Markquis Nowell and the Magic of March

For years, I was a college basketball nut. As a family, we moved from Cleveland to Charlotte when I was in high school, which is kind of a lousy time to move, and on one of my first days, a potential friend named Robert (who would actually become my best friend) asked, “What’s your team?”

When I said “Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Cavaliers, Cleveland …” he stopped me.

“No,” he said. “What’s your ACC team?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I considered myself something of a sports expert; that was my calling card back in Cleveland. But other than Saturday Ohio State football games and the vague knowledge that Buckeyes’ star Clark Kellogg was called “Special K,” I knew absolutely NOTHING about college sports. Seriously. I don’t remember ANYTHING about the Indiana State-Michigan State, Larry Bird-Magic Johnson national championship game. I don’t think I even watched it.

So not only did I not have an ACC team, I didn’t know what the ACC was and certainly couldn’t have named any of the schools in it (with all the conference realignment, I’m pretty much back in that spot now). Fortunately for me, Robert was from the North also and had gone through the transition, so he patiently named the teams and offered the pros and cons of rooting for each one. It seemed like North Carolina was the safest choice in various ways, so I chose UNC.

I was entirely unaware that the moment I chose to be a North Carolina fan, they had an incoming freshman you might have heard about, a guy named Michael Jordan.

The Tar Heels won the national championship that very year — Jordan hitting the game-winner against Georgetown — and it was such a new and wild experience for me to root for a team that actually won games and championships. I was totally hooked. I became the biggest ACC basketball fan going (moderation was never my thing). I learned all about the history of the conference. I became as big a fan of David Thompson and Walter Davis and Tom McMillen as I was of the current players.

And soon, that love spread to other teams — I became an obsessive St. John’s fan when they had Chris Mullin and Walter Berry and Bill Wennington; I loved Pearl Washington at Syracuse; I thrilled in watching Danny Manning at Kansas and Len Bias at Maryland and Muggsy Bogues at Wake Forest and Terry Gannon at N.C. State and Never Nervous Pervis at Louisville and my old high school classmate Byron Dinkins at UNC Charlotte.

Then, I started writing sports, and college basketball was among my favorite things to write about — my first national story was for The Sporting News about Byron Dinkins. And so it went on, I just loved college basketball, and I traveled the country watching it and writing about it — men's, women’s, all of it, Paul Pierce and Jackie Stiles and Carmelo Anthony and Becky Hammon and Steph Curry and T.J. Ford and Antoine Walker and Kevin Durant and Chamique Holdsclaw and Travis Best and Rick Barry’s kids and Tim Duncan and Blake Griffin and Danny Fortson and Stephanie White and Jacque Vaughn … even now I can see them in action and can feel the excitement they inspired in me.

I think about all the places where I’ve watched the most amazing games — Cameron Indoor and Allen Fieldhouse and Rupp Arena and Assembly Hall and the Palestra and Madison Square Garden and Bramlage Coliseum and the Dean Smith Center and The Pit and Gallagher-Iba and Hinkle Coliseum and so many others …

I think about all the coaches I’ve spent real time with — Dean Smith and Bobby Knight and Bill Self and Mike Krzyzewski and Skip Prosser and Dick Fick and Roy Williams and Rick Pitino and Bob Huggins (whew) and Quin Snyder and Hugh Durham and Jeff Mullins and so many others …

And if it sounds like I’m just listing off names and places, yes, that’s what I’m doing as I catalog my memory.

Markquis Nowell did this to me.

See, I left college basketball behind at some point a few years ago. It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision; my life and writing just took me in a different direction. I believe the last Final Four I attended (something that I luckily used to do every year) was back in 2011. I kept up with the sport for a little while, especially to check in on my coaching friends, but soon I barely even did that.

There’s something kind of interesting that has happened to sportswriting — there are very few generalists anymore. We used to have lots of generalists, which is to say sportswriters who wrote about every sport. My first book was a collection of columns I wrote at The Kansas City Star, and we titled it The Good Stuff. But I really wanted to call it “Whatever’s In Season,” because that was my charmed life, that was the charmed life of quite a lot of sportswriters. In the fall we’d write college and pro football and in the spring we’d write college and pro basketball and hockey and the Winter Olympics and the Masters and the Kentucky Derby, and in the summer we’d write baseball and the Summer Olympics and various golf and tennis tournaments and big fights and, as I say, whatever was in season.

That’s not really true anymore. There are a handful of seasonal sportswriters remaining, but only a handful; it doesn’t seem that readers want that kind of sportswriting anymore. Readers seem to prefer specialists who can offer deep insight into one sport. I get it. Time marches on. The weather constantly changes.

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But the point here is that I just lost touch with college basketball. March Madness would come and go and other than a brief check-in to see how my guy Bill Self was doing or what mega upset had happened, I didn’t pay attention.

This year was no different: I probably didn’t watch five minutes total of college basketball this season. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that Alabama or Houston is the best team in the country. Houston? Guy Lewis? Clyde Drexler? Alabama? Wimp Sanderson? Latrell Sprewell? It was going to be another disregarded March for me.

Only this year something wild happened: See, my wife, Margo, went to Kansas State. And while her school spirit has ebbed and flowed and disappeared through the years, for some reason she decided she would get excited about this particular Kansas State team, even though she didn’t know a single thing about them — seriously, there was no way in the world she could have even named the coach, let alone any of the players.

