Two weeks ago, Cuonzo Martin was asked to describe his kind of basketball player.
“Let me ask you a question,” he shot back with a gleam in his eye. “How would you describe me?”
How do you describe Cuonzo Martin? The word is always the same.
“I think he's tough,” Missouri assistant coach Cornell Mann said. “Without a doubt.”
“Tough,” junior forward Kevin Puryear said. “The main component is just being tough and gritty and not taking anything from anybody.”
“Tough,” Stephen F. Austin head coach Kyle Keller said after an 82-81 loss to Martin’s Tigers. “East St. Louis. It doesn’t get any tougher than that.”
“That’s what makes him him,” senior guard Kassius Robertson said. “His toughness.”
That’s Cuonzo Martin. Tough.
The kid who grew up with a single mother in East St. Louis and got out. The young man who helped Purdue to two Big Ten titles, made the all-conference team as a senior and hit eight three-pointers to sink Kansas in the Sweet Sixteen despite two knees that had doctors telling Gene Keady he would never play for the Boilermakers. The professional basketball player who was told at 26 years old he had a cancerous tumor the size of a baseball in his chest that might very well kill him.
Yeah, that’s tough.
“I know he comes from humble beginnings,” Puryear said. “Just to see how appreciative he is to coach us and how appreciative he is of the game of basketball is a true testament to that. He’s just been a pleasure to be around.”
Jim Sterk hired Martin to bring that toughness to Missouri last March. The Tigers were many things over the last three seasons. Tough wasn’t a word very often ascribed to them. The Tigers had won 27 games in three seasons and lost 68. This shouldn’t have been a quick fix.
Then Martin was hired in March and it was quicker than anyone could imagine. He brought in a glitzy, star-filled recruiting class led by the No. 1 high school player in the country. He added Robertson, a graduate transfer from Canisius. But he also leaned on Puryear and Jordan Barnett and Terrence Phillips, the holdovers from the Kim Anderson era who had been through all the losing, to help guide his newcomers in the ways of being a Division One basketball player. He found a role—and a big one—for Jordan Geist, who is currently Missouri’s main point guard after being written off as a guy who could be pushed out to free up a scholarship by many fans in the offseason.
“He’s done a great job of blending Kim (Anderson)’s players from last year with some high level recruits,” Keller said. “That’s hard to do. You all don’t know how hard that is.”
Having gotten all of two minutes and two points out of Michael Porter Jr., Martin has the Tigers sitting 10-2, on the right side of nearly every bracketologist’s prediction and a likely solid favorite against Illinois in Saturday’s Braggin’ Rights game.
How did he do it so quickly? He took a broken program and rebuilt it as his own.
“Not only just in terms of the players, but also in terms of the coaches. We’re a staff that he put together,” Mann said. “Yeah, I think 100 percent, you can see his mark and his hand all over this program. Guys do follow the beat of his drum. No doubt.”
The improvement on the court is obvious. Missouri has already matched its highest win total from the last three years. It was an admittedly low bar to clear. But here’s the thing: If you ask Martin or his players about his coaching style, the basketball doesn’t really even come up.
“Not only has he taught us things on the court, but I’d say people that play for coach Martin are men of integrity,” Puryear said. “That’s just what type of culture he establishes. Being good people and good basketball players as well.”
“You talk about being a man and what that looks like and what that feels like. A lot of times you have to be men on the court,” Mann said. “A lot of times we talk about being a man. But in life, you’re gonna be a dad, you’re gonna be an uncle or hopefully the guys we got are going to be better brothers and all of that. It’s about life. He’s teaching life lessons. He’s coaching basketball, but moreover coaching life.”
“If you’re not teaching life lessons, what are you teaching them?” Martin asked. “You’re wasting their time. Eventually they’ll be somebody’s father, they’ll be somebody’s husband, they’ll run a company one day. If they’re not learning those lessons now, then I didn’t do a good job.
“If I'm not doing it, if my assistant coaches aren’t doing it, then we’ve got to find a new staff.”
Life lessons? Cuonzo Martin’s got a few of those.
“Such a wise guy, too, off the court,” Robertson said. “He’s been through a lot so you can tell he’s learned a lot of lessons. He always tries to help us with that. He’s definitely a guy I look up to on and off the court.”
“He just brings out that fire in you,” Geist said. “Not only to just make us play the best, but also to be the best in the classroom, off the court just everything.”
Robertson has a tough time singling out a lesson he has learned from Martin. Eventually he settles on this: “You have to play your game like it’s going to be your last game. You’re not promised tomorrow. It puts things into perspective of going hard every night and treating every game like it’s your last. You might not get the chance to play ever again so you’ve got to leave it all out there.”
Martin cuts an imposing figure on the sideline. He stomps and scowls and screams. He still—at age 46—looks the part of an all-Big Ten basketball player.
“He brings out that fire,” Geist said. “I saw a video of him on Twitter just screaming. That’s just the way he is.”
He is—to put it bluntly—a no bullshit kind of guy.
“I’m never gonna disrespect them, I’m never going to embarrass them. You’ve never heard me say anything negative about these guys, you never will. But what happens is, I have to give it to them,” Martin said. “I want to win every game, but if I can give them something important to their lives and help them understand this is the truth. It might sting you a little bit, but this is the truth.”
“He’s gonna criticize you very hard,” Puryear said. “He’s gonna also tell you when you’ve done a great job as well. You can see him on the sidelines. He’s fired up and that gets us fired up as well just to see him get so involved in the game.”
“He’s built a certain way,” Mann said. “He’s built with a really tough outer coating. But don’t let it all fool you. It’s all because he’s got a big heart. Everything is made because he’s got a big heart and he cares about people and he cares about Mizzou, he cares about the program.”
Love, heart, life lessons. He's a basketball coach. But it's about so much more than basketball.
“I will do everything in my power so that when they leave this place, they had a great experience,” Martin said. “Not just because you won X amount of games, but my experience as a whole, when they sit back at 30 years old, 40 years old, (if) I get that call or one of the assistant coaches gets that call, ‘Coach I appreciate everything you did for me.’ That’s all that matters.”
For his players at Missouri—who have now been his players for all of nine months, and some not even that long—it’s already happening.
“We all just want to be like him,” Geist said.
“It’s a blessing,” Martin said when the statement was relayed. “I thank God that he said that because that’s what I try to strive to be.”
So how would Martin describe his kind of player?
“Is he a good person?” he asks. “Would they say that about him?”
Indeed, they would.
“He’s been where I want to go,” Robertson said. “He’s definitely someone that I try to emulate.”
