I never met him, but Cliff Tucker Jr. still changed my life
Author’s note: The Cliff Tucker Jr. Memorial Basketball Tournament is June 14-16 at Chapin High School in El Paso, Texas, and will feature dozens of current and former collegiate and professional players. Proceeds go to the Cliff Tucker Jr. Foundation, which raises money for scholarships for students in northeast El Paso. Tickets are on sale to the public.
For most of the last six years, I’ve felt like I knew the late Cliff Tucker Jr. for decades. It’s a complicated emotion to unpack, considering I never actually met the El Paso hoops legend. Call it a supernatural tie. Maybe we’re kindred spirits. In another universe where the car wreck that killed him never happened, I imagine there’s a good chance we would have ended up being friends and collaborated on a few stories.
Tucker Jr. died along with his girlfriend, Genesis Soto, and friends Andrew and Amanda Akaji on May 28, 2018, in a car wreck on I-10 on the way back from a basketball tournament in San Antonio. His young daughter survived but suffered a major brain injury in the crash. Every ounce of it was tragic and heartbreaking, and Tucker’s death was felt like an early summer heat wave on Memorial Day Weekend that year.
That very same weekend, driving the same stretch of road that took Cliff’s life, I moved to El Paso to start a new job at KTSM-TV. I was excited for a fresh start after a difficult conclusion to my time in Bryan-College Station, Texas, but it was coming in a city I’d never been to in my life. One of my first memories of my first two days in the Sun City was hearing about Tucker’s death and seeing the outpouring of grief, but also all of the love. His memorial service at Chapin High School was held my first weekend on the job at Channel 9. I learned a simple and important lesson about Cliff very quickly: “This guy mattered a lot to everyone here. You’d better figure out why.”
A phenomenal athlete in high school, Cliff was a star in basketball and football, but basketball was what he loved. One of his early mentors was current Chapin head coach Rodney Lewis. Coach Lewis was an assistant coach in those days and will say to this day that Tucker is one of the three favorite kids he’s ever coached. They stayed close for years after Tucker graduated high school.
College programs from around the country flocked to El Paso to see Tucker. Eventually, Gary Williams and the Maryland Terrapins won out. When Cliff died and I looked up more about him, I realized that I had at one point known who he was, however briefly. I remembered seeing his buzzer-beating three-pointer to beat Georgia Tech during the 2009-10 season on SportsCenter one night during my freshman year of college. It helped the Terps secure a share of the ACC championship. It was one of the biggest wins for Maryland that season, which ended in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, and Tucker was the hero of the day.
After graduating from Maryland, he played football for a year at UTEP, then embarked on a professional hoops career that took him from the United States to the Dominican Republic, Germany, Hungary, Mexico and, just months before his death, to Argentina. At 29, he was in the prime of his life, on the verge of a big, new chapter like so many of us are as we approach our thirties. Instead, it was cut short far too soon.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Tucker those first few weeks after his death. His public memorial, his funeral and then, a spur of the moment, late-night basketball tournament to raise money for his daughter and his other children hammered home who he was. Northeast El Paso takes care of its own unlike few neighborhoods you’ll ever find and Cliff was the man there. Everyone knew him and loved him. Everyone knew and loved his family. He brought people together. He was a model for how to be there for your loved ones. He seemed to be the best of us.
Over that first summer in El Paso, I wasn’t adjusting to desert life as quickly as I hoped. Looking for any kind of reprieve, I put out the Hoop Signal on Twitter: “Anybody got a good place to play basketball?” The first person to respond was Rodney Lewis. Chapin open gym. Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“That’s Cliff’s school,” I thought to myself as I drove over to get my ass kicked at one of the most competitive pickup basketball runs I’ve ever played in. Reason being? All of Cliff’s friends were there. And all of Cliff’s friends could hoop. I just tried to keep up. At the end of the afternoon, I thanked Coach Lewis for the invitation. I told him that I would come out to cover some of his team’s games that year. He was starting his first year as a head coach, right as I was starting my life over. I was drawn to how energetic he was and loved that even through a gruff exterior, you could still tell that no one cared about the kids more than him. He was grieving the loss of Cliff, back in the gym where they’d spent so much time as teacher and pupil. It had to be simultaneously exciting and difficult.
He had “CT21” patches sewn on to Chapin’s jerseys that season (and every season after that). They retired Tucker’s jersey and hung a large banner with his name in the gym during the 2018-19 season, the first after Cliff’s passing. I was true to my word: I covered plenty of Chapin basketball games that season, though they weren’t very good yet. 9 Overtime’s extended hoops coverage allowed us the freedom to cover dozens of high school basketball games every Friday night. Over the years, it became what I enjoyed most about my job. One night that first season, I got off air to a text from Coach Lewis. “Thank you, guys, for covering high school basketball the way you do. No one else ever has.” The respect was mutual.
After that first season, I went back to Chapin’s open gyms over the summer (I did this at other schools in town, too, for the record. Pickup hoops is the only drug I need). By that point, many of the guys playing there knew me from attending the high school games. I finally was formally introduced to Justin Avalos, Dwain Gulley, David Moore, Samantha Stukes and others who grew up with Cliff, who were some of his best friends in the world. Like Cliff, basketball brought me to them - I guess they have a way of doing that.
