Let the record reflect that Tony Allen’s Memphis Grizzlies breakthrough — a journey in which he became a transformative on-court force and civic folk hero — came in a 2011 regular-season win against the Oklahoma City Thunder. 

It came with Allen making huge plays on both ends of the floor in a hard-fought victory. 

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It came as he performed with a soon-to-be-familiar theatrical zeal and then bared his soul after the game. 

No, not that game. 

Actually, “The Tony Allen Game” — the first one, anyway — came a month before Allen’s signature phrase “all heart, grit, grind” was ever publicly uttered. 

It also, oddly enough, came at a moment of potential peril for Allen, whose opening months in Memphis were rocky, his tenure with the team then wildly unlikely to culminate in his No. 9 jersey being hung from the FedExForum rafters, which will happen after Saturday’s game against Miami.

Here’s the story of Tony Allen in Memphis, a special connection that came so close to never taking hold and the crucial night where it finally did. 

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How he got to Memphis

When Allen took to the FedExForum floor that night, on Jan. 4, 2011, it was the Grizzlies’ 35th game of the season and only Allen’s fourth start. He’d had as many games in which he was available, and the team, with a 15-19 record that day, had chosen not to play him.

The would-be Tony Allen Era was quickly becoming an afterthought.

Let’s rewind.

In summer 2010, Allen was a free agent who’d just guarded the game’s best scorers across four playoff series, climaxing with a seven-game NBA Finals battle against Kobe Bryant and the winning Los Angeles Lakers. 

The Grizzlies were coming off a season in which they’d just missed the playoffs, but a talented starting lineup had coalesced. They were looking to add depth and defense with hopes of breaking through. 

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Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace, who’d come to Memphis from Boston, thought he saw a fit. 

During NBA summer league in Los Angeles, Wallace huddled with coach Lionel Hollins to discuss offseason strategy. 

“Chris was trying to sell me on Tony Allen. And I kept saying we needed a point guard,” says Hollins, who’s continued to live in Memphis after his tenure with the team, even through other coaching stints in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. 

“I thought we could bring back (incumbent free agent) Ronnie Brewer and go get a point guard and we’d be pretty solid. I just didn’t like the fact that we were looking at (Allen) as a backup point guard. Chris made the decision, and he wanted to go with somebody who he knew.”

If Hollins had doubts, so did Allen, who was mulling a return to Boston alongside interest from the Grizzlies and his hometown Chicago Bulls.

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“The Memphis Grizzlies? I was thinking, ‘Yo, a lot of people go there, and their careers end,’” says Allen, who, like his former head coach, has continued to live in Memphis even after his career ended. 

“I remember Antoine Walker coming there and getting salary dumped. I remember Darius Miles coming there, getting salary dumped. Pau (Gasol) wanting to get out of there. The Memphis Grizzlies? I was like, ‘No, that ain’t gonna be it.’”

But Allen was already 28 years old, had never made a lot of money by NBA standards and had a major injury on his resume. The Grizzlies wanted him and offered the biggest and longest deal, $9 million over three seasons. He took it. 

In five of Allen’s six seasons in Boston, he’d averaged fewer than 20 minutes a game and started fewer than half of his team’s games. But he’d just guarded Bryant in the NBA Finals, and his new team hadn’t even made the playoffs. Allen thought he was arriving into a larger role.

Allen’s new coach didn’t just have doubts, however.

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He had options, with returning perimeter starters Mike Conley, O.J. Mayo and Rudy Gay, a promising wing shooter (Xavier Henry) the team had selected with the 12th pick in that summer’s draft and a rugged second-year wing (Sam Young) the team liked. 

“Tony Allen is going to be a utility player,” Hollins said during that season’s training camp. “I think he’s a 15-minute player on most nights. … If Xavier (Henry) is able to handle the load, he’ll back up O.J., and if not, we’ll look to Sam in that role. And Tony will be the wild card we’ll play in certain situations where we need energy.”

A slow start

“I’m talking about we were at least 8-9 games under .500, and I just couldn’t believe that coach was actually doing me like that,” says Allen. “But I had signed a three-year deal. I had every opportunity then to just say to hell with this. Pay me my money; it is what it is. This is what I thought it was like. You come here, your career ends. But something in me just always kept the drive to say, ‘You know what, I’m gonna stay ready.’”

Allen’s playing time was fitful. So was his performance. 

He played a dozen or fewer minutes 18 times in the season’s first two months. Through 14 games, the Grizzlies were 5-9. They were 3-0 when Allen didn’t play, 2-9 when he did, getting outscored with Allen on the floor in eight of those games. 

Owner Michael Heisley, who died in 2014, wasn’t happy seeing his $9 million investment rotting on the bench. 

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“Heisley was upset, because any time Heisley gives somebody some money, he thinks he’s supposed to transform into Godzilla,” says Hollins. “He wasn’t shy about telling me. But Tony wasn’t playing that well early in the season. (Heisley) was right, but Tony wasn’t a consistent shooter, and then defensively, he was all over the place.

