Anyone who witnessed such a pulsating Yellow Jackets win can retrace those waning moments very vividly.
Take your mind to the spirited high school gym in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
The Rivertowns buzzed about lively basketball games of this ilk, when the two quad villages shut down just prior to the tip-off.
The type of gym you might stumble upon while thumbing through Dr. J or Wilt Chamberlain’s high school highlights. It was a dim, old bandbox joint of a gym, where voices travel from the stands to the locker room rather rapidly.
Hastings and Dobbs Ferry have been blood rivals since the inception of varsity sports at the Westchester Class C schools. Both schools are a stone’s throw from each other, with intermingling and plenty of bad blood in between.
Extra-curricular activity, pushes, shoves (when the ref turns his head), and merciless trash talk set the stage for a physical and intense battle.
It was unusual, considering Lefkowitz seemed more content to pass the ball. His unique passes set up big fellas like then-sophomore 6-foot-4 forward/center Brian Nymcheck, for open looks in the paint. Lefkowitz had many tricks in his arsenal.
There was a patented no-look pass. There was the behind-the-back bounce pass. There was a left-handed shovel pass in traffic.
And so Lefkowitz entered his sophomore season with the identity of a passer, a kid who would rather draw the defense in and whizz a no-look pass to a big man or dump it off behind the back to the fast break trailer.
With fearless slashes, shots in traffic, teary floaters, pull-up jumpers and three-pointers in succession, Lefkowitz increased his scoring role. Perhaps his best attribute was his supreme confidence. With never-ending trash talk and the willingness to get in anyone’s face, Lefkowitz brought a swagger comparable to Billy Hoyle in White Men Can’t Jump.
In the marquee ’85 Hastings/Dobbs game, Lefkowitz displayed his flair for crunch time.
Letkowitz dishes the ball off and quickly calls for it back. Manipulating the Eagle defender who is draping his every move, Lefkowitz dishes it off to an open guard in the corner. The searing pressure is on.
Hastings is staring down at a two-point deficit.
The threat of a deflating loss to a heated rival, the football school next door, jolts Hastings fans out of their seats. With six seconds left, Lefkowitz calls for the ball back. Without a hint of hesitation, he fires up a high-arching three-pointer, as the clock ticks down from 5 to 4 to 3.2.
He bagged it. The 3-pointer gives the Jackets a one-point lead with 3.2 seconds left in another chapter of this epic rivalry. It also ignites the yellow and green-clad section of Dobbs’ gym, which is on its feet.
This was about business. It was about keeping Hastings’ early hot streak going. Falling victim to a bigger, more physical rival would drain some momentum from the Jackets’ body.
The buzzer sounds. Hastings wins in an absolute thrill-ride to the finish. This was expected, since Hastings and Dobbs always elicits high emotions and intensity.
Lefkowitz is immediately swarmed by his teammates, who create a near pile-on at the 3-point line while Dobbs Ferry walks off exasperated.
Dobbs fans are livid.
They wanted a timeout, a drawn up play. Anything but what they just witnessed.
Lefkowitz’ full repertoire was on display. Games of this magnitude call for stellar performances. Known more for his handle and streetball-eqsue passing, few knew Lefkowitz had such a scoring engine.
The story of the kid they call “Lew Ice” plays out like a topsy-turvy sports/comedy film that lacks a concrete ending.
Ice is No.3 on Hastings all-time leading scorers list, eclipsing 1,000 points. He averaged 23 points and shot a sizzling 96 percent from the free throw line his senior year.
“When somebody averages 23 points at Hastings, and the average margin of victory for your team is 20 points, that means Costello doesn’t let you play more than three quarters during blowouts,” said Lefkowitz, who now lives in Manhattan.
“Other guys could average more minutes and lose every game, because their team sucks. Not us. We had power at every position. We had a team that was committed to surrendering their individual totals for the best of the team.”
Lefkowitz continued, “Everyone bought in and knew what was expected of them. All high-character, low-maintenance guys. That was a prosperous era for us. There were schools that certainly played more games than us, that had players who played every minute of every game and still sucked. We had depth. We had guys who could easily have averaged more in their best statistical category, but we didn’t care about stats. We cared about winning and winning only.”
Lefkowitz played pickup ball religiously as a 15-year-old (he had family in the area) in the hardscrabble, tranny-laced Miami parks.
Lefkowitz claims he chose the more obscure college because he wanted to make an immediate impact, without the fanfare.
The stamp Lefkowitz left at ESCU was similar to the one he left on little Hastings High.
The proof is in the production tree: At ESCU Lefkowitz scored 1,143 points and shot 58.7 percent from the field, authoring an illustrious four-year career.
At the time, ESCU played a competitive schedule with multiple Division-I teams.
