With 5.2 seconds left in Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals, Miami trailed San Antonio by three points. Chris Bosh grabbed an offensive rebound and passed to Ray Allen, who was backtracking toward the right corner. Allen rose over Tony Parker and connected, tying the game without needing to look down and confirm his feet were behind the line. The Heat won in overtime and took the championship in seven games.
Allen was born on July 20, 1975, in Merced, California. At the University of Connecticut, he played three seasons under coach Jim Calhoun, earning consensus First Team All-America honors and the Big East Player of the Year award while scoring more than 1,900 points. Calhoun later called him probably the top name brand the program had produced.
Milwaukee chose him with the fifth pick in the 1996 NBA draft. Over seven seasons with the Bucks, he established himself as a three-point marksman, earned All-NBA Third Team honors in 2001 and appeared in three All-Star Games. A 2003 trade sent him to the Seattle SuperSonics, where he set career highs in scoring, rebounding and assists and made four more All-Star appearances.
In 2007, he joined Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce on the Boston Celtics and won his first championship in 2008. On February 10, 2011, his 2,561st career three-pointer moved him past Reggie Miller into first place all-time, a record he held until 2021. He finished his career with 2,973 made three-pointers. Allen retired in November 2016 after 18 seasons with Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston and Miami, announcing the decision in a letter on The Players' Tribune. His totals included 1,300 regular-season games at 18.9 points per game, ten All-Star selections, two championships, an Olympic gold medal from the 2000 Sydney Games and a place on the NBA's 75th Anniversary Team. His career also included acting: he played Jesus Shuttlesworth in Spike Lee's 1998 film He Got Game.
Another part of his public life took root during his playing years. Allen first read Anne Frank's diary in middle school and has said he did not realize the Holocaust was an actual event until he watched Schindler's List in 1993. In 1998, Bucks owner Herb Kohl invited him on a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Allen began encouraging teammates to join museum tours whenever his teams played in Washington, first in Milwaukee and later in Seattle and Boston.
President Barack Obama appointed Allen to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 2016. "To see and to feel what these people went through," he said, describing his wish to put his feet on those grounds. In spring 2017, he traveled to Poland with Rabbi Simon Taylor. Over three days, the group visited Warsaw ghetto sites, met Moshe Tirosh, a Holocaust survivor who had been hidden as a child at the Warsaw Zoo, and walked through the barracks at Auschwitz.
The trip also included physical work. Allen helped a group called From the Depths recover Jewish headstones that had been stolen and used as construction material during the war, carrying them back to a Jewish cemetery. He visited the Polish town of Ciepielów, where a Polish family hid Jews beneath a kitchen floor and paid for it with their lives.
When he shared the trip online, some friends and followers asked why a Black man who was not Jewish would make the Holocaust such a priority. Allen answered each message, according to Taylor, and afterward wrote an essay for The Players' Tribune explaining that he had gone to Poland as a human being. As a Black man, he told WBUR, he sees a connection between that history and the fights for acceptance and equality in his own country: "I just ask that people have empathy."
He was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018, and he has said he plans to continue his Holocaust education with return visits to Poland and a trip to Israel.