“I always say the beginning of the season is for experimentation and exploration, and we were exploring trying to find our identity.”

A mini-breakthrough came on Dec. 11 in Los Angeles.

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Tony Allen

Allen had played a total of 10 minutes over the previous four games, including a healthy “did not play” in the previous game, and was out of the rotation in this one, until Hollins looked to his bench for a spark.

“He sat me down the whole f------ game, and we was getting our a-- whooped,” says Allen. “Then he got mad at somebody and put me in.”

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Allen played the entire fourth quarter, in which he had four steals and a block in a one-point win over the Clippers. 

In the locker room, Hollins gave Allen the game ball and praised his persistence. 

After that, Allen didn’t get another “DNP” until the end of the season, when the playoffs were clinched. But his minutes and role remained erratic for a couple of weeks. 

In the meantime, the Grizzlies had decided to use Mayo in a sixth-man role and had been trying Henry as a starter, but knee problems had shelved the rookie. The Grizzlies could return Mayo to the starting lineup or elevate intended third- and fourth-options Young or Allen. 

On a return to Los Angeles on Jan. 2, this time to play the Lakers, Allen started, scored 10 points and the team won by 19.

Maybe Tony Allen had finally arrived.

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The plane ride home

It’s a bit of Grizzlies lore that’s been joked about for more than a decade, but you won’t find Allen smiling. 

Last week, with Allen appearing alongside teammate Zach Randolph on “The Chris Vernon Show,” the hosts laughed about Allen punching Mayo over a gambling dispute on the flight back from Los Angeles. 

Allen looked like he wanted to disappear into his chair. Randolph, knowing how uncomfortable the subject still is for his friend and former teammate, winced. 

“Yeah, I regret that so much,” says Allen. 

Different stories have been told about what happened and Allen isn’t much interested in reliving the details.

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Mayo and Allen were playing the card game bourré. In some versions, Mayo owed Allen money and declined to pay. In others, Mayo was winning and wanted to quit before the flight arrived in Memphis, a violation of accepted protocol. 

Regardless … 

“I’ve been in a few fights and I’ve seen a few fights where both people are in it, but only one gets to fight, and that’s what happened,” says Hollins. “O.J. was in the fight, but he wasn’t able to fight.”

It’s an important moment for that era of Grizzlies basketball and for Allen’s career in Memphis, but not for what happened on the plane. It’s important for what did and didn’t happen in the aftermath. 

Allen remembers being fined.

“Mr. Heisley wanted to suspend Tony. I said that would have destroyed our team if Tony got suspended,” says Hollins. 

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Back in Memphis, Hollins met with Mayo and Allen. 

“I said, ‘You guys are too close. You go through too much to let something like this determine whether you’re friends or not,’” says Hollins. “Tony was willing to let it go. Juice was embarrassed, and he didn’t want to at first, but when they shook hands and left, I felt like it was over.”

“Teammates get into it sometimes,” says Randolph, who was close to both Mayo and Allen and who, like Hollins, has both seen and been in his share of scuffles between teammates. 

“They got through it, and they respected each other. TA is a real guy, and O.J. knew that. O.J. is a real guy. Some guys can be kind of finicky. There wasn’t none of that. We grew up fighting every day. It wasn’t nothing we couldn’t get past.” 

But that wasn’t clear in the moment. 

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“We were lucky to have Lionel. He really excelled in those types of situations, when things get tough, when certain circumstances happen, fights, arguments, whatever,” says point guard Mike Conley, now with the Minnesota Timberwolves and the last member of the 2010-2011 Grizzlies still in the NBA. “If we had not had that leadership, it could have spiraled in the wrong direction and really splintered our team.”

“Coach Train (Hollins) is from the old school,” says Randolph. “He played in the days of Maurice Lucas, where they were throwing left hooks and right hooks.”

“I truly regret that even happening, but, most importantly, that’s my brother,” says Allen. “Brothers argue and fight all the time, and it was just a … it was just an unfortunate situation. As far as us moving forward, we still had a goal to get to the playoffs and that was our mindset. Our mindset was when we get out on this court, people need to understand who Memphis is.”

The (First) Tony Allen Game

If the team seemed to be getting past the altercation, there was still a game to play only a day later, at home against Oklahoma City, which had a record of 23-12 and boasted multiple emerging stars. 

That would be the real test. 

“In those moments, it’s tenuous. It could go either way depending on the character of your players,” says Hollins.

Not only was Allen not suspended, Hollins kept him in the starting lineup. 

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Mayo, sporting a blackened eye the organization was apparently trying to keep secret, was not with the team.

His designation on the injury report?

“Bronchitis.”

“That might have been something that (the organization) concocted,” says Hollins, who didn’t know or didn’t remember that was how Mayo was listed on the box score. 

“Maybe (Allen) knocked the bronchitis into his lungs,” says a laughing Hollins. “I don’t know.”

In any event, Mayo became perhaps the only player in NBA history to miss a single game with “bronchitis.”

