Catching up with Mark Macon

BALTIMORE — The utilitarian RAC Arena on the campus of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County is not the last place on earth where one would expect to find a former MVP of the McDonald’s High School All-Star Game who also was one of the top handful of players ever to pass through the Big Five. Not to mention it’s not exactly the last place to look for an old NBA lottery pick and finalist for the Wooden Award.  

But it would probably rate in the top 10.

That’s nothing against UMBC or its bucolic campus located just a dozen or so miles south west of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s just that NBA veterans and all-time leader scorers for one of the most-storied college basketball program in the history of the sport tend not to get to too many America East Conference games. Nor do guys who were once said to be the second-coming of Oscar Robertson turn up in 3,000-seat basketball gyms dressed fashionably in a pastel shirt and a dark suit to work the sidelines as the head coach for the University of Binghamton.

Then again, Mark Macon has always been a little bit different.  

Mark Macon. Yes that Mark Macon, the first high school All-American to sign on at Temple University where he immediately helped push the team to a No. 1 ranking for nearly all of the 1987-88 season, is the head coach for the Binghamton Bearcats. It’s the same guy who twice led John Chaney’s Owls to the regional finals in the NCAA Tournament in two memorable performances. In one of those games Macon’s 25-foot three-pointer dropped a centimeter away from sending Temple into the Final Four in a classic against North Carolina, and the other time… well, let’s just say Duke’s Billy King had a pretty good day.

Strangely, despite all of the great games and acclaim Macon had during his basketball career, he seems to be most remembered for the 1988 game against Duke where he went 6-for-29 with more air balls than made shots. In the history of bad performances in a big games Macon’s showing in his freshman season is one that will be difficult to duplicate. After all, how many coaches are going to allow a freshman to miss 23 shots in a game, let alone fire up 29 of them?

Maybe it’s that game that helped strip the remaining bit of hubris away from the young player (that he hadn’t already removed himself) and placed him on his course to be a coach and a teacher. After all, they say the greatest lessons are learned from failure.  

Or not.

“When I was at Temple I never dreamed that one day I would be a coach,” Macon said. “It might have been in the back of my mind, maybe, but I never imagined anything like this.”

Life can be funny that way for ex-ballplayers. Regardless, as the acting head coach for the University of Binghamton, Macon’s players were not even alive when their coach was the most electrifying freshman ever to hit Philadelphia.  

“If they were, they had rattles,” Macon said.

Needless to say, the current bunch of Bearcats never heard Dick Vitale scream wild proclamations about how their coach was the best college player in the country, or saw his photo on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Chances are they never even heard of him until last year.

But then again Macon prefers it that way.

“They know what they Google,” Macon said. “That’s it. They don’t ask me about games or anything like that, but they know when I was drafted [by Denver with the No. 8 overall pick] and they make fun of me for the shorts that we wore.”

Chip off the old Owl
It takes about a minute from watching the action on the court to figure out who Macon’s coaching influence was. Then again, that’s way too obvious. Anyone who ever spent 30 seconds at Temple University in the late 1980s and early 1990s knew the connection Chaney and Macon had. As a player Macon often begged his coach to hold him more accountable than the rest of the players. In fact, there are stories about how the player even asked the coach to yell at him more. There’s another story about how the player told the coach he was disappointed that he wasn’t chastised more often.

Meanwhile, Chaney told anyone who would listen that he preferred Macon taking a bad shot over a teammate taking a good shot. That might explains those 23 misses in the ’88 regional finals, but it definitely sheds light on their relationship.

Even now Chaney’s voice is never far from the new coach’s own voice.

“I told him I wanted to be a sponge,” Macon said. “I wanted to learn everything he knew.”

Did he get it all?

“No, the master always keeps a few things for himself,” he said with a smile.

Still, it’s not the only voice he uses. Macon says he borrows bits and pieces from every coaches he ever had during his playing career and even a few he never got to work with, including Larry Brown, Hubie Brown and Bobby Knight. Those men were (and are) classic teachers, he says.

A chance meeting with Hubie Brown while in high school left a big impression, Macon says.

