Former Bloomington South hoops star Chris Lawson went from riding moped to raising cows

Criss Beyers will never forget the visual of big Chris Lawson riding around Bloomington on a moped trying to get from pick-up game to pick-up game.

Beyers, then an assistant basketball coach at Bloomington South and coach for the elite grassroots travel basketball squad Bloomington Red, starting working with Lawson when the big man was in junior high, and could tell then that he would be a star. It wasn't just because of his obvious size, but because of his devotion to improvement.

"He was a big kid riding that moped," Beyers said. "And he would ride it to the YMCA, he'd ride it to South, he'd ride it out to the HPER (a recreational building on the Indiana University campus), anywhere he could just to work on his game for workouts and practice."

Lawson said it was a black Honda Urban 50 that could get up to about 35 miles per hour on the road. it wasn't exactly blazing, but it got the job done faster than a regular bike and that helped maximize his workouts for the day.

"I was too young to drive," Lawson said. "The Moped definitely came in handy because it was my only mode of transportation."

All those pick-up games it took him too helped him build a career worthy of the Monroe County Sports Hall of Fame, to which he will be inducted on Friday. The 1989 Indiana All-Star left South as the county's all-time leading scorer and rebounder. He spent two somewhat tumultuous years at Indiana before transferring to Vanderbilt where he averaged in double figures each of this two seasons. He then went on to have a professional career in Turkey and Taiwan, before moving to Salina., Kan where he now works in pharmaceuticals and raising cattle.

Leaving a legacy of hard work

Even now, legendary coach J.R. Holmes still uses Lawson's work ethic as an example for players more than 30 years since he left South, pointing out that no matter what else he had going on, he was always in the gym and at school when he was supposed to be.

"I talked to kids today about coming back for weights at 9 a.m. and they were out late at an AAU tournament on Sunday night," Holmes said. "They were complaining they didn't get to sleep in. I said, well, when Chris Lawson was out here he'd be out and we had weights at 7 a.m. in the morning because it was a class in the summertime. And he didn't miss a class. He had a right to miss a class because of his status. He was one of the most recruited players in the state, but he never missed a single class."

In a class of his own

He grew to 6-10 and became a multi-talented big man ahead of his time. He had the muscle to rebound but also the finesse to step outside and handle the ball on the wing or shoot jump shots. Holmes used that skill set to find creative ways to get the ball in Lawson's hand in places where opponents couldn't just hurl bodies at him.

"We found out when he had him in the post, they just sunk everybody in the world around him," Holmes said. "I think the people in the concession stand were actually on him. We would just sometimes start him out and get him faced up and get them to pull out which opened up for some other things. But he could hit that shot and once he hit a couple, it opened up the floor so he could take it to the basket and score with a one-on-one move."

It also opened up the floor for Lawson's teammates, and he was just as skilled at distributing the ball as he was scoring.

"They had to come out and get him because he was such a good shooter," Beyers said. "That's something he really worked on and wanted to be and he was. But he also, with him being out on the floor, he could see where people were cutting and he could hit people with good passes in scoring position. He wasn't the quickest guy on the floor, but he was as quick as a lot of those guys guarding him. He was able to give them a little shot fake, or he was smart enough to get you just a little bit off-balance."

With all that working for him. Lawson averaged 16.2 points and 8.7 rebounds per game. His 1,491 career points still rank fourth all-time at South and his 790 rebounds remain the school record. While he was at South, he played on three teams that won sectional crowns and two that won regional championships.

Setting the stage for playing at IU

Lawson also starred in a Bloomington Red team loaded with high-caliber recruits from the state, including future IU players Damon Bailey, Pat Graham, Greg Graham, Todd Leary and Alan Henderson as well as North Carolina star Eric Montross. Lawson got all the attention a player could ever want, but as a boy who had watched Indiana win three national titles in his then short lifetime, his decision was easy. He would play for Bob Knight.

"Never really considered anywhere else," Lawson said. "From the time I can remember even watching basketball games, it was Indiana basketball, falling in love with them. The goal as long as I could remember was to go to Indiana."

Lawson signed as part of the loaded class of 1989 that also included Calbert Cheaney, Greg Graham, Pat Graham, Chris Reynolds and Laurence Funderburke, but his time with IU and his relationship with Knight didn't go as smoothly as he'd hoped.

