Former NBA star talks about God, learning

Jerry Lucas could've topped off a successful professional basketball career with a multimillion-dollar broadcasting gig.

Instead he found God and became "Dr. Memory."

Lucas - who played for Ohio State University and went on to be one of the best NBA forwards ever during the late 1960s - spoke to a congregation at the World Overcomers Church in Bartlett on Sunday about his faith and new way of learning.

Lucas, 68, is a three-time All-American who in 1960 starred on Ohio State's national championship team and the U.S. gold-medal squad at the Olympics in Rome. He was also on the 1973 New York Knicks world championship team and inducted into the basketball hall of fame in 1979.

When he wasn't playing basketball, Lucas memorized portions of the Manhattan phone book and the entire New Testament in the Bible. As a kid, he found he liked to take words apart and then respell them alphabetically in rapid-fire order. For example his name would spell E-J-R-R-Y A-C-L-S-U.

"It was all absolutely useless, but that's the mind God gave me," Lucas told the congregation on Sunday.

Lucas also talked about his image-based memory learning and said that schools have it all wrong because teachers stress repetition to memorize rules and spelling.

"Everything you learn is in your mind," Lucas said. "If I say don't picture a zebra, you can't do it, it's impossible not to. I say don't picture a giraffe and there it is. Learning only becomes difficult when you go to school."

Lucas grew up in Middleton, Ohio and his family was not religious. They never went to church or prayed, Lucas said. It wasn't until after college when he was playing professional basketball that Lucas decided something was missing in his life.

"I was talking to my friend who said, there is a God in heaven and you don't know him," Lucas said.

So Lucas got to know him.

He brought the Bible with him to away basketball games. He memorized the New Testament and went to any church he could find.

"I accepted Christ in my life in a hotel room," he said.

These days Lucas is married, has five grown children, drives a pickup truck and travels around the country as a motivational speaker. He gets up most mornings around 3 a.m. for his daily prayer. He has also written more than 60 books on memory training and learning systems, including The New York Times best-seller "The Memory Book."

"Today, I am a successful person, I've never made much money and I don't care," he said. "I turned down many television broadcasting jobs because that wasn't what God wanted me to do. This is what God meant for me to do."