IndyStar’s Gregg Doyel on Lawrence Central’s Jake LaRavia family ties to Lakers
IndyStar’s Gregg Doyel on Lawrence Central’s Jake LaRavia family ties to Lakers
- Jake LaRavia was destined to the play for the Lakers, the team of his father’s youth, closing a family loop of impossible dreams and tragic death.
- Jake LaRavia was born in Pasadena before moving to Indiana as a boy, where he became a star at Lawrence Central and Indiana State.
- Jake’s dad, Jeff, grew up with the Showtime Lakers, whose popularity brought together Jeff, his older brother (Dave) and dad (Ellis). Dave and Ellis died before they could see Jake with the Lakers.
The phone call comes with Jeff LaRavia in the car, driving home with the youngest of his three sons, Seth. Jeff puts the call on speaker phone, because things are happening – basketball things – and this could be good. It’s his middle son, Jake, who starred at Lawrence Central, and then at Indiana State and Wake Forest, and played for the Memphis Grizzlies after being selected 19th overall in the 2022 NBA Draft.
It’s June, the middle of 2025 NBA free agency, and on the other end of the phone Jake LaRavia gets right to the point.
“He just blurted it out,” Jeff was remembering this past week: “’Hey, I want to let you know I signed with the Lakers.’”
Jeff LaRavia knew the Lakers were a possibility – he knew which teams had been in contact with his son – but still he was surprised by what happened next.
“I started to get emotional,” he says.
He’s in the car, a father talking basketball with his boys, and the memories are coming fast. There’s Jeff as a kid, the son of a Southern California pastor, growing up in Pasadena and attending Los Angeles Lakers games at the Forum with his older brothers, Glen and Dave. There’s Jeff’s father, Ellis, showing his boys how he shot free throws – granny style. Hey, it had been good enough back in the day for Lakers center Wilt Chamberlain.
There’s Jeff, marching around the house in those purple-and-gold Converse Weapon high tops. Leather so thick, it took him a year to break in those things.
There’s Ellis LaRavia loving his sons, installing a basket behind their house in Pasadena, located on a plain nearly 1,000 feet above the San Gabriel Valley. When a ball went over the fence, brother, that thing was gone. Whoever threw the errant pass would head down the hill and take a good five minutes before coming back with the ball. Most of the time it was the middle brother, Dave, always trying those fancy Magic Johnson passes.
“He was the point guard of the family,” Jeff says now. “If you weren’t ready, you’d get a ball in the gut.”
Sometimes, sure, it was Jeff who threw the ball over the fence. He’d attended Magic Johnson’s basketball camp, and he always did look up to Magic – and to his brother, Dave.
And now, all these years later, Jeff’s son is playing for those same Lakers? Playing alongside LeBron James and Luka Doncic?
Ellis and Gwen LaRavia would’ve loved to watch their grandson play for the Lakers, but they died years ago.
Jeff’s brother, Dave, would’ve loved to see it, too.
Yeah.
Your son, a Laker? What’s THAT like?
Everyone’s always asking Jeff LaRavia: What’s it like to watch your son play for the Lakers? People have been asking some variation of that question for years:
What’s it like to see Jake become the best player at Indiana State? At Wake Forest?
To see Jake get drafted? And play for the Grizzlies? And with Ja Morant?
People mean well, but they couldn’t possibly understand. They weren’t there when Jake LaRavia was in elementary school, falling in love with basketball, believing the NBA was his future. They weren’t there when Jake came home one day from legendary Lawrence North coach Jack Keefer’s basketball camp and announced:
“Hey, we did free throw and 3-point contests today – and I won them both.”
That camp had kids from elementary school through high school, and the contests were open to everyone – campers of all ages competing with each other for one trophy.
Jake was in sixth grade.
“That was the moment,” says Jeff, 53. “We knew then there was something special.”