Struggles at IU

He started seven games as a true freshman but averaged just 15.0 minutes per game, finishing with 3.6 points and 3.1 rebounds. His minutes were sporadic and he never found a groove in Knight's motion offense, which included a lot more time in the post and setting screens and much less opportunity for playmaking.

"The vast majority of stuff you were going to be playing with your back to the basket," Lawson said. "That was it, initially. I just wasn't overly comfortable with my back to the basket, and everything kind of deteriorated from there. And the atmosphere just wasn't conducive to my personality."

In his second year Lawson played even less, averaging just 11.0 minutes per game. He played a total of five minutes in the 1991 NCAA tournament, not appearing at all in the Hoosiers' Sweet 16 loss to Kansas, and decided it was time to move on.

Making the move to Vanderbilt

"He had some good games, but he got on the wrong side of coach Knight," Holmes said. "He came in my office after one of the NCAA games he didn't get into. He said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'It's time to go if you want to play. If you want to stay at IU, it's a first-class school, you'll get a first-class education, you'll travel first-class, but it looks like coach Knight is not gonna play you, so if playing time is important, you gotta go.'"

So he did, and picked Vanderbilt, a place he took interest in when the Hoosiers defeated the Commodores in Nasvhille in a December game in his sophomore year.

“Going into it, when Vanderbilt was on the schedule, I was like, ‘I don’t even know where it’s at,’” Lawson said. “So we fly down there in Nashville, atmosphere was awesome, and it just kind of stuck in my mind when we played down there to check it out. When I visited down there, coach (Eddie) Fogler was awesome. I liked the assistants, I liked everything about the city.”

Closing out his college career

Lawson was more comfortable with everything from the coaches to his role. Playing for Fogler felt more like playing for Holmes. He spent more time with his back to the basket than he did at South, but played in the open court a lot more than he did at IU.

The then-required NCAA transfer year-in-residence allowed him to get his bearings before his junior year, and he averaged 11.9 points and 6.1 rebounds per game in his final two seasons. With star transfer guard Billy McCaffery on the roster, the Commodores went 28-6 and reached the Sweet 16 in his junior year,  then made the finals of the NIT before losing to Villanova his senior year.

Upon graduation, he got an invitation to training camp by the Los Angeles Clippers, but in his words “played terrible” and didn’t get a chance to stay on. He spent his first professional season in Turkey and led the league in rebounding. He then went to Taiwan for three successful seasons and then got an invite to New Jersey Nets camp, but after that didn’t work out, he decided it was time to move on.

“The knees and the back and everything else were starting to break down,” Lawson said. “I knew basketball was pretty much done.”

Finding his career and calling

Lawson got a job with Pharmacia and Upjohn, a pharmaceutical company, and moved to Salina, Kan., because former IU player Todd Jadlow lived out there and it would give him someone to know out there. And he never left.

Through various mergers, Pharmacia and Upjohn was eventually bought by Pfizer, and Lawson still works there. He met his wife in Kansas and now has three children, and together they raise longhorn cattle.

That wasn’t something he imagined doing when he was riding his Moped around Bloomington.

“My dad, when I was really young, he had some cattle and he horses when we lived outside of town (in Bloomington),” Lawson said. “We moved into town, and I never wanted to live out in the country again.”

But he and his wife bought a house with a large plot of land in 2015. Two years later, they attended an event that got them interested.

“Abilene, Kan., used to be a massive cow town back in the Wild West days,” Lawson said. “On Labor Day, 2017, she wanted to go over there because they were re-enacting the Wild West stuff, and at the end of it they were going to have these longhorn steers come down Main Street. I didn’t even want to go, but I went, and at the end of it, I thought, ‘These longhorns are pretty cool

Not long after that, they bought four and raised them on their land, and now have about 15 that they raise, butcher and trade

“In my wildest dreams, I never thought we’d have longhorns,” he said, “but we love them."

Follow Herald-Times IU Insider Dustin Dopirak on Twitter at @DustinDopirak or email him at DDopirak@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Ex-Bloomington South star named to Monroe County Sports Hall of Fame