East basketball star Alex Lomax lives out his father's dreams as 'the face of Team Penny'

The Commercial Appeal was granted access to Team Penny, the Memphis-based grassroots basketball program started by former NBA All-Star and Memphis basketball legend Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway in 2012. Over the past four months, reporter Mark Giannotto attended practices and games to examine some of the region’s players who have helped turn the program into a national juggernaut.

Over the next five days, The Commercial Appeal will have stories on four of those players and then take readers behind-the-scenes of Team Penny's experience at Nike's Peach Jam, which is the biggest grassroots basketball event of the year.

Monday — The Pupil: Alex Lomax, 'the face of Team Penny'
Tuesday — The Prospect: D.J. Jeffries and the pressure of being a top recruit
Wednesday — The Potential: Malcolm Dandridge tries to fulfill his promise
Thursday — The Prince: Jayden Hardaway looks to create his own basketball identity 
Friday — The Peach Jam: Can Team Penny's talent trump teamwork? 

Go to commercialappeal.com for all parts of the series, including photo galleries, videos and a podcast. And join writer Mark Giannotto on The Geoff Calkins Show on ESPN 92.9-FM each day this week during the 9 a.m. hour as he discusses the series.

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. — The man with a customized “A LO” hat covering long strings of hair approached Alex Lomax with a one-word greeting: “Beast.” It was his introduction to a dramatic re-telling of what had just occurred on the court.

How Lomax scored a game-high 23 points. How he had the game-winning basket and secured the game-sealing steal. How this must have felt like redemption after an uneven outing the week before in front of college coaches outside Indianapolis. How emotional it got watching from the front row. 

More:East High star Alex Lomax granted release from Wichita State

More:Penny Hardaway reminds Memphis what Tigers basketball can be

Then, as Lomax offered his own more stoic take during a subsequent interview, Alex Lomax Sr. stood back with a smile on his face talking about it all again with Penny Hardaway. He couldn’t hide any longer how grateful he was just to be there at all.

“We come from real rough,” he said. “I never made it to high school.”

Alex Lomax is the two-time defending Class AAA Mr. Basketball in Tennessee after capturing two consecutive state titles with East High School. But he is also one of the original members of Team Penny, the grassroots basketball organization started by former NBA All-Star and Memphis basketball legend Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway in 2012.

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Hardaway, who grew up in the under-privileged Binghampton neighborhood in Memphis, hoped Team Penny would provide local children the “opportunity to be showcased and be seen” by college coaches, he said last month.

More:Penny Hardaway's hiring has Memphis fans buzzing, ticket sales humming

Look back:East’s Alex Lomax named state’s Gatorade player of the year

Even today, armed with a lucrative Nike sponsorship and prospects from every neighboring state around Tennessee, the motto emblazoned on the back of every Team Penny shirt remains, “One for all, all for one, all for Memphis.”

Nobody exemplifies this mission more than Lomax, a top point guard in the class of 2018 coveted by Memphis coach Tubby Smith and “the face of Team Penny,” according to LaMarcus Golden, Hardaway’s cousin and Team Penny co-founder.

“They filled in where my dad left off,” Lomax said.

Mentors aplenty

Lomax Sr. sat in the stands watching his son play a summer league game at Olive Branch High School last month and spoke in hushed tones. He’s a 38-year-old contractor around the Memphis area now, roofing houses and doing general construction work, intent on living his life on the right side of the law after years of the opposite.

As he tells it, he played basketball at Snowden Middle School and never made it out of the ninth grade. He repeated his freshman year of high school twice and then dropped out of school altogether.

“The day I quit I went to the streets,” he said. “ I started selling drugs and stuff. That took over me.”

He was in and out of courtrooms and jail cells for more than 15 years, according to Shelby County online court records. There were convictions for aggravated assault in 1996 and 2003 and two guilty judgments for possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute in 2000.

In 2008, Lomax Sr. returned to prison in Tunica, Miss., after being charged as a habitual offender and received a seven-year sentence for breaking and entering a car. He was released to U.S. Marshals in 2010 and served another 21 months in federal prison for counterfeiting securities.

“I never really understood why he was gone so long, so I was always missing him, asking about him every time,” Lomax said. “It was just being patient and waiting for him to come home. I always grew love for him. The more he was gone, the more I wanted to see him and be with him. I never detached or anything. I just grew stronger.”