There would be more moments. Young for his grade, Jake didn’t make the Lawrence Central varsity until his junior season, when he averaged 5.2 ppg for coach Al Gooden. The fall before his senior season, now close to his current height after a massive growth spurt – he’s 6-7 – Jake played in the Metro Indy Basketball League and scored 54 points.
In one game.
He was 10-for-11 on 3-pointers.
“That was another moment,” Jeff says.
More moments: Under-recruited, still just 17 after graduating from Lawrence Central, Jake LaRavia is on the bubble for various Indiana All-Star teams but gets selected for the North-South Game at Martinsville – and turns it into a one-man dunk contest. Same sort of thing happens at the 2019 Indiana-Kentucky All-Star Game, just a highlight reel of LaRavia passes, shots, even a chase-down block. He doesn’t look like one of the least-recruited players on Indiana’s roster. He looks like one of the best players on the floor.
He goes to Indiana State. Same thing: One of the best players in any game he plays. Goes to Wake Forest. Same thing. Enters the 2022 NBA Draft, doesn’t make it out of the first round. Spends most of three seasons in Memphis, and every step of the way, people are asking Jeff:
What’s this like, Dad – for you?
One of the people asking that question is me, just a few days ago. This happens next.
“People ask that question, and it’s amazing – he’s in the NBA, a lifelong dream realized,” Jeff says. “Not to minimize it in any way, but Jakes loves the game of basketball – he always has, that’s never changed. We’ve always known he would go onto do great things in the game of basketball, whatever that looked like, whatever level he played at.
“To see him playing at this level, not to be flippant, but it was a foregone conclusion. So knowing that, watching him play, when I look at him play, on TV or in person…”
Jeff pauses. It’s happening again.
“I’m going to get emotional about it,” he says, and pauses. When he starts talking again, his voice is softer. “It’s Jake playing basketball, doing the thing he loves, and that’s it.”
The tears keep surprising Jeff because he’s still processing this story, how it’s bigger than basketball, bigger even than the Lakers. It’s a story of family, of fathers and sons – and, yes, of brothers.
Doyel in 2019: Indiana State-bound All-Star Jake LaRavia puts on a show vs. Kentucky
Doyel in 2020: Lawrence Central’s LaRavia has grown into a star for Indiana State
Jake LaRavia destined to play for Lakers
There’s a picture of Jeff LaRavia as a kid growing up in Pasadena in 1984. He’s 12, attending Magic Johnson’s basketball camp, posing next to Magic himself. Two beautiful smiles in that picture.
There’s a picture of Jake LaRavia as a kid growing up in Pasadena in 2006. This is a year before Jeff and Becky LaRavia moved their growing family to Indiana, seeking a less hectic lifestyle and finding it in the Indianapolis area, where Becky’s sister had settled.
In the picture, Jake’s wearing a dinosaur sweater, what looks to be a stegosaurus on his chest – he’s 4 – and his dad’s old Lakers ballcap. That picture, that family treasure, went public this past summer when Jake signed with the Lakers and made that photo his profile pic on Instagram.
“It’s unbelievable,” Jeff says of the coincidences required for this story, that Instagram picture, to happen.
It became possible last year, after the Grizzlies declined their fourth-year option on Jake and later traded him to Sacramento, making him an unrestricted free agent after the season.
“A golden ticket,” Jeff LaRavia calls it. Jake was prepared to return to Sacramento, but the Lakers called Jake’s agents, Aaron Reilly and Reggie Berry of AMR Agency.
As Jake was telling his dad in the car this past summer, the Lakers were offering $12 million over two years – and had given him 24 hours to make a decision.
“The Lakers just asked me to come play for them,” Jake, 24, told his dad. “Yes, I want to play for them.”
Things were moving fast. Jake moved to Southern California, got married in September, then began training camp. Soon he finds himself in the starting lineup alongside LeBron and Luka, a 6-7, 235-pound wing who rebounds, defends, moves the ball and spreads the floor as a 3-point threat.
