SIMMONS: Departing Kyle Lowry leaves a lasting legacy on Toronto sports

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Years ago, in one of many conversations over time with Kyle Lowry, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Doug Gilmour.

He said he knew the name. He said he saw the photos of him on the walls of the Scotiabank Arena. He said he didn’t know anything else.

I told him he reminded me of Gilmour in how he approached every game, how every win and every loss mattered to him, how he stood in on every charge, how he played larger than his size, how he took so much of what happened with the Raptors personally, and how the biggest games were often his best.

He smiled then from the compliment and then tried to change the subject.

Gilmour was traded out of Toronto after he played his best hockey for the Maple Leafs, just as others had left before him, like Darryl Sittler and Borje Salming, and after him like Mats Sundin.

Lowry was leaving the Raptors not in the way Vince Carter departed, not heading directly to free agency the way Chris Bosh left town. He was doing business with Masai Ujiri, the way they’d come to do business with each other over the years. With some benefit to Lowry, some benefit to the Raptors, enough of everything to go around.

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In a way, we’ve grown up with Lowry here in Toronto and he has grown up around us. Not that he isn’t still angry and intense and fiery and occasionally singular. He is all of that even now at age 35 after nine seasons in Toronto. He has just learned to pick his spots better over time, learned to use his intensity to his benefit, learned to grow and lead and be prominent — something that he wasn’t when Ujiri took over the Raptors in 2014 and didn’t know what to do with him.

“Sometimes you’d see his body language,” Ujiri told me years ago. “And I’d think ‘Why is he like that?’

“You would hear the stuff about him, about the coaches he doesn’t get along with and that kind of thing. So I flew to Philly and went to see him. We had lunch. I told him what I expected. I was going to give him a platform, a chance. That’s how it all started with him.”

Not long after that meeting, Ujiri tried to trade Lowry for the first of many times.

“I told Kyle, when (NBA) people talk about you, it’s not like they dissect your game or kill your game,” Ujiri said. “A lot of people who talk about you are talking about maybe the attitude or the problem with coaches — it’s always this part. It’s never the game.

“I said to him, ‘You’ve got to work on that. Why would you allow that part to stop you from getting where you want to go?’”

Ujiri told him to “take care of your future, money-wise. You can go from being a couple-of-million player to more money, a lot more money. There’s a lot of possibilities here.”

Lowry didn’t just take the advice. He has lived it.

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As he prepares to leave the Raptors, he has career earnings of $199 million, an Olympic gold medal, and a Toronto championship ring.

He’ll probably have another $60 million or so waiting for him in Miami. More money than Ujiri ever imagined has come Lowry’s way and all of it just from being paid NBA going rates for his services.

“He’s our grit and our grind,” Dwane Casey once said of Lowry. And that was after they started getting along.

“I don’t think I’m a star,” Lowry told me once. “I can’t compare myself to Vince (Carter). I can’t compare myself to Bosh. I’m just a guy with a great group around me … personally, I’m just a guy who runs this team and is very passionate about winning. I want to get this organization and this city to the playoffs. I have some things I want to do. I want to do some damage in the playoffs. I don’t just want to get into the playoffs, I want to have some fun in the playoffs.”

And then he more than lived up his word. Lowry was the perfect complement to Kawhi Leonard in the 2019 championship run by the Raptors, even while his best friend, DeMar DeRozan, was traded away.

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It’s obvious, then and now, you don’t win NBA championships without A-level superstars and Leonard was precisely that. But Lowry was right there, second in command, especially when needed most.

In Game 6 of the NBA Finals in Oakland, it was Lowry, with a bad thumb, scoring the first 11 points for the Raptors, scoring 15 first-quarter points on the night Toronto won the NBA championship. He set the tempo on that gigantic night. He had some fun carrying the Larry O’Brien trophy.

It was his greatest night as a pro. The Raptors wouldn’t have a championship without Kawhi. But they wouldn’t have won without the combination of Kawhi and Lowry.

And now all that seems just part of the goodbyes now.

Lowry is leaving. He will be taking his charges elsewhere in the NBA, playing into his late 30s with a new uniform on. He’s leaving and he needs to be appreciated and admired the way we still appreciate Gilmour or Sundin or Sittler. The way we appreciate the late Roy Halladay or Carlos Delgado or Jose Bautista or Dave Stieb.

We grew up with so many of them, and so many of them grew up around us. Lowry arrived in Toronto at the age of 26 and leaves now at 35. We watched him develop from a young, angry, feisty, singular point guard into an older, wiser, still angry, still feisty, still stubborn guard. We watched him grow into husband and dad and team leader and all-star and family man.

His entire career in Toronto was about proving somebody wrong — coaches, general managers, scouts, broadcasters, even his fellow players who once considered him among the most overrated players in the NBA. And in the end, he was almost always right.

“For me, family put everything into perspective,” Lowry said. “It ain’t about you. It’s about the kids you’re caring for and the family you have. I feel so fortunate.”

When he became a father for the first time, it changed him.

“He’s done more for me than I’ve done for him,” he said of his first born son and later reiterated the same after his second son was born. “He’s a bigger influence on my life. It’s made me more of a man. It’s made me more of a grown-up. It’s made me more mature. It’s made me understand that life is bigger than just basketball and being mad about things. I’ve spent a lot of my life being mad. I’m never mad (anymore). Off the court, I’m never mad. On the court, that’s a different story.

“I don’t know why I was like I was that. I was always mad. Things don’t always go your way. You make mistakes. You make them out to be bigger than they are. You build them up. At the end of the day, you’re mad, then you’re mad at yourself. It’s no way to be.”

It’s OK to be mad today as a Raptors fan about Lowry leaving. It’s expected. It’s hard to watch your kids leave home. But for nine years, Kyle Lowry gave us everything he had. In a sporting sense, that’s more than a lifetime.

On a very short list of Toronto athletes to remember and cherish, he will always be near the top.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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