Lomax Sr. was in the hospital when his son was born on Valentine’s Day in 2000 and he was around for much of his early childhood. He made sure to put a basketball in his son’s hands at an early age. He would instruct his son to dribble down the streets of Binghampton and then Lomax would dutifully return asking, “What you want me to do next?”

Lomax Sr. tried, during those initial years together, to show his son how to approach life differently than he had. That education should be valued and “Dad doesn’t want me in the streets.” Lomax Sr. loved showing up at his son's elementary school and learning that Lomax read the morning announcements over the loudspeaker each day.  

Lomax Sr. admits, though, that it wasn’t the most stable upbringing because he and Lomax’s mother had “a crazy relationship.” He concedes, in retrospect, many of the issues involved his own immaturity and a tendency to be overprotective and jealous.

A range of family members, particularly Lomax’s grandmother, stepped in to fill the void of raising him. Some nights, after basketball games, Lomax would simply sleep at friends’ homes. It was, in many ways, a community effort and Lomax “is like the mayor of Binghampton now,” said Arecko Gipson, one of his first AAU coaches.

All the while, Lomax wondered where the man he still calls, “my best friend, my brother, my coach, mentor,” had gone.

“I didn’t have all the mentors that he got,” said Lomax Sr., pointing at his son across the court last month. “The mentors I had were drug dealers and thieves and killers. Those were my mentors. I didn’t have nobody to tell me to get back out there.”

Introduction to Hardaway

Hardaway walked into the Lester Middle School gym for the first time and Lomax didn’t know anything about him. He had to go to YouTube to figure out his new coach doubled as perhaps the city’s greatest basketball product.

It was Lomax’s first year playing for former Lester and East Coach Desmond Merriweather, a rival of Hardaway in high school who ultimately convinced the NBA star to return to Memphis to coach youth basketball. Lomax Sr., meanwhile, sat in a Tunica prison cell.

The circumstances, combined with Lomax’s skills on the court, quickly caught Hardaway’s attention.

“Des was there at the right time and then I came in,” Hardaway said. “With both of us coming in at the time he needed us the most, it definitely helped him out to keep him on a straighter path.”

Lomax said Hardaway and Merriweather brought a measure of mental and financial stability he hadn’t enjoyed previously and, “they’re a big inspiration to my life.”

Once Merriweather and Lomax’s grandmother died two years ago, Hardaway “extended his hand a little bit more and kept him in line and focused,” Golden said.

These days, Lomax is a frequent visitor to Hardaway’s home and “stays with us a lot,” according to Hardaway’s son, Jayden. “He’s like a little brother now.”

Hardaway confirmed that sentiment, describing his ties with Lomax as another “father-son relationship” at this point.

Lomax Sr. said this never inspired jealousy. Following his 2013 release from prison, he and Lomax’s mother agreed their son had to continue under the structure that worked while he was gone. Lomax Sr. moved to the periphery right as Lomax emerged as a high school basketball star known around Memphis by his nickname, “A Lo.”

In between those two straight state titles at East, Lomax shined as the youngest member of Team Penny’s EYBL squad last summer. This year, he’s the unquestioned leader with college suitors such as Memphis, Florida, Ole Miss, Missouri and Wichita State. He’s a 5-foot-10 floor general with a running back's physique who rarely loses and has a knack for finding open teammates.

The connection between Hardaway and Lomax on the court is often non-verbal, communicated simply through eye contact or a head nod. During games, it’s Lomax who quietly instructs teammates when they’ve been admonished by a coach. After six years under Hardaway’s tutelage, “I’m kind of the mini-coach,” he said.

“He’s been around me enough, and that’s how it’s supposed to be,” Hardaway added. “He’s supposed to be an extension of who you’ve been playing for out on the floor. I’m trying to make him the coach on the floor.”

But Lomax’s greatest assets remain his toughness and sense of the moment, and he views both traits to be the product of how he grew up.     

“It helps me big time because I’m strong mentally and can learn situations and read situations and kind of know where to be and where not to be at the right time,” Lomax said. “It’s just a blessing how everything happened because it just made me stronger as a person.”

Back in Georgia, however, he was not ready to declare his life a success story. There’s too much left to accomplish, he said, and too many people invested in his future.

But Lomax Sr. is reveling in all of this, traveling to gyms around the country and fielding calls from universities he could never attend. So Lomax stood there expressionless, knowing better than to interrupt as his father once again recounted to Hardaway the story of a high school dropout who always wanted to be right where his son is now.  

“This is a dream I’ve got to live through him,” Lomax Sr. said.