One to Watch: Hoop Dreams

Editor’s Note: This piece originally ran in our October 1995 issue. We hope you enjoy an early look at Roland Lazenby’s career!

He’s probably the only Roanoker who knows Magic Johnson well enough to call him Earvin to his face. 

He’s certainly the only former Blacks­burg High School teacher and wrestling coach that Michael Jordan would recog­nize. Jordan even apologized for making him wait so long for an interview.

Hobnobbing with the heavies hasn’t gone to Roland Lazenby’s head, though.

“It’s only sports,” he says. But here the writer with dozens of books under his belt makes an important distinction: “I always wanted to cover something at its highest level.”

Sure, it’s just a game, but when Michael Jordan slaps your back, the tin- gle travels. At these moments, Lazenby is struck not only by “probably the best-known human being on the planet,” but by the almost absurd access that he enjoys in the NBA.

Lazenby started writing at VMl in the early 1970s. “Just stupid stuff.” After he switched majors from biology to English, this certified “Ginsberg freak” won the institute’ s poetry prize.

“It’s the first time anything ever hap­pened that reinforced anything l ever did,” Lazenby says.

After graduation, the beat poet of the cadet corps taught English in Blacksburg, quit thal: $9,000-a-year job in 1978 to work 80-hour, minimum-wage weeks for a series of newspapers, attended Hollins while work­ing full-time and starting a family, and final­ly ended a five-year stint at the Roanoke Times & World-News to freelance in 1984.

His first freelance project was a book on UVa.’s Ralph Sampson. That venture earned him more money in six weeks than he made all year at the newspaper.

Since then, Lazenby has written dozens of magazine articles for nation­al publications and has written or con­tributed to 27 books.

His personal best is “The Lakers, A Basketball Journey,” published in 1993. At the moment, he’s working on four books. That’s in addition to editing a pro bas­ketball annual, writing several magazine stories a month, and teaching journalism courses at Radford twice a week. Oh, yes, he and his wife are also raising three chil­dren, ages 5, 9 and 18. 

“I’ve really been overrun with work,” he says with one part regret and two parts relief. 

“It’s been a good year.” One of his best, in fact, but a trying one. “I’m on a tread­mill,” he says, adding that the travel this year has been brutal.

In one 45-day stretch, he was on the road 32 nights. “I ran up something like 100,000 Marriott points,” he notes. But it’s not all pillow mints in plush hotels. “It’s fun to travel, out after a while, it’s exhausting.”