“When Hubie Brown was coaching the Knicks they used our school for practice. I got to watch him and Bernard King,” Macon said with a smile of the memory. “That was something I really learned a lot from.”

Not many high school kids would pick up more from a veteran basketball coach, especially when Bernard King was in the room, but that kind of explains how he has always looked at things.  

However, as a coach Macon isn’t quite to the extremes as his mentor was. Sure, it was Chaney who dragged Macon into the coaching business in 2001 when he invited his favorite player to be one of his assistants. He stayed with Chaney at Temple until 2006 before moving onto Georgia State for a year before a new administration took over the athletic department. In 2007, ex-Georgetown assistant Kevin Broadus hired Macon to join him at Binghamton as his right-hand man at Binghamton, and it seemed to be running smoothly. Last season Broadus was named the America East coach of the year after he led the team to a 23-9 record and an appearance in the NCAA Tournament.

Things were good. That is until all hell broke loose within the program last year.

According to reports, Serbian player Miladin Kovacevic is accused of beating another student into a coma in July of 2008. Published reports say he posted bail and left the country. Four months after that, another player, Malik Alvin, was accused of stealing a box of condoms from an area Wal-Mart and assaulting a woman as he tried to flee the scene.  

Last March, a woman working for the university alleged “egregious acts of sexual misconduct” against two athletic administration officials. That was followed by the Sept. 2009 charge against player Emanuel Mayben for distribution and possession of cocaine. That one was the proverbial last straw as six players were kicked off the team, athletic director Joel Thirer was forced to resign, and just before practice was to start for the year, Broadus was put on paid leave.

That’s how Macon got his first head coaching gig and was handed a team with none of its top scorers back from the 23-9 club and only seven scholarship players. He also has a Division III transfer, a couple of walk-ons, two kids from Canada, one from Paris, France, and another Ankara,Turkey.

Certainly Macon doesn’t have the same problems as someone like John Calipari has at Kentucky.

Needless to say that’s not the ideal situation to break into, but Macon’s team is 9-13 with a 4-3 record in the conference after the 80-63 victory over UMBC. All things considered, that’s not too bad.

Dropping knowledge
No, Macon doesn’t have that booming voice that Chaney used more as a weapon than a motivating tactic, but he doesn’t need it. Instead, he wears a perpetual scowl during the game and keeps the jacket to his suit buttoned up unlike his rumpled mentor.

Afterwards, with a victory wrapped up, Macon discusses personal philosophy — some wrapped in Chaney-isms — and teaching methods. He says he always thought he’d be a teacher, though not completely because of his degree from Temple in education. Chaney often did the same thing, too, only more colorfully.

However, during a radio interview with the crew from Binghamton, Macon was overheard using the axiom, “Speed kills…” When told that the source of that quote was pretty easy to figure out, all Macon could do was smile broadly.

“The master,” he said. “I got that one from the master.”

That was before he launched into an adage about crossing the street with cars whizzing by at 75-mph, complete with head-scratchers involving principles of time, space and distance.

Then there was the one that makes one’s head hurt.

“I tell them about making their present their future,” he said. “Before, we were in the locker room talking about the game and then we went out and won. By the time we got back to the locker room we had made out present our future.”

In other words, I tell him, it’s like the saying that there is no such thing as tomorrow because when it gets here, it’s today.

“Exactly,” he said. “But that’s only if you wake up.”

Too many distractions
He also carries a bit of an aloofness that Chaney never had. During timeouts Macon usually lets assistant Marc Hsu instruct the team on the bench while he huddles with top assistant Don Anderson on the floor. He also has repeatedly turned down numerous media requests from reporters from his hometown of Saginaw, Mich., Detroit (where he spent a few seasons with the Pistons), and Philadelphia.

That’s because Macon says he doesn’t want to be the only voice his kids hear.

“They hear things from a lot of voices, and mine is just that of another teacher,” he said, alluding that he doesn’t want to hammer his players with too much from just him.

Still, there are other reasons, perhaps, but some close observers of the Binghamton team have wondered if Macon was really interested in any of it at all.

Nope, they just don’t know Macon.  

