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.

“For me, it was books, ball, everything else,” Macon said of the order of importance. “That is what drove my success.”

He’d spend hours practicing and working out, after all his school work was done.

“If I had an edge over you, I didn’t want you to get that edge back,” he said. “If I wasn’t working, somebody else was.”

After his first major collegiate game against UCLA, in which he scored over 20 points, a reporter asked him if he was in awe of the whole experience.

Macon replied “No,” and from then on Chaney decided to keep the media away from his marquee player because it took attention away from the team. Macon thanked Chaney.

From that point, there was a father-son relationship between the two and Chaney, who was all of his first five coaches rolled into one, became the sixth man in Macon’s life.

“[He’s] a wise old Owl,” Macon said. “I would be in his office everyday, trying to soak up everything he’d give me. I told him I [was] going to be a sponge.”

The Temple Owls finished that year losing to Duke in the Elite Eight of the NCAA. Macon shot 6-29 in that game.

“I shot horribly. I was hurt because I felt we were going to win the national championship,” he said.

Macon returned to Buena Vista that summer, but realized not much was there for him. Most of his classmates were either in college, working or serving their country. After spending some time with his family and his high school coach, Macon decided to return to Philadelphia to get ahead of the game by take summer classes, working at Pep Boys and continuing to practice.

He repeated this process for the next three years. He wanted to graduate from college and not leave early.

During his senior year, Macon almost went out on a sour note. He sprained his ankle and sat out for the last two games.

“It was terrible, but it was something that just happened,” he said.

The Owls went to the semi-finals of the Atlantic 10 conference tournament that year but lost. After securing a bid to the Big Dance, Temple’s season ended in the Elite Eight after falling to UNC, 75-72.

The Professional

On June 26, 1991, as Macon was in the mist of finishing his college degree and graduating that summer, he was drafted by the Denver Nuggets in the first round as the eighth overall pick.

Macon knew he was going to play basketball professionally, whether it was overseas, in the CBA or the NBA.

“I was going to be a professional athlete,” he said. “That was my train of thought.”

After getting drafted, Macon realized how his life had changed dramatically.

“I went from this kid who grew up poor to a young man with what people would consider a lot of money,” he said.

During his six-year tenure with the Nuggets and the Detroit Pistons, Macon enjoyed his life as a professional athlete and learned as much as he could from the veteran players, picking up little things and not being as intense as be was during his college days.

“I needed to relax more to be able to play,” he said. “Be intense when you are between those lines, but once you’re outside those lines, relax. Be able to focus on seeing other things while other guys are playing so when you do step through those lines, you know what to do.”

Macon had changed his entire game when he made the jump to the NBA. He went from a scoring big guard at Temple to a defensive guard at Denver.

“I spent my professional years just really being a backup player, having what I consider a stellar career,” he said.

His reasoning for this move was two-fold. First, there were other players on his team that could score. Second, he wanted to do what would keep him on the floor.

“And that was to play defense and I took pride in that, not only as a college basketball player, as a high school player, as a kid, but as a professional athlete also,” Macon said. “Being able to prevent somebody from what they used to do.”

Following his career in the NBA, Macon played overseas for several teams. He then realized he needed to enter “the real world.”

In 2001, he landed a job in Philadelphia as the sports program director for a local YMCA. With a degree in education, he was doing something he loved to do — teach sports.

New Career, Same Setting

Two years later, the phone rang. It was Coach Chaney asking Macon to come be an assistant coach at Temple. This was not the first such call. Chaney had asked Macon in 1997 to join the coaching staff, but Macon turned his No. 6 man down because he was still a professional athlete.

But the second time around, Macon could not pass up the chance to be under Chaney’s wing and getting some of that knowledge.

In 2006, Chaney announced his retirement and Macon moved on to Georgia State under head coach Michael Perry, where he gained a vast amount of knowledge with the coaching staff.

After one year at Georgia State, Macon was let go when the new athletic director fired Perry and brought in former Ole Miss coach Rod Barnes. While Barnes interviewed Macon, Barnes decided to bring in his own guys, leaving Macon without a job.

“To me, that hurt because you get involved with these kids and really want to be able to teach them some of the things you know and now you have to leave them,” he said.

During the 2007 NCAA tournament, Georgetown and their assistant coach Kevin Broadus made a run to the Final Four, but fell short of a national title after losing to Ohio State.

At the same time, Binghamton University began to reel in Broadus as the new head coach for the Bearcats.

Macon and Broadus talked during the Final Four and Broadus had offered Macon a spot on his staff.

“[Broadus] said to me, ‘Take your time,’” Macon said. “That was the greatest testament that he could have done for me to make me know that he was a ‘great dude.’”

Macon took the whole summer to gather his thoughts and then jumped on the opportunity to come to Vestal and not only give some of his knowledge to these Bearcats, but also to continue to learn.

“Through all of my ventures in terms of my love for basketball, it is about being the student and learning, getting and learning as much as you can before I go on in terms of me,” Macon said. “In order to be a leader, you have to learn to follow.”

And he is doing just that, learning from the experience of Broadus and assistant coaches Julius Allen and Don Anderson, all of whom have over 20 years of experience, more than half of Macon’s life.

“I just want to grab this vast knowledge that we have here with [these coaches],” he said. “I need that knowledge. I want to get everything I can before I even give anybody that may ask me that they want me here or there. But I’ll know when it is time.”

Asked if he will ever be the teacher, Macon responded saying, “I aspire to be, but I still have a lot of learning to do.”

As for the seventh and final man who shaped Macon’s life, that spot belongs to his father, Samuel Arthur.

“The true person that made me believe, that [ground] into me that education is really what takes precedents of all these things,” Macon said. “He would always tell me that everything can be taken away from you. You can use your legs, arms, but they can’t take what you know. You got to get your education.”