Raymond Lewis, the Sixer who never was

Like Joel Embiid, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Darryl Dawkins, Billy Cunningham, and other NBA legends, Raymond Lewis was once a first-round draft pick by the Philadelphia 76ers. But Lewis never actually played for the Sixers, or even in the NBA at all.

The circumstances of how that happened, including Lewis’ short-lived time in Philadelphia, is the subject of a new documentary, Raymond Lewis: L.A. Legend, that unearths the story (from nearly a half-century ago) of a talented player who has been all but omitted from basketball history.

The Sixers, having shed the Wilt Chamberlain/Bill Cunningham core of the team that won the championship in 1967, were at low ebb in 1973, and still a few years away from the arrival of Julius Erving. After losing a record 73 games the year before, the 76ers drafted Lewis with the 18th overall pick in the 1973 NBA draft, and paired him with Doug Collins, the former U.S. Olympic team star who had been picked first overall in the same draft.

But Lewis, negotiating without an agent or attorney, agreed to a lowball contract that was mostly non-guaranteed and deferred far into the future. As multiple people in the doc and news accounts at the time say, Lewis outplayed Collins at the team’s rookie camp that summer.

In a situation that foreshadowed the Eagles’ 2005 blowup with Terrell Owens, Lewis asked for his contract to be torn up and sulked after the team refused. After some missed practices, he was suspended for a year and forbidden from playing for a team in the rival ABA.

“We let the world know that Raymond belonged to us,” former Sixers general manager Pat Williams says in the documentary. “He was our property.”

Lewis sat out, unpaid except for his signing bonus, for his first two years, and was eventually invited to training camp in 1975. But by then, the Sixers had acquired the likes of Darryl Dawkins, World B. Free, and Joe Bryant (the father of Kobe), and left Lewis less of an opportunity to make the team; he ended up walking out of that camp as well. Lewis had tryouts with other teams several times in the ensuing years but his lack of a signing is seen by many as evidence of league-wide blackballing. By 1976, the ABA and NBA had merged, preventing him from playing in the other league.

Lewis died in 2001, at the age of 48, after battling alcoholism and other health problems.

Raymond Lewis: L.A. Legend represents the work of two filmmakers, who have been working on the project for many years. Co-director Ryan Polomski is a Lansdale native who played basketball at North Penn High School. Co-director/producer Dean Prator is from Compton, Calif., and actually went to a rival high school to Lewis’. “We knew even then that he was a legend,” said Prator, who was a freshman when Lewis was a senior. “He was a Stephen Curry-type ballplayer.”

Years later, Prator wondered what had ever become of Lewis. He started a website in 2005, connecting with Lewis’ family members, and then started the long process of trying to make a documentary.

Polomski arrived in Los Angeles in 2014 . He and Prator connected around then and started doing interviews, speaking with then-Sixers coach Gene Shue, some old friends, as well as ex-Laker Michael Cooper. “We knew we had a story just from those interviews,” Polomski said. What was challenging, however, was finding footage. Polomski said they had no video of Lewis playing, since high school and college programs in the 1970s didn’t typically preserve game footage. Eventually, they found some game tape that surfaced last year. They discovered an even bigger surprise: A college-aged Lewis being interviewed by future star journalist Bryant Gumbel, who was in his early 20s at the time.

Collins, who coached Michael Jordan with both the Bulls and Wizards, coached the Sixers from 2010–13, resigning just before the start of the “Process” era. He was on the sidelines for the Sixers in the 2012 playoff series against Boston, which later became the subject of the big bet in the movie Uncut Gems.

Though he appears frequently in documentaries about basketball, Collins declined to be interviewed for the film, although he “wished us luck with the project,” Prator said.

The filmmakers hope that the film, which arrives among a recent glut of basketball documentaries, can introduce Lewis’ legacy to a new generation. They’re also hoping to get the film in front of current NBA players, who live in an era in which they not only make exponentially more money than Lewis ever did, but exercise greater power when it comes to choosing their team.

“I think that it was… an extraordinary confluence of events that created this scenario,” Polomski said. If a variety of factors had been different, from Lewis being drafted to a different team, to ABA being an option for him, to if Lewis had an agent, Lewis’ story may have turned out very differently.

“I think if Raymond could have gotten paid what he was worth, at that particular time, he’d have been one of the greatest ballplayers who ever played in the league,” Polomski said.

Lewis played at a time when nearly everyone in any position of power in the NBA was white. “Not only was he a great ballplayer,” Prator added, “but he was a Black ballplayer, from Watts, and the league just wasn’t having that type of thing at the time.”

Polomski called race “the subtext of the whole story, but it’s not the whole story…. I think he didn’t intentionally go out to become a symbol of somebody fighting for equality, but he ended up doing so.”

The film was a finalist for the 2022 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. One of the two films it lost to also had with local ties: Ross Hockrow and Tommy Walker’s Philly on Fire, a documentary about the 1985 MOVE bombing.

“It took us a long time, [it’s] quite a challenging project. But we got to the finish line, and we’re excited to bring it to the world,” Prator said.

Raymond Lewis: L.A. Legend is available to stream online on Prime Video Direct, Roku, Google Play, iTunes, and other streaming platforms. For details, visit: https://www.raymondlewis.com/