Even as a teenager jumping into the world of big-time college basketball, Macon often distanced himself from what he felt were distractions. After all, it was because of Macon that Chaney instituted his policy of forbidding the press to talk to his underclassmen and at Binghamton, Macon took the policy a step further. For the press that covers the team, Macon allows only his two captains, Moussa Camara (from Paris), and Chretien Lukusa (from Toronto), to talk to the media.

It’s just too much of a distraction, the coach says.  

“When I took over [Broadus] told me to keep it simple,” he explained. “when we started the breaks were on, but out there now I want to go 120-mph. We’re getting there.”

That’s Macon in a nutshell — he works to avoid distractions. As a teenager during his first year at Temple, Macon decided that anything other than studying and basketball were a waste of time so he effectively eliminated normal collegiate pursuits from his life. Instead, he collected homilies and adages, wrote letters to his family and friends and maintained as much as an ascetic life as possible for a famous athlete in North Philadelphia.

As Chaney said in 1990 interview with Sports Illustrated, “Mark is common. He never leaves the earth.”

“I never heard that before. I like that,” Macon said when re-read the quote. “That means I’m rooted — I’m grounded. … I am no different than anyone else, but I am as great as I want to be.”

Two decades later and it’s still the same. 

Getting to know Pete Rose

There are not very many sports figures in which the public image perfectly matches who the person really is. Most of that is because most public figures — and especially athletes — protect that image as if it’s a newborn. Often press types are told by these people that they really don’t care what anyone thinks about them, but the opposite is the actual reality.

Pete Rose, however, is not one of those guys. Aside from hiding the truth about his gambling on baseball, what you see is what you get from Pete. He’s one of those guys where reading between the lines is totally unnecessary because he’ll tell you exactly what he means. Forget sports figures… that’s rare trait in any person in any walk of life.

Pedro Martinez, John Chaney, Allen Iverson and Charles Barkley are a few of the folks who passed through the city who just didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought about them. If you asked any of them a question, you got a real answer. In fact, once I asked John Chaney something (I forget what it was, but it might have been about Aaron McKie, Eddie Jones, Johnny Miller or Mik Kilgore) and not only did he tell me it was a stupid question, but he told me why it was a stupid question.

Who takes the time to do that? That John Chaney is a real sweetheart when it comes to things like that. No, that was not the sarcasm font.

Anyway, in December of 2008 I spent an afternoon chatting and hanging out with Pete Rose in Las Vegas as he signed autographs and posed for photos with some slack-jawed yokels. Needless to say, it was a blast and that was before Pete broke out the prison stories from when he did time for tax evasion.

A few times I had to pinch myself because the ex-con telling me the stories about his time in the slam was Pete Rose.

“When I was in there it was the only Level 6 [federal prison] in the entire system in the U.S.,” Rose said about his jail term. “I had to work in the main prison. I had to go every day and the people in Marion were in the cage 23 out of 24 hours a day. We were the only camp who didn’t have cable TV, because then every [bleeper] in there would have had to have it in every cell.

“I worked in the welding department. My job was to have the [bleeping] hot chocolate made by 8:15 a.m. every day. That was my [bleeping] job. And every time the warden was coming back [to the welding department] they had me back as far back as I could go because I was a high-profile guy. They’d also say, ‘The old man is on the way back,’ and every time he came back I was in my little kitchen sweeping the floor. He said, ‘Pete, you know something, this is the cleanest damn floor in this entire prison. Because every time I come back there you’re sweeping this damn kitchen.’ I said, ‘Hey, I gotta keep it clean!’

“A couple years ago we we’re selling Pete Rose cookies with a company out of St. Louis. The only place you could get these cookies is in prison. They can’t sell them in a supermarket. A couple years ago I went to North Carolina for a convention of all the commissaries and all the wardens came. That warden came and got my autograph.

“I should have signed the broom for him.”

Beat that one.

This is not a deleted scene from that day in Las Vegas:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZapdwATUqY&w=425&h=344]

We all have our favorite stories that regardless of how much information we’ve accumulated on the topic, we hunger for more. For me some of those subjects are Watergate, the invasion of Normandy, Len Bias, punk rock from Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, and Pete Rose. Sure, there a few others but that’s what comes to mind quickly.

