Told he’d never play again, Canadian became part of British basketball lore
Twenty years after accident on court fractured his skull, Tuck is still building his legacy
The contest was simple enough: See who could dunk from the furthest out.
On a Thursday night in the middle of December in 2000, inside the Markham District High School gym with the bright lights beating down on the wooden floors and only the squeaking of sneakers and whistles heard, Mike Tuck had just finished practice. The team had been fine-tuning their game ahead of the Toronto Raptors Holiday Classic at Jarvis Collegiate.
Coach George Kraus had the troops huddled at halfcourt for a final debriefing. There was a hub of activity on the sidelines where members of the Markham District girls team were lacing up their shoes and working their ankle braces on, getting ready to jump on the court. Tuck and a handful of Marauders teammates broke away from the team and launched themselves at a side rim. It was something they often did, a ritual of sorts to end practice.
After two dunk attempts, Tuck took a run and jumped from inside the key. His hand awkwardly caught the rim and with the force of his momentum, his feet swung up in an almost backflip fashion. The then-17-year-old let go of the rim and landed headfirst on the court.
“I don’t remember anything after that,” Tuck said.
He was told by those who saw it that his six-foot-six frame lay motionless on the ground with blood spilling out of one of his ears. Paramedics arrived and strapped Tuck to a stretcher and feared he might have broken his neck. After an initial examination at Markham Stouffville Hospital, he was moved to the head trauma clinic at St. Michael’s to be tested by neurologists.
It was some 12 hours after the horrific fall that Tuck’s memory kicked in. When he first woke up groggy, spaced out and sporting a cut above his eye, he still remembers trickles of blood weeping from his ear. He vaguely recalls hearing the doctor’s initial worst-case scenario that he might have long-term cognitive damage. As it turned out, Tuck was discharged from the hospital with a fractured skull and a serious concussion needing weeks of rest.
“I couldn’t remember what year it was. Waking up in a hospital and not knowing how you got there is a scary thing,” the 37-year-old told the Star, reflecting on the accident. “You think the worst immediately. Especially when you have doctors saying you’re not going to play basketball. That was a hard thing to deal with.”
For a top-50 teenage basketball prospect in the Greater Toronto Area, the fall could have easily ended his athletic ambitions. Yet now, more than 20 years later and after a long and fabled career in the British Basketball League, Tuck is one of the most recognizable basketball
“Here I was, this skinny kid from Canada and next thing you know I’m the captain (of England), halfway across the world competing on a world stage.”
MIKE TUCK
players in Britain.
The short version of how Tuck’s basketball DNA ended up across the Atlantic Ocean is this. In 2008, after leaving Loyola University-Maryland with a sixth man award and a degree in communications, the plan was to sign with an agent and use his British passport to play in Europe, a right he inherited from his late mother, Susan, who hailed from Bournemouth.
But that summer, out of the blue, Tuck was invited to train with the Raptors at a pre-draft morning workout at the Air Canada Centre, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the sevenfoot-two Roy Hibbert. It was there he caught the eye of Leo Rautins, who at the time was head coach of the Canadian men’s team.
“My first reaction was, I was angry. Why don’t we know about him?” said Rautins, the Raptors colour commentator who spent two summers with Tuck on Canada’s development team. “He was a good size, aggressive, smart. He may not be the guy throwing 30 or jumping out of the gym but he’s one of those guys that help you win.”
The NBA was a distant dream for Tuck. It wasn’t the dream. All he wanted to do was find a way to make basketball his job. It was through Rautins that Tuck found his agent, Bernie Lee, a Toronto native whose list of clients includes the likes of Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler.
Lee encouraged Tuck to “dip his toes” in Europe and got him his first contract overseas in Cyprus. Stops in Luxembourg and France eventually led to the BBL’s Sheffield Sharks, with whom he has played since 2009.
Tuck’s former coaches will tell you his European journey has a whiff of familiarity to it. He wasn’t a hot ticket coming out of Canada. He went undrafted in the NBA, wasn’t blessed with NBA genes. If you pull up a YouTube clip of one of Tuck’s games you might not notice him, but he’s the guy setting screens so that his teammate can shoot the game-winner.
