The Hustler
Gamecocks’ Martin has busted his tail to go from JV coach to Sweet 16
SOME things are just too far-fetched to even dream about. Are you kidding? Frank Martin was 27 years old, still coaching junior varsity ball at Miami Senior High School. Do you know how many rungs on the coaching ladder you have to climb from there simply to consider such fantasies absurd?
So Martin didn’t obsess about his résumé or fret about the other 27-year-olds who were soaring to the front of the coaching game. He worried about getting up in the morning and making a difference. Thirteen of his first 16 years as a coach, he taught and coached in his neighborhood, in the shadow of the Orange Bowl. And loved it.
“Those kids needed the kind of guidance, the kind of helping hand, that I’d had,” Martin said. “Sure, you watch basketball on TV, you see the coaches, it’s hard not to wonder how they got where they got. But I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. And I was doing it exactly where I wanted to do it.”
Funny how things work out, though. Sunday, as a nation sat with dropped jaws, Frank Martin stole a peek — just a peek, mind you — to the other side of half-court at Bon Secours Wellness Arena and he realized his South Carolina Gamecocks were about to deliver him to victory over Mike Krzyzewski.
Now, Martin is no neophyte. He’d already won 117 games at Kansas State when he was hired at South Carolina in 2012. He’d already advanced as far as an Elite Eight with the Wildcats, which is farther than the Gamecocks had ever gotten, even during the 16 years they were coached by the fabled Frank McGuire. Over and over, he’s told his players this year: “I want you to experience what I’ve experienced.”
Now they were experiencing a victory over Duke and throwing busted brackets into Dumpsters all across the country. And he thought to himself: “Isn’t this unbelievable?” We don’t get the East Region we thought we were getting this weekend at Madison Square Garden. Villanova is back home, back on Philly’s Main Line, and the Blue Devils are in Durham, still trying to identify the steamroller that chased them from the tournament. The East survivors at the Garden read like the NCAA Tournament version of safety schools: Florida, Wisconsin, Baylor. And South Carolina.
Looking for a team to hang your hat on? Hang it on Carolina. Hang it on the Gamecocks. Hang it on Frank Martin, who got his job at Kansas State when Bob Huggins left for West Virginia and State was desperate to keep together a recruiting class that included Michael Beasley and Bill Walker. Martin’s hiring baffled a lot of people — he’d only been a college assistant for six years, he’d spent all those years in high school. Skeptics screamed: How do you win with a high school coach?
Martin always smiled when he heard that. Later, when that first team qualified for Kansas State’s first NCAA Tournament in 12 years, he explained why: “What you didn’t understand was you were paying me the ultimate compliment: You were calling me an educator.” Hang it on Carolina’s deep history, which, thanks to McGuire’s tenure, is deep with names intertwined with the golden age of New York basketball: Bobby Cremins (All Hallows) and Tom Owens and John Roche (both LaSalle), Kevin Joyce and Brian Winters (both Molloy) and the Dunleavy brothers (both Nazareth). “The game against Duke isn’t even over yet,” Martin said, laughing, “and already my phone is filling up with text messages from Kevin Joyce.” He said Mike Dunleavy, now coaching at Tulane and out recruiting (a good idea, since the Green Wave went 6-25 in his first season there) told him he was changing his flight so he could be at the Garden Friday, when the Gamecocks face Baylor. And if you’re feeling especially nostalgic? Hang it on the fact that Martin fervently embraces his ethereal connection to McGuire, the St. John’s man who built a champion at North Carolina and tried to do the same at South Carolina and for this reason or that never really came close to the Final Four. “Without what those guys did, building this program, we wouldn’t be here,” Martin said. “It’s important to me that these players know that.” It’s important to see what Frank Martin has done, too, and where he has come. Are you kidding? He didn’t play college ball. As a high school student he specialized in 30-hour work weeks, washing pots and pans, selling newspaper subscriptions, hustling the occasional game of pool, working a Dairy Queen in a segment of Miami so treacherous he’s often said he knew the guys with the guns who regularly came by to stick up the place so well they were on a first-name basis. “You move forward in this business,” he said, “by doing things the right way.” And sometimes that leads you all the way to the Sweet 16. All the way to a Friday night at the Garden, a building into which he first walked at age 40, coaching Kansas State. “Couldn’t ever afford to see a game here before that,” he said. “Are you kidding?”