Iowa center worked hard to become one of best
Luka Garza comes from basketball family, now leads No. 17 Hawkeyes.
IOWA CITY, Iowa – Luka Garza pushed himself so hard last summer that no one can push him around this winter.
A trip to Bosnia wasn’t about admiring the Alps and visiting family. It involved renting out a gym, working out three times each day, getting into a defensive stance with a brick in each hand and sliding back and forth through the lane until he sometimes vomited.
In August, it was 10 days in Vallejo, California, which offers breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. Garza was in the gym three times a day there, working out with his grandfather and his father, expanding his offensive repertoire.
Garza has become one of the surprise stories of the college basketball season, the face of an Iowa team that is ranked No. 17 entering Wednesday’s game at Purdue. The work he put in last summer has paid off to the tune of 23 points and 10.4 rebounds per game. Garza has become the leading candidate for Big Ten player of the year and is in the conversation for national player of the year.
And the 6-11 junior center might be the only one who foresaw his transformation.
“He’s in one of those zones right now where he can’t be defended. He’s really unstoppable,” said former Iowa center and Big Ten Network analyst Jess Settles. “You keep thinking that there’s going to be this falloff, and it’s just not happening. It’s surprising when he doesn’t get 25 points in a game, and that’s pretty unprecedented.”
Garza, a Washington, D.C., native, has gotten by because of his inner drive. It’s how he earned 26 starts as a freshman, when he averaged 12.1 points per game. It’s what enabled him to average 13.1 points as a sophomore, despite having a 9pound cyst pulled from his abdomen a month before practices began.
Garza credits the arduous offseason workouts for much of what he’s doing this year. In Sarajevo, in his mother Sejla’s homeland, he worked with his uncle and cousin, Teoman and Denis Alibegovic. Garza’s father, Frank, a former college player at Idaho, designed the two-hour training sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening, with 90 minutes of weightlifting in the afternoon.
“If you weren’t throwing up, you weren’t working hard enough,” Frank Garza said. “You have to go to depths of conditioning. You have to teach your body to go beyond.”
In Vallejo, where Luka’s grandfather James Halm is an assistant basketball coach at California State-Maritime, there was a similar regimen.
The experience was part of the basketball excellence Garza grew up surrounded by.
His mother played professionally in Europe. Halm was a 6-8 post player at Hawaii before beginning a coaching career. Teoman Alibegovic was a 6-9 center who averaged 18.1 points in his final season at Oregon State in 1990-91 before a 13-year pro career in Europe. Teoman’s oldest two sons, Mirza and Amar, are on pro teams in Italy.
“He didn’t have a chance to be whiny in that house,” Teoman Alibegovic said of his nephew. “He understood there is no success without sacrifice. He knew from the get-go, when he was a little clumsy growing up, that he had to overcome that with stubbornness. He would never give up.”
When it came time to choose a high school in the D.C. area, Garza landed at Maret, a private institution with small class sizes and a mission of preparing students for college. Garza wanted to challenge himself academically.
“In the beginning, he struggled,” said Lynn Levinson, Garza’s history teacher in ninth grade and academic adviser for 10th through 12th grade. “But just as he does on the basketball court, he committed himself so wholeheartedly to developing his skills, just strengthening his contributions in class, working on his writing and his presentations. He met with me all the time and he just was really desperate to succeed as a student here.”
Levinson still recalls the speech Garza made at the senior dinner. Everyone expected that he would talk about basketball. “He talked about how the teachers believed in him here, how much he grew academically, how he is so intellectually curious and prospering because of his time at Maret,” Levinson said. “He focused exclusively on academics, didn’t even mention sports.”
Entering the season, expectations were low for the Hawkeyes, who were picked to finish eighth in the Big Ten in a media poll. Garza was aiming much higher. He came back leaner and stronger and with a new arsenal of moves.
Garza was a 31.4% shooter from the 3-point arc in his first two seasons. He’s at 37.3% now, despite the distance of that shot increasing from 20 feet, 9 inches to 22-13⁄4. Garza, who is shooting 54.6% overall from the floor, can face up opponents and score. His uncle helped him develop a running hook shot.
“I always play with emotion. That’s what basketball does for me, is allow me to show who I am,” Garza said.
“It doesn’t really matter who’s lined up in front of me. I’m just going to go as hard as I can. I play hard if I’m in the YMCA, if I’m in L.A. Fitness, as hard as I do in the Big Ten. I don’t really take any moment on the court for granted because you never know what’s going to be your last.”