Lamar Hurd Trusts His GutHow one Beaver built a life in basketball around what mattered most.

It is 6:25 p.m. at the Moda Center, and Lamar Hurd, ’06, is due on camera. He wears a chic plaid suit with a coordinating tie. A producer threads a headset through his jacket, and Hurd takes his seat on a courtside stool. In the seconds before he lights up for the camera, his expression turns blank, as though he’s retreated to some interior world. Then a producer counts down three, two, one, and the Portland Trail Blazers pre-game show is live.

Hurd has been the Blazers’ television analyst for a decade now. He is the “how and why” guy to play-by-play announcer Kevin Calabro’s “what you’re seeing” guy, which means that while Calabro calls each pass and point, Hurd explains their significance.

A former point guard for the Oregon State Beavers and a longtime youth coach and mentor, he has a knack for translating complex plays into words, as well as a profound interest in sharing his love for the game. These qualities, along with a propensity to go on oddball tangents — opining about The Grinch or The Lion King — have earned him legions of fans.

As a sampling of Reddit commenters puts it: “I feel like I become a more knowledgeable basketball fan the more I listen to him.” “Lamar should be on ESPN. He’s really that good.” “Lamar Hurd is a legend, don’t tell me otherwise.”

When Calabro was hired, the Blazers executives asked him what he thought about teaming with Hurd. “I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of it, to be honest with you,” he said. They made a screen test together. About 10 minutes in, Calabro recalled, “they said, ‘Stop, that’s all we need.’”

Lamar Hurd during his OSU playing days. Photos courtesy of OSU Athletics

As the clock ticks toward tip-off, Hurd and Calabro chatter animatedly about small forward Deni Avdija, the Blazers’ breakout player this season. “Gotta get that man to the all-star game,” Hurd says.

Hurd grew up in Houston, the second son of a single mother who was herself an ardent basketball fan. On Sundays, the family returned home from church in time to watch his hometown team, the Rockets, on TV. In elementary school, he began playing — first on his Jordan Jammer, a plastic training basket, and then with a youth team — and in sixth grade, he and his older brother left home to live, for most of the week, with their coach/youth pastor. Later, when Hurd became a coach himself, it was with this role model in mind. “I wanted to be for them what my coach was for me,” he said.

By the time he finished high school, he was the third-ranked point guard in Texas on a team ranked among the top 25 high school programs in the country. Recruits came calling. He committed to Baylor University in Waco, but he couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling. A few weeks later, he pulled out. On the phone, Baylor’s coach screamed, first at him, then at his coach. Hurd felt he’d made the right choice.

A year later, the Baylor basketball program was wracked by scandal. There was a drug bust. One player murdered another, disposing of his body in the desert. The coach was fired. By then, Lamar Hurd was in Corvallis — safely ensconced as the starting point guard for the Oregon State Beavers.

Commentary is at times a high-wire exercise in intellectual multitasking.

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At 6:50 p.m. a buzzer sounds. As the players warm up — tonight, the Blazers face the Houston Rockets — Hurd and Calabro fill in context for the game. In a sweet intersection with Hurd’s own Houston roots, the Rockets coach, Ime Udoka, grew up in Portland. The game begins.

Commentary is at times a high-wire exercise in intellectual multitasking. Hurd begins to talk through fans’ high hopes for these home games before interrupting himself midstream to call a point. He and Calabro set up ideas and swap anecdotes — the analyst’s mind not so different from the player’s.

After his first season, Hurd landed on several lists of NBA prospects. Then things started going sideways. He clashed with his coach. “I played the worst years of basketball in my entire life,” he said. It wasn’t all bad; even though he was injured partway through senior year, he still won the Beavers’ most valuable player award — a testament to his standing within the team — and was a first-team Pac-10 All-
Academic selection. He ranked fifth in games started and tied for eighth in assists in the OSU record books.

But he started to see that his sense of his own value couldn’t depend on authority figures. “It taught me to take real accountability for things I can control and to question certain things,” he said, “like, ‘How much do you really believe in yourself?’”

For many college players, turning pro is the dream, and for a while after he graduated, it was Hurd’s, too. He played for a season in Germany. But back in Oregon, while awaiting a call from an NBA developmental team, he started coaching a youth program.  “I loved every bit of it,” he said. “I wasn’t making any money … and I could not have been happier.”

From 2009 to 2012, he ran All in One Basketball, a youth coaching and leadership organization, and then created The Other Side of Basketball, a nonprofit through which he coached and ran training camps. He visited his mentees’ schools and attended their games, encouraging self-confidence and community service as well as sharp playing skills.

“I think it would be great, honestly, if every kid that played youth sports had a mentor, a coach, someone like a Lamar,” said Christian Thurley, who participated in All in One. “I don’t mean this lightly: Everyone loved playing for him.” (Thurley is now a Blazers production assistant, which he credits in part to Hurd’s recommendation.)

Around the same time, Hurd started working on screen, first for Fox Sports Northwest and then for the Pac-12 network. His civic-mindedness permeated this work, too; he and his wife, Bethany, hosted a TV show called Hurd Mentality, spotlighting acts of kindness.

This point of view helped lure him from the Pac-12 to the Trail Blazers. “There’s no bigger basketball entity in the state,” he said. “I knew, when joining the Trail Blazers, that if their views aligned with mine in terms of how the Trail Blazers can be an asset to the community, then things would work out really well.”

Surrendering an ambition to play professionally was not the obvious choice. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” Hurd said. But trusting his instincts had paid off already. “I feel like I was able to test that muscle of whatever you call it: whether it’s faith, or hearing your inner voice.”

The game zooms forward — time divided into 12-minute episodes. By 10 p.m., the Blazers’ lead over the Rockets has narrowed. In the last moment of the game, they’re up 103-102 and the Rockets’ Kevin Durant just misses a shot. Tari Eason snatches the rebound and tips the ball into the net at precisely the moment the buzzer sounds.

“Does it count?” Calabro asks. Hurd intuits that the point isn’t clean. “They’re gonna look at it — they’re gonna look at it,” he says. There is confused quiet as a referee reviews the tape, but Hurd is right. The point doesn’t count, and the Blazers win by the skin of their teeth. The arena erupts with cheers.