Loose-ball gets, creative playmaking and fighting spirit aren’t necessarily the most conspicuous ways to market an overseas basketballer, but these are grinding traits that Tuck possesses, helping the Sharks win consistently over 12 injuryfree seasons that have included 327 league games, four league championships and averages of 12.7 points and 7.3 rebounds per game.
“You don’t want to measure your success with someone else’s ruler. Because for a lot of people they might not know or understand what he’s done,” Rautins said. “How he’s handled his business on and off the court, who he is as a person, has contributed to his longevity. Otherwise he would have been just like everybody else and tossed aside.”
Wayne Dawkins also coached Tuck in his teens — winning a silver medal together at the 2001 world under-18 junior tournament in Northern France, falling in the gold-medal game to an American roster led by Carmelo Anthony. Dawkins believes what set Tuck apart was that he established himself as a mentor and impacted his team as a captain, a title he has held for the last seven years.
“Mike’s character is something that is exceptional,” said Dawkins, a former NCAA player and coach who shares his time between Toronto and Phoenix spearheading youth basketball development camps. “The way they’ve embraced him into their leadership into their organization and country, you rarely ever see that.”
Tuck, the youngest of three boys, grew up in Markham. He was always the tallest kid in class and initially took a shine to volleyball, football and soccer. The fuel that lit Tuck’s love for basketball was a trip with his dad, Wilfred, to the 1994 FIBA world championship at the SkyDome.
The 10-year-old sat gobsmacked while watching the American Dream Team II — with the likes of Shawn Kemp, Reggie Miller, Dominique Wilkins, Alonzo Mourning and Shaquille O’Neal — compete against the Canadians. It gave Tuck everything he needed to make basketball the only sport he cared about.
Under Kraus, his high school coach, his game flourished.
“Everyone loved him — coaches, teachers. Around the school he was like the mayor of Markham,” said Kraus, who has been coaching boys and girls for more than 40 years. “He played on a successful team where three players got U.S. scholarships and he would have been our top scorer in most games.”
In 2016, at the peak of Tuck’s career, he claimed MVP honours in the BBL playoff final at O2 Arena against the Leicester Riders, scoring 22 points and 13 rebounds in a come-from-behind win. He calls it his proudest moment because his mother, Susan, was there to see it. Susan died unexpectedly three years later.
Another highlight: being named captain of England men’s basketball team ahead of the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.
“Here I was, this skinny kid from Canada and next thing you know I’m the captain (of England), halfway across the world competing on a world stage.” Tuck said. “I just think all those years of hard work, it all just culminated into this one moment for me.”
Over the years Tuck has competed against Drew Lasker, a 38-year-old Newcastle guard from Texas who is the oldest player in the BBL and also provides basketball commentary for Sky Sports. Lasker has watched Tuck conquer the gaps in his game with intangibles such as physical and unapologetic visceral play, which mimicked the New York Knicks of the 1990s. In a natural progression, Tuck morphed into what the British call the pantomime villain, similat to the anti-hero in North American wrestling. In Glasgow they always start a “Tuck sucks” chant. In Worcester, he gets booed when they announce his name at the pregame.
“I hated playing against him,” Lasker said. “He’s the underdog that overachieved. He has a cerebral game with a high IQ. It’s why he’s been able to play this long. He proved the doubters wrong.”
When Yuri Matischen, founder and chairman of the Sharks, initially signed Tuck he saw a triple threat: a savvy and bluecollar Canadian with an American college pedigree who held dual citizenship that could extend the roster. What he didn’t know was that Tuck would go on to become a household name in Sheffield.
“He’s become our franchise player,” he said. “No one gives you 12 years on a contract. It’s a business. You have to be good enough to play, and do the hard miles. That’s why he’s a warrior.”
The club had a testimonial planned for June last year to honour Tuck’s service to the team. That is still up in the air. Tuck hopes it will be safe for BBL stadiums to be filled with fans come September, although he’s still not sure if this is his final go as a player.
“When I first came here I thought this was going to be a one-and-done year,” Tuck said. “Even if I’ve influenced just a couple of kids to pick up a basketball along the way, it would have all been worth it for me.”
Like most things during the pandemic, the end of Tuck’s career is laced with uncertainty.
But the one thing you can bet on is that the kid from Markham, who wasn’t supposed to play basketball again, will forever be part of British basketball lore.