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“It was just kind of a weird feeling,” remembers Conley of starting that first game after the altercation. 

“With what we’d been through as a team in the past 24 hours, we’re all looking at (Tony), looking at our team like how are we going to respond today? We don’t know who we’re going to be. So for him to have a game like that was remarkable. I don’t even know how you can have the level of focus you need to be able to regroup and put that out there in between the lines.”

The game Allen played that night was the Grizzlies’ Tony Allen experience in microcosm.

In Boston, some observers had taken to labeling Allen a “trick or treat” player.

On this night, the tricks came first. 

Allen stole the ball from Thunder star Kevin Durant, and then missed a wide-open layup. 

Two minutes later, Allen missed a second layup. Then, in the second half, a third. And a fourth.

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By this point, the fans were groaning and gasping whenever Allen touched the ball. 

“When somebody missed a layup, we used to call it a Tony,” says Hollins. “The Boston Celtics started that. When we were in Boston and Tony missed a layup, all the players were yelling, ‘He did a Tony.’ Tony obviously didn’t like it.”

“S---, I remember TA used to miss a lot of layups, but then he’d warm up,” says Randolph. “He was relentless that game. He never gave up.” 

In the middle of the third quarter, Allen erupted to the rim to block Thunder point guard Russell Westbrook, then perhaps the sport’s greatest athlete.

Later that quarter, Allen made a driving layup to give the Grizzlies a four-point lead. And then another, which he followed by blocking Thunder guard James Harden’s jumper. 

Fans weren’t groaning anymore. 

Midway through the fourth, Allen hit a 3-pointer to give the team another four-point lead, and then a few minutes later made another 3 to give the team a five-point lead with 81 seconds to play. He let loose a little shimmy after the shot. 

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Instead of gasping and groaning, fans were laughing and cheering. 

“Yeah, I think they were chanting my name, too,” says Allen. “I remember that vividly. Man, all I can say is I was put in a situation where I had to respond.”

It was, as Hollins noted from the coach’s podium that night, “a great NBA basketball game.”

Learning to live with, and love, Tony Allen

In the final 15 seconds, Allen hit two free throws to give the Grizzlies a three-point lead and harassed Durant into a missed 31-footer to seal the game. 

Allen had scored 19 points, then his high as a Grizzly, with three steals, two blocks, one win and the acquisition of thousands of devoted new fans. 

Allen had taken those fans on a wild ride, provoking some frustration but ultimately earning love and respect.

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His teammates and coaches could relate. 

Trust was an issue early on, and given Allen’s chaotic game, how could it not be?

Back then, Allen’s ability to jump into passing lanes to generate steals while still recovering to contain his man was perhaps unparalleled. He had a knack for deft passes, swooping blocks and thunderous dunks. He also had a knack for wobbly dribbling, missed layups, dead-on-arrival jump shots and curious on-court decisions. 

“It took a minute,” says Conley, the coach on the court who had to gain trust in Allen nearly as much as the coach on the sidelines did.

“I can usually tell when somebody’s going to be open in a corner. Tony might not be in the corner. He might roam somewhere else. He’s always just around, moving, playing his kind of a freelance-style basketball,” says Conley.

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“But for the one mistake or the one little thing that looks crazy, he’ll have like nine or 10 crazy things but in a positive way. You’ll be like, ‘How did he block that shot?’ or ‘How did he get that steal? How did he get back on defense and create that havoc?’ The positives started to outweigh the negative stuff. We got comfortable with it and just embraced him as he is.” 

“When we would draw plays, I’m always in the corner. So there’d be times where we run sets and it’d be the perfect opportunity for me to break the play or make something happen simply because they’re not really guarding me,” says Allen.

“I used to take advantage of a lot of those sets, and you know coach would be like, ‘Awgh aah,’” says Allen, waving his arms, shaking his head and chuckling. “Then it worked and then (Hollins) would sit down. There’d be times when Mike would be ‘No, no, no … alright.’” 

“No, no, no … yes!” was essentially the story of Allen’s breakthrough night and perhaps his entire seven-season Grizzlies career. 

“The Memphis Grizzlies? I was thinking, ‘Yo, a lot of people go there, and their careers end.’”

Tony Allen

After this game, Allen sat in the Grizzlies locker room, his right foot submerged in a bucket of ice, bags of ice strapped to both knees.

“I’m a blue-collar guy,” said Allen on that night, deploying a phrase Randolph would more famously use a few months later. “I don’t mind working hard. I just had to show them (enough to gain) some trust. I’m just gonna play my role and stay within the realm of things … and make some layups.” 

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Then Allen shook his head and smiled.

“I wanted to try to really right my wrongs through winning and I thought that was a perfect opportunity to just get past that,” says Allen now, looking back on having his first big Grizzlies night in the immediate wake of one of his lowest Grizzlies moments. 

On this night, at FedExForum, against the Thunder, “grit and grind” was born, but the man who would later be dubbed “The Grindfather” hadn’t yet filled in the name on the birth certificate. 

That would come a month later, on the road, against the same opponent.