taken loans out against his $15,000 monthly payments, which were down to just $1,000. He would have them mailed to a check-cashing place in Newark, where he would ask the owner to give him half the money at a time. If he took it all, he knew, he would spend it all on drugs in a couple days.

People tried to help. Candelino. Pyonin. Fazio. They checked him into rehab centers, but after a few nights, he checked himself out. They arranged interventions with his family, with former teammates, with spiritual leaders in the town. The well-meaning attempts usually ended the same way, with Wright making empty promises and asking for money.

“I gave him 20 bucks because he said he needed something to eat, but I knew he was going to take the 20 bucks and spend it on drugs,” Candelino said. “Until he wants to make changes, we know there’s nothing we can do.”

“It was happening gradually,” said Stan Neron, director of Elizabeth’s Department of Recreation. “We were trying to intervene, to step in and see what could be done, but everyone knows this about addiction: You have to want to change. He knows we love him and support him and we’re here for him.”

He had been homeless for seven years when, four days before Christmas in 2004, Wright finally reached his breaking point. He had been wandering the city streets in the dead of winter without shoes, and when the unbearable pain finally forced him to go to the hospital, surgeons had to amputate two of his toes.

“I was sick,” Wright wrote. “I was sick and tired of being homeless. Sick and tired of being high.”

He checked himself into a rehab facility “for real” this time. He spent months in treatment, then months more attending meetings, and then became active in a church community in Linden.

Luther Wright

Luther Wright counsels a homeless man about his substance abuse during Operation Warm-up at the Morningstar Community Christian Center in Linden in 2007.SL

It was the Morning Star Community Christian Center in Linden where Wright finally found a community that would help him build a productive, happy life. He played guitar in a church band, sang in the choir and met a woman he would later say that “taught me how to love.”

He would marry Angie Felton, a hospital worker, and settle into a comfortable life. He returned to Seton Hall, where he worked as the self-described “World’s Tallest Deejay” during games at the Prudential Center and was honored with his former teammates from the 1992-93 team for the 20th anniversary of their Big East championship.

He did book signings when “A Perfect Fit” was released in 2010 and even some motivational speaking. Wright had a story to tell about hitting rock bottom, shaking off failures and finding happiness in life, so Neron put him in front of as many youth groups as he could.

“One day, he appeared in my office, and he wanted to tell his story,” Neron said. “I took him everywhere I went — mentor, workshops. Everybody thought I had a bodyguard.”

It wasn’t, despite the book’s title, perfect. But he was optimistic and happy, and for the first time in his life, doing what he wanted to do. The book ends on a hopeful note about his future:

“I was finally going to get something right!”

So how did he end up back on the streets? Why did he throw away everything — his sobriety, his family, his new-found sense of belonging — when he had conquered his demons?

And how did he end up in that small cinder-block house in Augusta, Georgia, of all places?

Getting out of Jersey

Wright leans back on the couch. He knew the question was coming, and when it does, he points at the recorder I’m holding and asks me to turn it on. This is something he wants the people back in his home state who are wondering about him to know.

“I’m in a good place,” he said. “I had to get out of Jersey. It was toxic for me. The drugs were taking me down. I couldn’t find no exit from that lifestyle. The people, the drugs, the life ...”

He takes a deep breath and exhales deeply.

“I just decided I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I can’t. I can’t live this hazardous lifestyle I was living. Some people, they just can’t get out of it. Some people get out, return and die. I’ve been on all spectrums, all sides, life and death.

“I figured out that I love life a little bit more than death, you know what I’m saying?”

Luther Wright

Luther Wright and his sister, Michelle Wright, playfully spar outside their Augusta, Ga., home. (Photo by Chris Thelen)

He wouldn’t go into detail about what drove him back to the street, except to say that his life began to spiral when his marriage ended. (Felton, his ex-wife, could not be reached for comment.) He lost his deejaying gig at Seton Hall games, he said, after an altercation with a security guard. He stopped showing up at Morning Star.

He had been active on social media in the years following his recovery, his feed filled with photos of the pit bulls he was raising, of his deejay gigs and memes celebrating his sobriety milestones. Then, in March 2016, his Twitter feed ends with a video of him taking a long hit from a pipe and this ominous message: “I had been 12 years clean.”