Needless to say I will definitely watch the documentary by a bunch of guys from Cincinnati called, “4,192: The Making of the Hit King.” Interestingly, the film is taking the approach of concentrating solely on Rose’s playing career—a cute little tidbit that has gotten lost in that whole “banned for life” stuff. Other than some blind apologists, not many serious looks at Rose have taken this approach.

According to a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer on the documentary produced by Terry Lukemire and Barking Fish Entertainment, Rose participated with the filmmakers though they did not reveal what or if he was compensated.

“We want to give a new generation a chance to know about Rose,” Lukemire said.

How does one do that about a guy that everyone already knows everything? Easy… by concentrating on the part everyone has chosen to forget. Rose played baseball for 24 years in the Majors, and he is going on his 21st year of banishment. Chances are there is a lot we don’t remember.

Reynolds a blast from the past

Spend 10 years writing exclusively about baseball and it’s easy to get lost about the goings on in other sports. There is only so much one guy can do to keep up with the full range of games, but when it gets right down to it sometimes all a guy can do is focus on what is in front of him.

Over the past decade I’ll wager that I have been to approximately 1,000 baseball games, but maybe 30 to 40 college basketball games. A long time ago those numbers would have been reversed.

The bad par, of course, is missing out on the terrific ballplayers that came through the Big Five over the past decade. Oh sure, I caught Jameer Nelson just because St. Joe’s was one of the biggest stories of 2004 when they were No. 1 for most of the college season. However, names like Randy Foye, Allan Ray, Dionte Christmas, Pat Carroll, Mardy Collins, Dante Cunningham, David Hawkins , Kyle Lowry, Steven Smith and Curtis Sumpter (amongst other standouts over the last 10 years), get lost in the pile of early-season ballgames.

Fortunately, Scottie Reynolds of Villanova decided to return to Villanova for his last season because it would be a shame to miss out on watching him play.

Reynolds is an undersized guard in a city with a long tradition of great guards. Though he’s listed at 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds, I suspect he’s probably an even 6-foot and maybe a few pounds lighter. However, unlike the traditional Big 5 guard, Reynolds isn’t content to stay in the backcourt in half-court sets and spread the ball around like Howie Evans, Pepe Sanchez or even a shooter like Lynn Greer.

Reynolds will mix it up inside if need be. For instance, even though he scored 12 straight points from the outside in the first half of the 82-77 victory over No. 11 Georgetown at the Wachovia Center on Sunday afternoon, Reynolds’ biggest hoop of the game came with 3:14 left when he knifed to the hoop against three bigger players for a layup and a foul. For good measure he made four straight foul shots to held ice the game with less than 36 seconds remaining.

Reynolds scored 27 points on just 15 shots and 29 minutes in the victory over Georgetown.

“He can’t be contained,” Georgetown’s coach John Thompson III said after the game. “I don't say that in jest. He's too good of an offensive player and they do too good of a job of getting him where he needs to be. It's nothing new. He’s been doing it for four years. What's different is now as a senior, when they need a basket, he ends up with the ball in his hand and good things happen.”

Though he’s a small guard, Reynolds has a game similar to 6-foot-5 Big Five guard, Mark Macon of Temple. The difference, of course, was that Temple relied on Macon to score. In fact, John Chaney, Macon’s college coach, was known to say that he’d rather have Macon take a bad shot than another player to take a good one. That’s how much Macon meant to Temple and Chaney.

But aside from his freshman year in 1988 when Temple was the No. 1 team in the country, Macon didn’t have the supporting cast like Reynolds has had with Villanova. Still, even with teammates destined for the NBA like Foye, Cunningham, Ray and Kyle Lowry, Reynolds should hit the 2,000-point plateau by the end of the month.

Depending upon how far Villanova goes into the NCAA Tournament, Reynolds could flirt with Kerry Kittles’ all-time scoring record (2,243), which is saying something considering all the talent he had to share the ball with.

