Mason beats Bears ... then joins ’em
WACO, Texas — Makai Mason’s first name means “winds to the sea” in Hawaiian, but the winds of basketball life have brought him here to the banks of the Brazos River in central Texas.
This doesn’t mean they didn’t already know him when he showed up in Waco last spring after he graduated from Yale. The folks around here haven’t forgotten what Mason did to the Baylor basketball team that afternoon of March 17, 2016 in Providence.
“For sure, it’s come up,” Mason said at the Ferrell Center, hours before the Baylor women would end UConn’s 126-game regularseason winning streak. “In the summer, it was on in the locker room a couple of times. It was kind of weird.
“Ish Wainwright’s in there and stuff like that. Kind of reliving it a little bit. Yeah, I just walked in and some of the guys were watching it. It was pretty funny.”
Mason was terrific in scoring 31 points as No. 12 Yale upset No. 5 Baylor at Dunkin’ Donuts Center and everyone, including Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, couldn’t stop talking about him. An Ivy League school had toppled a major conference program and the 6-1 sophomore guard with a compelling story became the early face of 2016 March Madness. Baylor coach
Scott Drew would say, “Mason controlled the game.”
And now here he is, 1,000 days later, averaging 14 points for Drew and Baylor as a graduate transfer. Here he is talking about Wainwright, who also played Baylor football and now is playing basketball in Germany. Talking about circling the calendar for the Baylor women’s game against UConn. Yes, he beat Baylor. And he joined ’em.
“I’m enjoying it, I like the whole experience,” said Mason, working on a graduate degree in sports management. “It’s obviously a little different than Yale in terms of New Haven vs. Waco and the Big 12, maybe the best conference in America, vs. Ivy League.”
Yes, he decides, “I guess there are a lot of differences.”
“I’m the first grad transfer they’ve had here at Baylor in the program history,” Mason said. “It’s a little experiment, kind of figuring things out on the fly. I’m in class with some of our graduate assistants. So that’s pretty funny.”
The Ivy League and NCAA can make for strange bedfellows. Some rules smack of early 20th century amateurism. Some practices smack of 21st century network television money. At any rate, Mason found himself looking at the Ivy League eligibility rule that stipulates a player can compete only in a four-year time frame. The NCAA allows a fifth year.
His injury came in a closed scrimmage against Boston University before the 20162017 season. Mason dislocated his right toe, broke the sesamoid bone in the ball of his foot and torn the plantar plate. He lost his junior season.
“I made it known I wanted to do the grad transfer thing after my injury,” Mason said. “We looked at different schools. We got to know the Baylor coaches. We decided if I liked it when I was down here, this was the place.”
Notre Dame, Duke, Gonzaga, were interested, too. He decided on Baylor in May 2017.
The first story of Makai and his dad Dan was well told in March of 2016. There were some elements as classic as the Yale blue and neon yellow Baylor uniforms worn in Providence. Dan Mason, who coached high school ball, raised his son to be a player from a very early age. He developed Makai’s skills in most comprehensive and nuanced drills. He brought Makai from their home in rural Greenfield, Mass., to the urban environment of Springfield to forge his game. When Dan became turned off by the AAU world he pulled Makai out and, not surprisingly, his recruiting ratings fell. Mason played for The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville before Yale. It was not a surprise he quickly became one of the Ivy League’s best players.
There is a second story now, one of perseverance and an unrelenting love for the
game. Mason played only one game between the second-round loss to Duke and hitting three 3-pointers in his first game with Baylor against Nicholls State on Nov. 16.
“It was tough,” Mason said. “You have something you love most in life on a dailybasis taken away, it’s definitely tough.”
There were rehabs. There was the steerable kneewalker. There was shooting and dribbling from chairs. Cleared to play, with big things expected for his senior year, Mason suffered a stress fracture of in his foot before the November 2017 opener. Overcompensation may have caused foot pressure elsewhere. Mason finally got back in the lineup after 25 games in February, played one game against Harvard and went back out. His Yale career was over.
“I think it’s fair to say I don’t take anything for granted now,” Mason said.
The good news is a Yale political science major was healthy enough to walk for graduation.
“To have my parents there, family and friends, to understands all the sacrifices they had made in my life, was really cool,” Mason said. “It was surreal, honestly.”
And wouldn’t you know it? Three-four days before the Baylor opener, he suffered a sprained ankle. Surreal, honestly.
“It was like, ‘Here we go again,’ ” Mason said. “David Chandler (Baylor director of athletic training) is great, working with me every day to get me on the court. It was great to be out there competing again.”
Mason said his parents, who had been to a couple games already, were coming to the TCU game Saturday and were staying for games against Iowa State and Kansas. Dan and Jody moved to Meriden while Makai was at Yale. Neither are of Hawaiian descent. Jody was born in Germany and reportedly considered naming him Wolfgang. Makai holds dual passport and played some with the German national team.
“I owe pretty much my whole basketball career to my dad,” Mason said. “His wisdom, his hours in the gym, his sacrifices, it has been invaluable. I want to make him and my mom proud every night. It is cool to be on this journey with them.”
It is a basketball journey that included a fascinating game of pickup in Springfield.
“It was one of those things where my dad didn’t want to tell my mom where we were,” Mason said. “There was like a disagreement over a foul. The next thing you know the guy has a knife, waving it around, threatening him. It was wild. I was like 11-12.”
At this point, Mason is laughing.
“We got through it,” he said. “We were able to finish the game. And we came back the next day.”
He’s looking to make a mark on the Big 12 this winter. He’ll look to get workouts with NBA teams after the season. He’ll look to play pro ball wherever it takes him. That’s the thing about Makai Mason. He always comes back the next day.