He started severing connections with the people who could help him. Walker, his old Seton Hall teammate, knew the pattern. Wright would stay in Jersey City “until people got sick of him,” then move onto Newark, then onto Irvington or East Orange, changing the scenery but not the self-destructive behavior.

About a year and a half ago, Walker said, Wright showed up at his building in Jersey City with a noticeable limp. He asked his friend what was wrong, and when Wright pulled off his sneaker and his sock, Walker took one look at his foot and nearly vomited in the bushes.

“It was disgusting,” said Walker, who is now a Hudson County commissioner. “I almost passed out. He had this big old hole in his foot. It was infected, just horrible. I was saying to myself, ‘It’s only a matter of time.’”

That was the last time Walker saw him, but news of his problems spread through the basketball community and on social media. He showed up at an Elizabeth High practice and, because of his erratic behavior, was asked to stay away. He was spotted walking barefoot down Broad Street in Newark, loudly singing gospel music. He was caught in a video riding a motorized shopping cart until police intervened.

Luther Wright found the help he needed when his sister, Michelle Wright, told him to move to Augusta, Ga., to stay with her. (Photo by Chris Theilen)

He was back on the streets — and in and out of hospitals — for almost three years when his sister, Michelle, saw a Facebook post ridiculing him for his problems. Hurt and furious, she reached out to her brother last fall with an ultimatum:

“You’re coming down here with me.”

Wright, weeks removed from having his remaining toes amputated, knew he was out of options. A friend drove him to Augusta, he said, on Election Day. His sister left him a key, and he said when he opened that door on Nov. 3, “We got a new president and we got a new Luther.”

“When I walked in my door and I saw him sitting on the couch, I cried,” Michelle Wright said. “I was so happy. I’m going to take care of him. He’s here with me and we’re good.”

Wright resurfaced on social media, first in a series of rambling videos on his sister’s page and then with his own page. He asked for money and left a mailing address in Augusta, but in a few weeks, the settings on that page were set to private.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know where Wright’s story will go next. He is still just 49 but looks about 15 years older, his face puffy and most of his teeth missing. He has suffered too many relapses to declare this — or anything — as a happy ending.

But, at least, he’s safe. Michelle Wright, who works as a nurse’s assistant, cooks for him and makes sure he takes the medication he needs for his bipolar disorder. Is she the stable force in his life that her brother has been missing? He thinks so.

“I just decided I can’t do this any more. ... I figured out that I love life a little bit more than death, you know what I’m saying?”
Luther Wright

“When she sees that I’m a little down, she talks to me and says, ‘What’s the matter, Lou? You a little down?’” Wright said. “She gives me a little push. It’s gonna be all right. It’s gonna be all right. She keeps telling me that, so I figure it’s going to be alright sooner or later.”

The money from the Jazz, what little of it was left, stopped coming this winter, but Wright and his sister is challenging the team over child-support payments they say it failed to make years ago to a now-deceased son. He isn’t ready to look for work, not with his feet the way they are, but he helps out around the house and shops for groceries.

Maybe, he said, he’ll try public speaking again. Maybe he’ll find a job coaching women’s basketball, like he used to do as a volunteer assistant in Newark. He still believes he has something to offer, that the story of Luther Wright still has a few chapters ahead.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re about to die, and God charges the batteries for you and gives you another chance,” Wright said. “He’s obviously not through with me yet. There’s something he wants me to do. I just don’t know what it is. But I’ll figure it out.”

I had spent so much time trying to find him, but now that I had, I wasn’t sure what else to say. After about an hour, I wished him luck, shook his hand and stepped out of the small house.

He closed the door behind me, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw a sign hanging from it that I hadn’t noticed before. “Home Sweet Home,” it read above a shamrock, and for the big man inside, I walked away hoping those words were finally true.

Luther Wright

Luther Wright and his sister, Michelle Wright, in Augusta, Ga. (Photo by Chris Thelen)

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About the Authors
Steve Politi
Steve Politi, the sports columnist for NJ Advance Media, has covered New Jersey sports since 1998. He was named the nation's top sports columnist in 2019 by the Associated Press Sports Editors.

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