Still, the best part about Reynolds—and where he is most like Macon—is that he is accountable. Though Chaney would always forgive one of Macon’s hurried shots, the former Owl (now acting head coach at the University of Binghamton) famously pleaded with his coach to yell at him more. Because Chaney leaned on him so much more than the others, Macon thought he should also have to face the music more often, too.

As if anyone has to tell John Chaney to scream at them twice…

Villanova’s coach Jay Wright also forgives a lot of Reynolds’ mistakes for a lot of the same reasons. That attitude works out very well when Reynolds turns in some bad games like the one he had in the Big East Tournament semifinals against Louisville last year where he went 1-for-6 from the field, including 0-for-3 from beyond the three-point arc with six turnovers and just two measly points in 38 minutes.

Prior to that, Reynolds dropped 40 points on Seton Hall only to fall into a funk where it took him four games to match the scoring output of that one game.

“Some games we lose and he looks really bad, but that never affects him. He comes back the next game and makes the same plays,” Wright said last season, marveling at Reynolds’ fearlessness in the face of failure. “That's a great quality to have as an athlete.”

So if you get the chance to catch Reynolds in action (and you’re into that sort of thing), make sure you do it. After all, players like him are seen just a few times a decade.

Dunphy replaces a legend at Temple

Nearly twenty-five years ago when Temple’s president Peter Liacouras was looking for a coach to turn his school’s middling basketball program back into a big-time, perennial powerhouse, he decided to hire an up-and-coming, 50-year-old man to restore the glory. A “best-kept-secret,” John Chaney was not exactly a household name beyond the insular world of Division II basketball, specifically, the small school PSAC, where Chaney guided little Cheyney State into one of those teams that just scared the living daylights out of people.

In fact, they still talk about Chaney, who was much more unbridled than during the later years at Temple, putting on shows on the sidelines while his teams took care of business at places like Millersville, Kutztown and Shippensburg. Certainly, no one back then thought Chaney was heading for the Hall of Fame. Count him in that bunch, too, since he has always maintained that he would have never left Cheyney had they offered him tenure.

But they didn’t and we all know how his story turned out.

So 25 years after Temple took a chance on 50-year old Wild John from Cheyney State, Temple announced that it will take a chance on a 56-year-old basketball lifer. This time, though, the choice to take Temple back to its basketball glory days is Fran Dunphy, who has spent the past decade-and-a-half nearby at Penn. It was there that Dunphy won title after title in the Ivy League in very much the same way Chaney did in the PSAC.

Obviously, there is a quite a difference between the Ivy League and the state schools of Pennsylvania. And certainly Dunphy is not quite the “unknown” that Chaney was when he arrived at Temple despite being tabbed with such a label.

“He’s one of America’s best-kept secrets,” Chaney said.

That in itself is quite a feat. Dunphy had taken Penn to 10 NCAA Tournaments, and compiled over 300 victories all without offering a single scholarship to any of his players. In the history of the city’s Big 5, Dunphy is one of just six coaches to win more than 300 games at the same school. Yet with four starters returning from last season’s team that cruised to the Ivy League championship before losing to Texas in the first-round of the NCAA Tournament, Dunphy could have very easily relaxed for the rest of his career, earning tournament bid after tournament bid while cultivating his legendary status at 33rd and Walnut.

But there is something kind of boring about that for Dunphy. Having spent his entire life with basketball programs that were almost big time, but not quite as an undergrad and assistant at La Salle before taking over at Penn, Dunphy, deep down, knows he will never get to the Final Four with the Quakers.

Yes, of course there are many challenges remaining at Penn for Dunphy. After all, it’s hard work to get to the top and stay there year after year. But if George Mason can go to a Final Four with Jim Larranaga as the coach, why can’t Dunphy do it?

Then again, Chaney never got to the Final Four at Temple, one of the winningest basketball programs in the country, though he came awfully close five times. Plus, recruiting kids to play for Temple is a lot different than at Penn. That’s not a knock on either school, it’s just the way it is.

