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Born grew into his role as a star for the Mocs

By: Jim Tanner
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Brandon Born

Brandon Born highlights

Mack McCarthy learned a painful but ultimately valuable lesson during his first season as basketball coach at the University of Tennesssee at Chattanooga — never play against a member of the Born family from Ringgold, Ga.

In the 1986 Southern Conference championship game, Davidson’s Gerry Born hit a shot at the buzzer to defeat the Mocs 42-40 and send the Wildcats to the NCAA tournament.

Five years later, when Gerry’s younger brother, Brandon, was looking to play college basketball, McCarthy made sure this Born would be wearing blue and gold.

“We decided we weren’t going to get beat by a Born again,” McCarthy said, laughing during a phone interview Monday.

UTC Photo-- Brandon Born's hard at work helped him one of the best to play for the UTC Mocs.

Keeping Born close to home paid huge dividends for McCarthy and the Mocs. He went on to score 1,449 points in his four seasons at UTC, tying him with Gerald Wilkins for second on the school’s Division I scoring list. The Mocs also were SoCon tournament champions three times during Born’s career.

Born has been selected as one of the top five Mocs to have played in McKenzie Arena. They were elected by a 13-member panel of local media and UTC staff who have followed Mocs basketball for the past 25 years.

The five will be honored Saturday at UTC’s game against Wofford.

Growing up in Ringgold, Born was a Mocs fan in his childhood, but his brother’s decision to play for Davidson led to some uncomfortable trips to the arena when the Wildcats would visit to take on the Mocs.

“I still remember crystal-clear in my mind, a guy in the front row in the arena stood up and he had a sign that said ‘Born Loser’ on it,” Born said Wednesday in a phone interview. “At that time, I was really not a big UTC fan when they played Davidson — for obvious reasons.”

But the hard feelings had subsided by the time McCarthy and the Mocs came calling in his senior year of high school, and Born chose to stay at home to continue his basketball career at UTC. Born was overlooked by many recruiters because they thought he would be an undersized Division I forward.

Among those who took a pass on Born was Davidson coach Bob McKillop, who told Gerry that that his younger brother “wasn’t the caliber of player” the Wildcats were looking for.

What may have been a recruiting gamble for UTC paid off. Born kept growing after he arrived at UTC.

“He was only about 6-5 and maybe 175 pounds when we signed him,” McCarthy said. “By the time he left, he was 6-8 and about 230.”

As Born’s body caught up with his ability, McCarthy said it became more and more difficult for teams to match up with him.

“His biggest attribute was the fact that he could really shoot the basketball,” the former UTC coach said. “And at 6-8, when you can really shoot the basketball, you create a lot of problems for people.”

Born agrees that size was not his biggest asset on the court. But what he lacked in physical presence, he more than compensated with intelligence and hard work.

“I was never really a big strong player, never had a lot of weight,” Born said. “But each year, I just kind of evaluated myself, evaluated my game and said ‘I’m pretty good at this. I’m horrible at that.’ And in the off-season, I’d work on my weaknesses.

“Little by little, physically I got stronger and better. And mentally, I was always there. I always knew what I could do, I just couldn’t physically do it. As the years went by, those two items started to parallel, and I turned out to have a pretty good career there.”

That “pretty good” career at UTC included 159 3-pointers in four seasons and a school-record percentage of .447 from behind the arc. He also connected on almost 85 percent of his free throws in his career.

McCarthy, now the coach at East Carolina, thinks the progress Born made at UTC is an amazing story.

“As I go back over 30-some years of coaching,” McCarthy said “I think he probably improved as much as anybody from when he got there to when he graduated. ... I think he improved as much as any player I’ve ever seen.”

As for the coaches at Davidson, who apparently forgot what it means to have a Born on your team, they learned the same lesson McCarthy learned in 1986. During Born’s time at UTC from 1991-95, the Mocs were 6-1 against the Wildcats, including a 2-0 mark in Southern Conference tournament games.