By the first anniversary of his death, Tucker’s mother, Regina, as well as other members of his family and a bevy of friends, had set up the Cliff Tucker Charity Foundation, with an annual basketball tournament to raise money for students in northeast El Paso to attend college. The media covered the tournament each year and even put a team together to play in it in 2021, a team that featured former NBA player and UTEP assistant coach Earl Boykins (I’ll be playing on a team with Avalos and other northeast El Paso legends this year, too). Giving back through basketball to a community that meant so much to Tucker seems to me to be exactly how he’d want his legacy to be honored.
It stands to reason that few things would make Tucker prouder than seeing the powerhouse program that Lewis has turned Chapin into since 2018. The Huskies have won over 70 straight games vs. El Paso competition, been to four straight Sweet 16s and back-to-back Elite Eights under Lewis. The talent is always strong, too. Arizona star KJ Lewis is arguably the best player to ever come out of El Paso, thanks to his exploits at Chapin. He’s the only player that can see eye-level with Tucker’s accomplishments with the Huskies. About a dozen others under Rodney Lewis have signed or will sign to play college basketball, at every level of the sport.
I’ve always felt that in a small way, I got in on the ground level of an industry-changing start-up, seeing the rise of Chapin hoops since Lewis took over in 2018. It afforded me the opportunity to get to know the best high school player I’ve ever seen (KJ Lewis) on a personal level; countless others, I’ve gotten to know and watched mature all throughout their high school lives. Since they were so dominant, it became difficult to justify NOT giving them quite a bit of coverage. As a result, I was there for every step of their extended playoff runs from 2021-2024. When you’re around a team that much, the coaches and kids get to know you and that wall between journalist and team comes down ever so slightly. We talked as people, not as reporter and interview subject, had true conversations about their lives, their dreams for the future, their families.
Slowly, you begin to matter to each other, whether you meant to or not. After a second-round playoff win in Fort Stockton in 2021, center Bubba Holmes told me that he was nervous until he saw me filming the game on the sideline. “I was looking around the gym and I didn’t recognize anybody until I saw you. Then, I felt better,” he said. It’s still one of my favorite compliments I’ve ever received as a reporter.
Chapin alumni like Cliff’s friend David Moore had turned from pick-up hoops opponent to trusted friend by this point. He would ask for score updates and scouting reports on the next opponent. I wore hats on air from his northeast El Paso clothing company, Nawfside Dyer. Quietly, I’ve always cherished that I had grown pretty close with someone that mattered so much to Cliff.
Sometimes, Cliff would come up in conversation among the Chapin kids and coaches. His son, Dallas was now at Chapin, playing both football and basketball. It always has struck me how much everyone has looked out for him since the worst day of his life six years ago. He has an extended network that cares about him more than he realizes, in part because of what his dad meant to so many different people. Even in my chair, I felt a certain obligation to have his best interests in mind. He knows who his dad is and was to the northeast. He’s turning into a menace on the football field and more importantly, a good person off of it, while dealing with issues and emotions that no kid his age should ever have to think about.
As my time at KTSM drew to a close back in March, I made up my mind that I was going to announce my upcoming departure from the station after the high school basketball season ended, after Chapin’s run at the program’s first Final Four was either successful or cut short. It just felt right, going out after my final season covering high school hoops, with the team that I’d seen in so many postseason battles across west Texas. Before every game, a Chapin captain would place Tucker’s iconic number 21 jersey on a chair at the end of the bench. He was always in the building; the ultimate vibes guy.
The 2023-24 Chapin Huskies were ranked in the top five in the state of Texas for almost the entire year, but in the Elite Eight in Wichita Falls, with a trip to the Final Four in San Antonio on the line, they went cold in the second half of the Class 5A Regional Finals vs. Amarillo High. Dreams, dashed. Making it to the Final Four in Texas is tougher than almost anything in high school athletics across the entire nation, but the defeat no doubt stung for a group of kids that was knocking on The Alamo’s doorsteps two years in a row.
The image seared into my mind from the Huskies’ second trip to the Elite Eight was Chapin senior star Brandon Hymes getting the honor of bringing Cliff’s jersey out to place on the bench. Before warming up, Hymes would carefully and painstakingly place Tucker’s threads in his spot, smoothing out any wrinkles, before tapping it for good luck. Just before tip-off, Rodney Lewis would do the same. Kids who weren’t yet teenagers when he passed, who may have never even seen him play, know who he is and what he’s meant. That’s impact. That’s legacy.
Driving home, high school hoops season in the bag, I began quietly telling some people of my plans to leave KTSM. One of the most difficult people to tell was Cliff’s mother Regina, because she’d been so supportive over the years. She has handled the worst loss imaginable with remarkable grace. She loves telling stories about her son. To know her is to know him. She’ll celebrate Cliff with the tournament named in his honor this weekend. The 2024 Cliff Tucker Memorial Tournament is June 14-16 at Chapin High School and there’s no better way to salute his life; his presence is always felt that weekend.
When I told David Moore I was leaving the station, I thanked him for everything, then I told him something that I’d never said out loud. I told him about what I perceived as some strange coincidences that tied Cliff and I together. For the first time, I told him that I’d moved to El Paso the same weekend that he’d passed; that I’d serendipitously met his friends - including David - and earned their trust and friendship; that I cherished that I’d come to mean just a little bit to Cliff’s beloved Chapin Huskies and the northeast community at-large with our coverage at KTSM of the neighborhood. I’ve always hoped it would have meant something to Cliff.
David agreed; it felt cosmic in a way, he said, but Cliff always had a way of bringing people together across many different backgrounds and walks of life. “I’d like to think in a way he had a hand in us crossing paths,” he said.
I couldn’t agree more.