Lefkowitz pieced together a 31-point and 11-assist performance in a 95-92 overtime win against Virginia Union, the alma mater of former bruising NBA forward Charles Oakley.
Ice scored a game-winning layup on a transition leak-out to beat former offensively inept NBA center Chris Dudley and Yale.
In addition to carrying the scoring mantle, Lefkowitz led Elizabeth City in both steals and assists in each of his four years.
The kid who grew up idolizing Pete Maravich, dribbling in his garage with the lights off, Lefkowitz said he always wanted to create his own path to stardom.
From Hastings to North Carolina, the goal was to take some ownership of the offense. The goal was to stand out, as if being a 5-foot-10 Jewish kid at a predominantly African American college didn’t do that from the jump.
“Lew had the best handle of anyone I ever played with,” explained high school teammate Keith Fagan, a Hall of Fame wide receiver/quarterback at Western New England College and three-sport athlete out of Hastings.
“I literally don’t remember him ever having a turnover. The only time he lost the ball was when a teammate couldn’t handle his pass or never expected it because it seemed it would have been impossible for Lew to get him the ball, yet he somehow did.”
Fagan recalls the fierce rivalry between Hastings and Alexander Hamilton, which contained three Division-I players at the time.
“When was the last time any local Section I school outside of Mount Vernon had three D-I kids, let alone in Class D?” Said Fagan.
“Lew Ice killed them! Both game scores were in the 90s. The 90s! We lost both games, but Lew Ice had over 30 in each.”
Leftkowitz’ father, Norman Leftkowitz, coached at Lehman College in the Bronx. He played at the University of Cincinnati, where he roomed with Sandy Koufax.
“That was a good way of tasting higher level of competition early on. In the backyard of our home, it was a lot of grass and dirt. So, I learned to dribble the ball on every surface, it was like a string attached to my hand.”
Leftkowitz was ahead of his time at an early age.
“By the time he was 12-13, he was so much more advanced than any other kid,” said Seth Groveman, the former Binghamton guard and director of Future Stars Basketball School in Florida.
“We played together for Racquet Lake Summer Camp in the Adirondacks. He could have beaten some teams we played 1 on 5. He was probably the best 13-year-old in the country. You could not be a better player than he was at that age. He had the body of a kid who was 18. He could handle it, he could shoot deep. He was dropping like 50 a game.”
His SATS were lower than Shaq’s in “Blue Chips,” his ACTs didn’t do much to bolster his cause. The low boards did scare away several NCAA homes. Lefkowitz said he has since made an effort to make up for lost time.
Lefkowitz, who says his hoops game has improved immensely since his college days, said his last loss was in 2012– when Mitt Romney was defeated by Barack Obama in the presidential campaign.
The workout fiend is no longer waking up at 6 a.m. to launch jumpers. Now he’s out of bed at 3 a.m., at Crunch or Planet Fitness sculpting up his body for three hard hours.
After that, Lefkowitz will hold workouts with everyone from the upcoming schoolboy basketball talent to the elderly woman in tony mid-town in dire need of more exercise.
His intensity never tails off. His motor mouth never stops spewing, whether it is motivational lingo or trash talk.
“He was the biggest trash talker ever,” Groveman said.
“When I played one-on-one against him, we used to get into fist fights all the time. He would find everyone’s weakness and exploit it. For me, I used to go to my right a lot. Immediately, Lew would be like, ‘man why can’t you ever go left, do you have a left hand?’
“Everytime he would hit a jump shot and it hit the rim Lew would be like, “Damn, I suck! How do I hit the rim! I’m not supposed to be hitting the rim, that’s terrible.” He would find stuff like that. He would never stop talking, for even a millisecond. He was the most annoying guy to ever play against. As a teammate, he was a great guy.”
Growing up in quaint and quiet Hastings, the suburb 20 minutes outside of Manhattan. Lefkowitz vowed basketball would take him to busier, lively places.
Leftkowitz would sling his shirt to the side, flaunting a sharpened six-pack.
“Who wants some of Ice? Who wants some?” He would scream, to nobody in particularly, when he caught fire.
This was the norm. The kid who once torched a team for 63 points in a Colts Club basketball game as a 12-year-old never let his focus falter.
When he couldn’t find a local game, Lefkowitz hopped on the train to Manhattan. He’d play for hours at Dyckman, West Fourth Street, or on the famed asphalt at Rucker Park. When Lefkowitz was 13, the aforementioned Evans spotted him dribbling around cones at Reynolds.
Evans, one of the best shooters in Section I history, implored him to play 2-on-2 against two grown men.
After he and Evans “wiped the court with those two guys” as Lefkowitz recalls, a tandem was born.
Evans was a senior and touted Division-I prospect, but he tagged along with the younger and smaller Leftkowitz for countless pickup runs.
