Longtime Friend Adds Weight To Tales Of Drug Use By Lewis

The Boston Celtics, preparing to retire Reggie Lewis’ number at Boston Garden, again face talk of a dark side: A friend said Lewis used cocaine.

Now a shadow is cast over the ceremony and the final days of the storied Garden, which is to close after the NBA and NHL seasons.

Suggestions of drug use first arose almost two weeks ago in a report exploring Lewis’ sudden death in 1993.

The Wall Street Journal said Lewis refused to take a drug test, and questioned whether concerns about finances and bad publicity may have prompted the Celtics to ignore drugs as a possible explanation.

Then, in Monday’s Journal, Derrick Lewis said he and Reggie Lewis had used cocaine in a Maryland hotel before a Celtics road game. Lewis collapsed five days later, April 29, 1993, during a playoff game in the Boston Garden against the Charlotte Hornets. He died in August 1993 after collapsing while shooting baskets.

Derrick Lewis, who played high school and college ball with Reggie Lewis and is no relation, said the Celtics star was “with me, an experimental user of cocaine like a lot of people, from executives to college students, who try it once in a while. Reggie was addicted to basketball, not drugs.”

The two did a lot of “heavy partying, mostly with marijuana. There was a lot of partying on the team,” Derrick Lewis recalled of his days at Northeastern University.

He also recalled another incident in the 1980s, when he and Lewis attended a Celtics camp for college players and free agents. He said he, Lewis and two other players went to a McDonald’s restaurant and used cocaine in the bathroom. The Journal said it confirmed much of the report with one of the other players, who was not identified.

Celtics officials, scurrying to get ready for the retirement ceremony on Wednesday, had no comment on the report. They had vehemently denied a Journal report on March 9 indicating that possible cocaine use had never been vigorously examined at the time of Lewis’s collapse.

Lewis’ No. 35 will be retired in pure Celtics fashion, with his family getting a piece of the famed parquet floor and his number being raised to the rafters of the Boston Garden beside those of Cousy, Havlicek, Bird, Orr, Esposito, et al.

But recent and compounding drug allegations will make the event far different from recent ceremonies for Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Dennis Johnson.

On Saturday, The Boston Globe reported that Lewis may have failed a cocaine test before playing in the 1987 NCAA tournament.

Lewis’s wife has said her husband never used drugs. kids.”