Toughing It Out
PALO ALTO — The letter arrived, and Matt Lottich read it. He didn’t answer it.
That will be for later.
Writing back to the mother he hasn’t had contact with since he was 5 would be too emotional right now, he said.
Lottich is the starting shooting guard and leading scorer for the undefeated, second-ranked Stanford basketball team that plays Arizona today in Maples Pavilion.
On the court, he is all toughness and feistiness -- “Chicago hothead,” Lottich calls it. But if you understand his history, the edge that sometimes irks even his teammates makes more sense.
The hometown listed on Lottich’s biography is Winnetka, Ill., a wealthy suburb on Chicago’s North Shore.
But his address was a one-bedroom apartment shared with his father, David, who raised him alone after he and his son’s mother separated when Matt was 7 months old. David eventually won sole custody.
“My dad actually gave me the bedroom. He slept in the living room,” Lottich said.
“He made the ... sacrifice. We lived in a wealthy part of town in a one-bedroom apartment, with mansions all over the place. We had to fight to pay the bills, fight for attention.”
His father’s plan was to scrimp and scrape to live in the right neighborhood for Lottich to attend highly regarded New Trier High School.
“Would you want to live in a bigger place where everybody had their own room and the school wasn’t so great, or a smaller place where the school was great?” his father asked.
At New Trier, Lottich became a star student and athlete.
In an age when most athletes going on to major-college careers specialize in one high school sport, Lottich excelled at three.
The basketball team he played for made the quarterfinals of the state tournament.
The baseball team he pitched for won the state championship.
The football team he quarterbacked won a league title.
And no matter what season it was, Lottich was always the toughest player in the game.
He dived for loose balls with a vengeance.
In baseball, “a lot of headfirst slides,” he said. “I was a pretty competitive pitcher. A lot of brushbacks.”
In football, he was a scrambling quarterback with a bit of a mouth on him, and if the other team got a chance, they made him pay for it.
“That happened a lot,” he said. “Cheap shots under the pile, when they could catch me.”
He is a popular teammate, but even the other Stanford players laughingly admit there are moments.
“Yeah, everybody’s been mad at him,” forward Josh Childress said. “Not mad, but ... you just wonder sometimes why he does what he does.
“He was feisty when I first met him, playing pick-up in the fall. Right from the start, he was all in my face. Just being Lottie. That’s how he is. He’s very vocal. A great player to play with, not against.
“But he always hits the big shots. If I were a coach, he’d get the ball.”
Lottich’s 12.9-point average leads a balanced Cardinal team, but he is known best for the three-pointers he seems to make in the most crucial circumstances, and for a 34-point scoring outburst against Gonzaga earlier this season.
His partner in the backcourt, point guard Chris Hernandez, is another fierce competitor, and they sometimes go at each other hard in pickup games.
“He has amazing toughness. That’s the kind of guy he is,” Hernandez said. “I know he had to fight for everything he got. He knows how blessed he is and how fortunate he is to be where he is. He’s blessed to have a father like he does who made those sacrifices.”
Lottich believes that playing three sports without the time to practice any one of them contributed to the way he plays.
“To have success, I had to ‘up’ the competitive level,” he said. “If you push up the pressure against high school guys, some of them are going to back off.”
And, of course, there is the way he was raised.
“It worked out,” he said. “It can be nice to have a blue-collar presence in a ritzy town, and with success in sports came popularity.”
It was hardly immediate, though.
“When you’re younger, kids tend to be cruel,” he said. “That was an adjustment. By high school, people are much more mature.”
Youngsters’ images of what constitutes wealth vary. For some it is a pool, or a pool table.
To Lottich, it was a house.
“You’d go over to kids’ houses and their dad would have, like, $15 million and the house was huge. They’d drive Benzes. We weren’t in that class and probably never will be.”
A funny thing happened, though, as Lottich grew older and won his prestige on courts and fields. His apartment, not some other boy’s lavish home, became the place to go.
“You could lounge and be yourself,” he said. “There wasn’t really any expensive rug to worry about. No lamps to break. And Dad was always cooking.”
Sky-high SAT scores had earned his father a place at the University of Chicago, where he’d studied political science, but when Matt was growing up, he was a carpenter.
“I’d put him in a backpack and take him to work,” David said.
Now David is living in Berkeley, working in construction so he can attend his son’s games.
“It took 20 years to build that company. He gave that up to come out here,” Lottich said.
As for his mother, whose name, Cynthia, Lottich spells uncertainly, “I’m pretty sure she’s in Florida.
“She wrote, ‘I’m aware of what you’re doing,’ which was nice, to know your mother has seen you,” Lottich said. “She wrote that I had a cousin who had played football at Tennessee.
“I’m not mad at her at all. I’m really thankful for what she did for me. She brought me into this world, and she’s the only one who could have done that. I love her for that.”
That’s an attitude his father helped shape, saying there is no point in resentment.
“To a certain extent, it can be seen as a loving act to recognize the other parent has the greater ability to raise the child,” Lottich’s father said.
His son’s mother obviously had difficulties at the time, he said, but he doesn’t believe it is productive to talk about it.
“Forgiveness is a remarkably liberating event,” he said.
Matt already seems to understand that.
“I will [write back],” he said. “It’s not the right time.”
This is his time. His and his father’s.
“Unbelievable. He’s the best father,” Lottich said. “I just hope and pray I can be as good a father to my son, my children.”
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Season Bests
Top Pac-10 season records since the conference went to an 18-game schedule in 1979. Stanford enters today’s game against Arizona 19-0, 10-0 in the conference:
*--* Season Team Conf. Overall 1980-81 Oregon State 17-1 26-2 1987-88 Arizona 17-1 35-3 1988-89 Arizona 17-1 29-4 1992-93 Arizona 17-1 24-4 1997-98 Arizona 17-1 30-5 1979-80 Oregon State 16-2 26-4 1981-82 Oregon State 16-2 25-5 1980-81 Arizona State 16-2 24-4 1991-92 UCLA 16-2 28-5 1994-95 UCLA 16-2 31-2 1995-96 UCLA 16-2 23-8 2000-01 Stanford 16-2 31-3
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Note: The Cardinal is one of two undefeated teams in Division I. St. Joseph is 19-0.
