"From the suburbs of Michigan to the college courts of Temple University, to the NBA and now Binghamton University, there are two commonalities that describe Mark Macon: the most obvious, a basketball player, the other, a student.
The 39-year-old assistant coach for the Binghamton men’s basketball team found his way to Vestal after crisscrossing the nation as an NBA player and college All-Star.
But none of that would have been possible if not for his upbringing in Saginaw, Mich., and the seven men who ground him into the man that he is today.
Macon’s story begins on the monkey bars of A.A. Claytor Elementary School in his neighborhood of Buena Vista, just outside the city of Saginaw.
During the summer between third and fourth grade, 10-year-old Macon picked up the game that would change his life. Though he originally started out as a football player — it was the predominate sport of his neighborhood — Macon would swing from the monkey bars, trying to slam dunk a small basketball.
“At the time, I couldn’t dribble,” Macon said.
During the fourth grade, Macon got involved in organized basketball programs, even though he still loved football.
“I kind of fell in love with [basketball] cause it was something I liked to do because I was a competitor,” he said.
Macon had a drive to want to be better.
“When I learned something with my right hand, I did it with my left,” he said. “I never wanted to lose in things I did as a kid. So it kind of stuck with me.”
The First of Seven
His fourth and fifth grade coach, the first of seven men to shape his life, was Mr. Pruitt.
“[Mr. Pruitt] knew nothing about basketball, but knew everything about family,” Macon said.
Macon quickly realized that basketball had helped him in more ways than one.
“In order for us to play, we had to have a character grade,” Macon said. “You had to be a good kid going through grade school.”
His second coach was Mr. Pfifer, in sixth grade.
In the seventh grade, Macon met his tough, yet compassionate coach, Mr. Samuels, a teacher at his junior high school.
Up through seventh grade, Macon only played with other kids in his neighborhood and local areas like and ‘the city,’ yet he said it was all about competing and falling in love with the sport.
As he grew older, Macon attempted to compete against the high school players. But they wouldn’t let the seventh grader play.
“They would take my ball, tell me I was going to play,” Macon said. “I’d try to fight them and get my ball back, but it wasn’t to the point that we got in fist fights; they would just hit [you] in the arm and make you cry.”
But one high school athlete befriended Macon.
Derek Richardson, the football player that everyone looked up to, told young Macon to keep playing and that he was going to be good at it. But before Richardson got a chance to watch Macon play, he died in a car accident.
“To my whole neighborhood, it was crushing because he was that first athlete in my local area that was really good,” he said.
In the eighth grade, Macon’s game improved thanks to the fourth man of his life, Coach Dowdell, a tactician as Macon described him. However, with better skill came a slight hint of arrogance.
It took an incident, which Macon only divulged as unsportsmanlike, for him to learn the hard truth of discipline.
“It embarrassed my team and myself and until I apologized to my team, I couldn’t play,” he said.
The High School Years
From there, Macon headed to Buena Vista High School, where he practiced all the time in the summer.
“I couldn’t shoot a jump shot to save my life [before then],” he said.
Enter man No. 5, Macon’s high school coach Norwaine Reed, who Macon said was “somebody who if you didn’t know him, you’d think he was the meanest man in the world.” Macon almost did not want to play for him.
“[Reed] was just a disciplinarian, was serious about coaching kids and the development of kid,” Macon said.
That summer, the high school team played in Detroit at St. Cecilia School.
“[Reed] told me ‘If you can score here, you can play with anybody,’” he said. “I had two points and from that time on, I felt like I was just as good as anyone I played against.”
That’s where his career as a basketball player truly changed.
“He started teaching … the mental aspect of basketball, how it was the key not only to basketball but to everything in your life,” Macon said. “The mind is 4-to-1 the physical and the more you dwell into it, you tend to realize that your mind is one of the strongest instruments in your body.”
During the summer going into his senior year, Macon met Temple University head coach John Chaney, who was recruiting Macon’s teammate Shawn Randolph. Macon instantly fell in love with Chaney’s style and wanted to play for him, despite originally wanting to play at Georgetown or UNC.
“[Chaney] was talking about how simple basketball is [saying], ‘ABC, 123, then back to A.’ I pulled my coach to the side and told him ‘This is where I want to go, Coach. I want to go to Temple,’” Macon remembered saying.
It was an opportunity for Macon and Randolph to continue their success together. Macon finished his high school career as a McDonald’s All-American, where he was the MVP of that McDonald’s game.
Temple and the Sixth Man
At Temple, Macon quickly realized why he was there: for an education and basketball, nothing else.
After attending a few parties, he decided not to get involved in the party atmosphere of college, but rather focus on what was really important.
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