Jake averages 9.5 points, 4.1 rebounds and two assists in 27.1 minutes, and whether his parents watched on TV or attended in person – they’ve been to Lakers games at Charlotte, Phoenix, San Antonio and Chicago – he returns to the locker room to a text from Mom or Dad. Nothing big, just letting him know: We were watching.
Jeff and Becky are in Los Angeles this week for a Lakers homestand that started Saturday against Golden State and continued Monday (Oklahoma City), Tuesday (Spurs) and Thursday (Mavericks). They attended Jake’s wedding in September, and they’ve seen the Lakers play several road games, but this was their first look at him in a Lakers uniform at Crypto.com Arena, the first time hearing the home crowd roar as their son was introduced during pregame introductions. Then they watched him play 27 minutes in the Lakers’ 105-99 win against the Warriors.
“Unimaginable,” Jeff says.
After the game Jeff shared two things with Jake, two memories that had surfaced this week as he’d told his L.A. story to me. First, he pulled out that picture from 1985: Jeff and Magic.
“See this 12-year-old boy?” Jeff told his son Saturday night in Los Angeles. “He had no idea what was to come. And if he had known, what a smile would’ve been on his face.”
And then Jeff told Jake a little more about his older brother, Dave.
Doyel in 2023: Get a load of all these overachieving Indiana kids on the Grizzlies
A family, bonded by the Lakers
The memories, you know? They come fast as Jeff watches his son play for the Lakers.
There’s Jake in elementary school, in Indiana, telling his dad he doesn’t need to work on his ballhandling because doctors said he was going to be close to 6-8, and anyway, he was a shooter. Jeff took that opportunity to tell Jake about one particular 6-8 player who’d worked on his ballhandling as a kid: Magic Johnson.
Earlier memory: There’s Jeff playing intramural basketball at Ambassador College, always hanging out in the gym, where he notices a player on the Ambassador women’s team. That was Becky. They’ve been married 30 years.
Earlier: Jeff and his brothers in the yard overlooking the San Gabriel Valley. Jeff pretending to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, flinging those long skyhooks. Jeff would’ve preferred to be Magic, but Magic was Dave’s guy.
“Dave was seven years older, so we didn’t have a lot in common,” Jeff says now. “Once I hit my teenage years, we had basketball in common. And … yeah.”
Jeff’s starting to laugh, but not because this is funny. This is hard. Dave was eventually diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder, and he fought it so hard – “He battled,” Jeff says – but in 2016 he died.
“He took his life,” Jeff says.
“Yeah,” Jeff says again, quieter now. “I wish he were here. So he and I could go to a game.”
Quieter now.
“And watch Jake play for the Lakers.”
Quieter.
“Yeah.”
This is hard, but life can be hard. Jeff knows that. Life also can be beautiful, and that’s what Jeff wanted to tell his son Saturday night. Remember those emotions Jake had heard over the phone from his father last summer, when Jake announced he was signing with the Lakers? Those tears trace to the 1980s, to a Lakers ballcap and a backyard basket overlooking the San Gabriel Valley, to Magic and Kareem and…
… and to Dave.
The coincidences are so staggering, you don’t have to be a pastor’s son to think: There are no coincidences.
It was basketball, triggered by Jeff’s love of the Lakers, that brought him and his wife together. Before that, it was basketball – it was the Lakers – that brought his father and brothers together. Now it’s the Lakers bringing his family together again, right there in Los Angeles, where Jake is in Lakers coach J.J. Redick’s starting lineup and Jeff and Becky LaRavia are in the crowd, watching their son play alongside LeBron James.
And people want to know what that’s like?
It can be as complicated as three generations of LaRavia men – some here, some gone – connected by a single NBA team. It can be as simple as Jake playing basketball, doing the thing he loves, and that’s it.
Yeah.
More: Join the text conversation with sports columnist Gregg Doyel for insights, reader questions and Doyel’s peeks behind the curtain.
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