Lefkowitz remembers Evans taking him to play with a horde of bigger, older Mount Vernon kids for Riverside Church. Lefkowitz recalls Evans pulling him aside one fall morning at Gaucho Gym.
“Little man, you’ve got something special,” he remembers Evans saying. “Don’t lose it.”
Ice took his mentor’s words to heart. Lefkowitz kept playing year-round, subscribing to a strict workout regimen in high school.
Lefkowitz outdueled 6-foot-10 Marty Conlon (who played in the NBA for several years) in Pocono Invitational camp. Ice went eyeball-to-eyeball battle with Kenny Anderson at Molloy High in Queens, a marquee and memorable performance.
Ten years later, Leftkowitz played alongside Anderson at “The Cage” on West Fourth Street.
“He definitely got his love for the game from his father,” said Groveman.
“His old man was a great coach, but he had the tendency to blow up like Bobby Knight when he went crazy. I remember we were at Echo Lake one summer. They brought their own refs, who worked at their camp, and the refs were jobbing us. The game was rigged from the very start.’
“They weren’t calling fouls, they were charging us with offensive fouls every time there was contact, it was a joke. They were really screwing us. So, Lew’s Dad pulled us off the court and we never finished the game. Lew had about 30 heading into the fourth quarter and he wanted to keep playing. I just remember a 14-year-old Lew screaming , ‘Come on Dad! Let me play! Come on Dad, let me go out there and dominate!’
Lefkowitz believes he is leaps and bounds better than Mark Blount, the former NBA big man out of Pittsburgh and Dobbs Ferry. He said he would light up the top seniors in Section I with ease this season.
Memories such as the game-sealing 3-pointer against Dobbs resurface, massaging Lefkowitz’ maniacal ego whenever he needs a good jump-start.
A man who used basketball as a tool to engage at-risk youth in upstate New York, a man who served the country in the U.S. Army, basketball seems as pivotal to breathing as Leftkowitz.
If you cut his arm open, you would expect basketballs in the form of blood to leak out.
Never was this statement more validated during a local 3-on-3 run in New Jersey last weekend.
Leftkowitz was scoring at will, taking the ball to the cup early and often and shredding defenders off the dribble. Still possessing legitimate handle and a cross-over, Leftkowitz spearheaded his team to three straight victories.
To see one Lefkowitz game is to have seen them all.
His performance and high-engine antics open eyes.
The former Hastings point guard peppers the court with an endless supply of trash talk.
With a defender fronting him in the posts, he screams “Pass me the ball, there is nobody guarding me! This guy couldn’t carry my jock strap in a Nike sneaker box!”
Every time his opponent shoots, Lefkowitz shouts “Brick!” at an ear-splitting level.
After receiving a “nice shot” compliment from his defender following an off-balanced jumper, Lefkowitz feels slighted.
“Oh come on!” He shouts.
“Stop kissing my ass. This is not freshman orientation, we are not here to make friends. I’m not here to make friends. You don’t congratulate me after I make a shot. What, you think that’s an accomplishment for me? You think I suck? We’ll see who sucks at game point, chump.”
His nephew, Robby Lefkowitz, was a key facilitator on the Livingston High team as a senior point guard this year.
His jumper, which has lost luster since he broke his wrist in 2008, was intact.
Enshrined in the Hastings High Hall of Fame a few years ago, Lew Ice maintains he’s still capable of burying the top high school players in New York and New Jersey under a barrage of feathery mid-range shots.
“I came out of retirement right from Vegas and played against most of the starters at Livingston High and a couple of scorers close by,” Lefkowitz explained.
“I had my way with those youngsters, breaking ankles and getting to the rim with ease. I honestly thought they were letting me score at will, it was so easy.”
Lefkowitz continued, “all these kids have sweet cars here, they are 17 and 18. These kids are better suited for the chess team or violin lessons. I feel like these are kids who never made a team in their life, never went to the prom, never even made the rec league team. Yet, they are ‘starters.’ I was like a mid-town cab, driving in and out of traffic. I asked the kid guarding me to at least pretend like he’s trying to stop me, not rolling out a red carpet from my feet to the basket.”
Lefkowitz put his viewpoint in perspective.
“When I score I don’t need any kid telling me ‘nice shot.’ No, this is not summer camp. This is not the Penn State locker room showers, where coach Sandusky will tell you he’s going to make you the best player known to man,” he said.
“This is real life, if you want to do something useful get a steal and score. These kids need a better, tougher mentality instilled in them. They all want to be friends and give each other high fives even when bragging rights and pride is at stake, it’s definitely a different era.”
“What’s that show where you have to train a kid trying out for a team? “Made?” I’d like a shot on that show,” Leftkowitz said.
“I will mess up on purpose at first, to make it interesting. Then after a month I won’t miss a shot.”