So with his dreams and wanderlust, Dunphy will dig in on North Broad Street where his teams will play in a fancy new building complete with all of the modern amenities that coddled college basketball studs expect. Those things come with bigger expectations and more pressure, but it seems as if the unflappable Dunphy, seemingly rejuvenated by the switch, can handle it just fine.

He just seems like the man Temple was looking for.

“It’s as I once said, you want to stay your course,” Chaney said. “That means when you have made a decision on who you want to come into our high-profile program, you want to be sure you’re bringing in a great person.”

Excuse Chaney while he disappears

I'm just a blue-collar guy that goes to work ... In any job I've ever had, I've never thought about a time when I would leave. I just go to work. -- John Chaney

A few years back, an old college friend was stopped at a red light heading down North Broad after a summer school class at Temple when John Chaney rolled up in the lane next to him. But instead of waving hello, Chaney started right in needling the guy all while gathering information.

“Where are you off to?” Chaney asked between cracks about driving as if the old friend were fleeing the scene of a crime.

My friend told Chaney that he was off to visit a friend who had just undergone surgery and was in the hospital. In a conversation that lasted the length of time it takes a signal to turn from red to green, Chaney somehow deciphered the name of the friend and which hospital he was in.

In fact, my friend wasn’t even sure if he gave Chaney any revealing information until he was getting up to leave the hospital room. That’s when a package filled with Temple Basketball shirts, posters and a handwritten get-well card arrived.

“Who does that kind of thing?” my friend asked when re-telling the story.

John Chaney, that’s who.

“It took me a while to realize that everything he did, he did for me,” said NBA star and Temple alum, Eddie Jones, a few years ago. “It was all for me, never for him.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As long as I'm in this city, I'm a lightning rod. People don't like me for a lot of reasons and I create all of them. I love it when they hate me. All my closest friends hate me. -- John Chaney ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On a day that everyone knew was looming, the 74-year-old Chaney finally decided to take a cue from the last line from one of his favorite old Frank Sinatra standards and begged a full house in a conference room at the university’s Liacouras Center on Monday to, “Excuse me while I disappear.”

Fortunately for the people close to him – which seems to be just about half of the city – Chaney will not disappear. We won’t let him. Oh sure, he might sleep in to 6 a.m. now, or he might turn up on TV here and there or find a seat in the stands “with some peanuts and a beer, telling lies.” He just won’t be stalking, ranting and cussing along the sidelines looking like an unmade bed with his tie off-center, top two buttons undone and a sweater vest hanging on for dear life. That’s all over.

But he’s not going anywhere. There are just too many stories to tell.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A blind man ain't got no business at a circus. --John Chaney ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like the one where he tried to keep Ramon Rivas out of a huddle during a timeout so that his brawny center would not hear the play after his teammates ignored the coach’s plea not to pass him the ball even though he was wide open.

“There's a reason why a guy's open, you know what I'm saying? He's always going to be open if he can't shoot. There's a reason. They leave him open.”

During Monday’s announcement, Temple’s president David Adamany told of how Chaney donated money to the school’s plea for funds for the library. Adamany revealed the story as if it tales of Chaney’s generosity was a new thing, which is hardly the case. In fact, Chaney dipped into his own pocket to help pay for the new basketball arena and he was renowned for taking sponsorship money from the likes of Nike and turning it over to the school and the underprivileged.

“If you’re going to reach the ceiling, you have to lift the floor up,” he said Monday. “If you can get a youngster to reach that ceiling, he’ll reach back and pick somebody else up.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Winning is an attitude. -- John Chaney ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Surely, generosity from the well-heeled isn’t really a big deal and it’s not anything people should celebrate. It’s a duty, according to Chaney.

“I remember an old poem by a man named Walt Whitman who once said, ‘I celebrate myself.’ I didn’t come here to celebrate myself. I came here to recognize people and recognize this university for giving a 50-year-old man a chance to come and coach,” Chaney said.

Oh, but Camden’s Uncle Walt could have been writing about Chaney in his epic Song of Myself. After all, it’s the line following, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” that tells the story:

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

So Chaney should celebrate himself. After all, his allure and the reason why so many people love him has nothing to do with basketball.

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