Luc Longley

• 1. Introduction

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  Luc Longley was born in Melbourne on the 19th of January 1969, and by the time he was 25 years old he was standing at the Fremantle Port watching a new football club unveil itself to the world. He called Fremantle "one of the world's great spots." It is a small, salt-bleached harbour city in Western Australia, and it produced one of the most unlikely champions in NBA history. How does a kid from Fremantle become the starting centre for the greatest regular-season team ever assembled? What does it cost to get there, and what does it mean for a country that had never had a player in the league before him?

• 2. Roots and Recruitment

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  Gary Colson, basketball coach at the University of New Mexico, flew to Perth not to find Luc Longley but to recruit Longley's childhood friend Andrew Vlahov. Vlahov ended up at Stanford. Longley ended up in Albuquerque, which changed the course of Australian basketball. Both players had grown up competing together for the Perth Redbacks, and both had passed through the Australian Institute of Sport in 1986 and 1987 under Boomers head coach Adrian Hurley. A third player at those AIS sessions was Mark Bradtke, from Adelaide. The three of them would later form the nucleus of the Australian national front court for the better part of a decade.

  Longley's family background was unusually well-suited to the path ahead. His father Richard was an architect who played basketball internationally and appeared in two Olympic squads. His mother Sue is a tall equestrian who moved to Albuquerque, the very city where her son would attend college. Longley's brother Griffin also played briefly for the Perth Wildcats. At 16, Longley was already in the Australian Under-19 program. At 17, he played two games for the Wildcats in the National Basketball League. At the University of New Mexico from 1987 to 1991, he averaged 19.1 points, 9.2 rebounds, and 3.6 assists in his senior year. He helped the New Mexico Lobos reach the NCAA Tournament in 1991, the same year he would hear his name called seventh overall in the NBA draft.

• 3. Breaking Ground

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  No Australian had ever played in the NBA when the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Longley 7th overall in 1991. Contract negotiations dragged into the opening weeks of the 1991-92 season, preventing him from playing for nearly the first month. His debut finally came on the 30th of November 1991. Minnesota was a struggling expansion franchise, and Longley spent just over two seasons there before being traded to the Chicago Bulls for Stacey King late in the 1993-94 season.

  At 19, well before his NBA debut, Longley had already represented Australia at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The Boomers finished fourth, which was at that point the best result an Australian senior men's basketball team had ever achieved. His international career ran alongside teammates including Andrew Gaze, Phil Smyth, Bradtke, Vlahov, Ray Borner, Brett Maher, and Larry Sengstock. From 1988 onward, Longley was the preferred starting centre whenever he was available, a run that would stretch 12 years.

• 4. The Bulls Dynasty

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  Phil Jackson made Longley the Bulls' starting centre at the start of the 1995-96 season, after Longley had spent his first Chicago year coming off the bench in 55 games. The decision proved consequential. Chicago finished that season 72-10, setting the NBA record for most wins in a regular season. Longley held a central role in that achievement, and he stayed in the starting lineup through three consecutive championships from 1996 to 1998. No Australian before or since has won three NBA titles.

  The 1996-97 season brought a significant interruption. While body surfing at Hermosa Beach near the team's hotel after a game in Los Angeles, Longley dislocated his shoulder and missed nearly two months. In a 2014 interview on Australian television, he recalled that Michael Jordan called him repeatedly during the recovery, urging him to return because Jordan said he had no one to set screens for him. That detail captures something real about Longley's role: he was not a scorer but a physical anchor whose presence shaped how Jordan and Scottie Pippen could operate.

  A dislocated shoulder was not his only physical setback. Post-season surgery on his left ankle after the 1996 championship forced him to miss the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, adding to absences that had already kept him out of the 1994 and 1998 FIBA World Championships.

• 5. Late Career Moves

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  After the Bulls' dynasty ended following the 1997-98 season, Chicago executed a sign-and-trade that sent Longley to the Phoenix Suns in exchange for Mark Bryant, Martin Muursepp, Bubba Wells, and a conditional first-round draft pick. He spent one season in Phoenix before becoming part of a trade that, at the time, was only the second four-team deal in NBA history.

  The 2000-01 transaction involved the Suns, the New York Knicks, the Seattle SuperSonics, and the Los Angeles Lakers. Longley went to the Knicks along with Glen Rice, Travis Knight, Vladimir Stepania, Lazaro Borrell, Vernon Maxwell, two first-round draft picks from the Lakers and SuperSonics, and two second-round picks from Seattle. Patrick Ewing went to Seattle, Horace Grant, Greg Foster, Chuck Person, and Emanual Davis went to the Lakers, and the Suns received Chris Dudley, a first-round pick from New York, and an undisclosed sum of cash. Longley played one season with New York before a degenerative condition in his left ankle ended his playing career.

• 6. Life Beyond the Court

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  In 1996, Longley bought a house in Riverwoods, Illinois, and wrote a book titled Running with the Bulls about that record-breaking season. Phil Jackson wrote the foreword. That same year he also earned the distinction of becoming the first Australian to win an NBA championship.

  Back in Australia, his off-court life wove back through Fremantle. He was number-one ticket holder at the Fremantle Dockers in the AFL between 2006 and 2007. On the 6th of April 2007, a fire destroyed his $2 million Fremantle home. He later said that of his basketball memorabilia, he lost only his 1996 team photo. He then bought a nearby warehouse and had his wife's father, an architect, convert it into a family home. By 2015, Longley and his wife Anna Gare, a television presenter, had moved to a property near the coastal town of Denmark in Western Australia.

  In December 2009, Longley named a newly discovered shrimp species Lebbeus clarehannah after his 15-year-old daughter Clare Hannah, following his participation in marine conservation work. Longley had become a part-owner of the Perth Wildcats in 1999 alongside Andrew Vlahov, the friend whose recruitment trip to Perth had set Longley's own career in motion. He donated his 75% equity to Vlahov in 2004. His path from the Wildcats back to ownership of them closed a loop that stretched across two decades and three continents.

• 7. Legacy and Honours

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  On the 8th of October 2009, at the Sport Australia Hall of Fame's 25th anniversary dinner in Melbourne, Longley became only the fourth basketball player inducted into that body, joining Andrew Gaze, Michele Timms, and Phil Smyth. Two years earlier, in 2006, Basketball Australia had already inducted him into its Hall of Fame in Melbourne. In 2001 he had been named to the Australian Institute of Sport's Best of the Best. In August 2021, Basketball Western Australia inducted him separately into its own Hall of Fame.

  Longley has spoken directly about why he returned to the national program as an assistant coach, serving with the Australian men's national team from 2013 to 2019. He credited the Boomers with shaping him as a player and said that debt was his motivation for giving back. In 2019 he joined the Sydney Kings as a special advisor, and in 2022 he became part of the ownership group for Hoops Capital Pty Ltd, which owns both the Kings and the Sydney Flames of the Women's National Basketball League. The progression from Perth Redbacks junior player to co-owner of two professional franchises spans the full arc of what Longley built after being the first Australian to ever set foot on an NBA floor.