Do we like them?Do we like Luc Longley?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent, low-drama record with some public service, but not much on the record about causes, so it stops short of the top end.
Luc Longley grew up in Western Australia and ended up the first Australian to play in the NBA. Minnesota picked him seventh in the 1991 draft, and he later won three straight titles with Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. He got there via the University of New Mexico, where he turned up to his workout late after, by his own account, forgetting his shoes because he'd been at the beach.
His career was not all glory. He has said his last three years in the league were “horrible”, and he was famously left out of Jordan's The Last Dance series. That led to the ABC's two-part Australian Story, One Giant Leap, in 2021, which has racked up more than seven million views. Jordan, Pippen and Kerr turned up to back him, which says plenty about how he's rated by the blokes who played alongside him.
The one real stoush on file is from 2018. As a Boomers assistant coach, he blamed the Philippines coach after a World Cup qualifier in Manila ended in a mass brawl, saying the coach had “incited them to come out and thug us”. He also called the Filipino players and staff thugs. Whether you see that as a mate defending his team in the heat of a bad night or as a harsh label for another country's players, it's a single outburst, not a pattern.
On the harm check, nothing turned up. We found no words or acts from him aimed at LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no sign of him backing conspiracy theories or hanging around people who do. His recent work is in basketball ownership and advice, and we found nothing there that raises a flag. To be straight, the record is thin rather than glowing: there's no big public campaign on any cause either.
On the good side, he was named chair of the Western Australian Health Promotion Foundation, Healthway, in 2003, a three-year role that handed out funding for healthy-lifestyle programs. In 2019 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to basketball. And he's never been far from a local footy club: he still talks about Fremantle with the sort of warmth you only get from a lifelong fan.
Lately he's the bloke footy clubs ring when they're chasing a three-peat, because he's done one. He told the AAP that advising the Lions left him feeling like a bit of a goose, since his heart is with Freo. That's about as spicy as his news gets, and it's a refreshingly harmless kind of drama.