So, together, we watched Kansas State play Montana State last Friday … and were introduced to Markquis Nowell. People probably know a lot about him now, but then every detail was new. He’s 5-foot-8, was born on Christmas Day 1999 in New York City, he played for a time at famed St. Anthony High School under the coaching of Bob Hurley Sr., then transferred a couple of times. He went to play at Little Rock, was good there, also dealt with some stuff there, transferred to Kansas State last year and was asked to be the leader of this year’s hopeless Wildcats’ team under new coach Jerome Tang. The Wildcats were, more or less unanimously, picked to finish dead last in the conference.

Only it turned out that Nowell — along with some of the other players who transferred in — had a little bit of magic. The Wildcats won their first six games — including a victory in the Grand Cayman tournament — scored 116 points at Texas, knocked off Baylor in overtime, beat Kansas in overtime, beat a good Iowa State team, worked their way into the Top 25 and made the tournament as a No. 3 seed.

And, I guess, Nowell was spectacular. I say “I guess” because, as mentioned, I’d never heard of him before the Montana State game. But in the Montana State game, he was absolutely mesmerizing. All my life, I’ve been drawn to great passers — nothing in the game thrills me more than seeing someone thread a mind-bending pass through a flurry of defender’s hands to a player who is suddenly and inexplicably open.

And Nowell … well, he did that like EVERY TRIP DOWN THE FLOOR. He had 14 assists in the game, and each one had its own particular beauty. I mentioned above that I loved Pearl Washington at Syracuse; I think it was because he dripped New York, you know? Every part of his shake-and-bake, no-look pass style seemed to come right off the pavement of Rucker Park or Dyckman Park or The Hole.

That’s what Nowell plays like — flash (look at him go behind the back) and substance (he’s like a 90% free throw shooter) and joy (the smile; how can you not love that smile?) and general electricity. Holy cow, is this guy fun to watch! I found myself engrossed in a college basketball game for the first time in, well, I don’t even know how long.

Nowell is bringing his own special magic to March Madness. (Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

Then we watched Nowell and Kansas State play Kentucky, and if anything it was more exciting, he was more exciting, some of the passes he was connecting on were simply beyond comprehension. I mean that literally — beyond comprehension. He’d make one those passes to nobody and then a Kansas State player would just appear as if summoned by a magician and the ball would be in his hand and then it would be in the basket, and my mind simply could not comprehend it. I’d want to watch the replay two, three, four, five times just to understand what had happened.

There’s nothing quite like a single college basketball player just taking over a tournament. I saw it with Steph at Davidson, I saw it with Jackie at what was then Southwest Missouri State, I saw it with Wally Szczerbiak at Miami, Ohio — you can come up with plenty of your own. And it’s so thrilling. I don’t want to say that Nowell singlehandedly beat a supremely talented Kentucky team because, by definition, he’s a team player whose brilliance is his ability to lift his teammates higher and higher. It was actually another New Yorker and a Wake Forest transfer, Ismail Massoud, who hit the gut-punch shot that took out Kentucky.

But Nowell’s 27 points, nine assists, four steals, and two rebounds made for one of the most wonderful and joyful performances I’ve ever seen … and, man oh man, he hooked me on college hoops again.

As it turned out, all of it was just an appetizer for Nowell’s performance against Michigan State on Thursday. Forget the NCAA-record 19 assists. Forget the five steals, including the final strip that sealed the game. Forget the 20 points, including the last reverse layup to put the finishing touches on a 98-93 overtime victory. Forget the glorious three-pointer he was so sure about that he began running up the court before it splashed through the net. Forget that he did all of it on an ankle so badly twisted that, for a time, he couldn’t put any weight on it at all.

No. Just focus on one play, 92-92, less than a minute left, Nowell’s dribbling the ball just across half court, and he starts arguing with his coach, Jerome Tang. It isn’t exactly clear what they are arguing about, but somehow the argument made sense. Nowell had been running a little bit hot. In critical situations, he’d tried two absolutely terrible three-pointers from 30 or so feet out. The first one clanked away and gave Michigan State a chance to tie. The second one barely hit the finger of a Michigan State defender before bouncing out of bounds. You could sense that Nowell wanted it, perhaps, a little too much.

So they argued, Nowell seemingly saying he had his own idea of what to do, the coach seemingly saying he wanted to run a play, back and forth … “he wanted to run one play, and I wanted to run another,” Tang would tell reporters later.

And then suddenly, while still looking at Tang, Nowell lofted the ball toward the basket. And, Margo can vouch for this, I jumped out of my chair and shouted, probably for the first time in my life, “Oh my God, ALLEY OOP!”

Yes. ALLEY OOP! Nowell did the alley, teammate Keyontae Johnson did the oop — he caught the ball in mid-air and then reverse-dunked it. I think of the most staggering plays in my college basketball memory. Jordan’s game-winner against Georgetown. Mario Chalmers’ shot against Memphis. Gordon Hayward’s near-miracle shot against Duke. And yes, the Christian Laettner play, Lorenzo Charles’ dunk, Tyus Edney going coast to coast, the Illinois comeback against Arizona, the Bryce Drew buzzer-beater (hmm, I was at a lot of these), and this was up there with any of them.

People will forever ask: Was it a planned trick play? The Kansas State people say no, it wasn’t planned, it just happened, but The Wichita Eagle did a super-fun breakdown of the play, and they make a pretty compelling case that it was at least partially planned — it doesn’t hurt that Nowell before the play turned to Isiah Thomas and said, “Watch this.” It also looks like Tang might be conducting the play a little bit so that the timing was just right.

Then, the play was so pure, so beautiful, so wonderful that I’m not even sure whether it was better planned or unplanned. After the play, Nowell made the game-winning strip and the final bucket and on Saturday Kansas State will play Florida Atlantic for a shot at the Final Four, and it will be wonderful.

So I guess the point here is to thank Markquis Nowell for reigniting a few college basketball feelings. It’s good to feel young again.