Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes talks with Jordan Bone (0) and Jordan Bowden (23) in the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Vanderbilt Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. Tennessee won 92-84. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)Hooray for Rick Barnes.
Discussing tonight's road game against Missouri a couple of days ago, the University of Tennessee basketball coach said of Mizzou's Cuonzo Martin, who coached the Volunteers from the fall of 2011 through the spring of 2014: "I'm not sure how he was embraced. But if he wasn't fully embraced, people should be ashamed, because I'm going to tell you the guy is a heck of a person and he's a heck of a basketball coach."
Finally. Someone with Big Orange ties who is strong enough to speak the truth about the most unloved good coach and great guy the university ever employed. And a Sports Illustrated article concerning Martin that hit the internet Tuesday explains both those observations in superb detail. But more on that in a minute.
To briefly return to the 2013-14 season - which ended with the Vols in an unlikely but hugely impressive Sweet 16 run that might have reached the Elite Eight without an official's questionable call late in that 73-71 loss to Michigan - whether it was a very vocal minority or an apathetic majority, no one ever got the sense that Martin was warmly embraced by the Big Orange masses.
In fact, if only for that uncomfortable online petition that final winter to "Bring Back Bruce (Pearl)" - the one that supposedly garnered more than 36,000 signatures wanting Pearl to return to Big Orange Country despite his NCAA rules violations - it seemed obvious that too many Volniacs wanted anybody but Martin.
So within a month of that Michigan loss he was gone, off to the University of California, where he recruited better than he had at Tennessee and guided the Golden Bears to the 2016 NCAA tournament, though they lost in the opening round.
Point is, Martin always has been a good coach and a good guy. He just had the great misfortune at UT to follow the magnetic Pearl, who could have sold a Ponzi scheme to Warren Buffett, made a Kardashian blush or won a game for Pat Summitt's Lady Vols with an inbounds play he gave her, which actually happened.
Because of that, almost anyone except Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski might have struggled to follow Pearl, but the fact that Martin was in so many ways the complete opposite of Bruce Almighty in both his demeanor and coaching style only heightened their differences.
But to read the excellent SI article by S.L. Price titled "Cuonzo Martin, the Fight for His Life and Why He Took the Job as Head Coach of Missouri" is to appreciate far more completely what makes Martin both a heck of a person and a heck of a coach.
Briefly, Price's piece spends a good deal of time focusing on how even Martin's own relatives - especially his sister Valencia - couldn't believe he would leave the Left Coast for racially torn Missouri last spring.
After all, the Show Me State has become, in many ways, the Ground Zero of racial unrest in this country, thanks to the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, the later racial unrest at the University of Missouri involving its football team and the protests throughout St. Louis last fall after a white police officer was acquitted of murdering a black man.
Explained Valencia, who's an assistant principal at East St. Louis (Ill.) High School, of her reaction when she heard her brother might take the Mizzou job: "With all the racial tension, a lot of minority students leaving, I was just, like, Ugh."
But according to the article, when Martin was praying to God in the late 1990s to spare him from the cancer ravaging his body, he promised "to view the world in a more Christian light."
So when Mizzou called to offer him the job last March, he and his wife, Roberta, huddled to discuss the pros and cons.
"It scared me going back to the middle of the country," she's quoted in the story. "But we were, like, somebody has to go back and be an example. Somebody has to be a mentor. Somebody has to be the one others can look up to. So this became the next step of our journey."
On the court, it already has been a remarkable step up. The Tigers already have won as many SEC games (2), as they did all of last season. And that 12-5 overall record has been achieved without Michael Porter Jr., who was the national prep player of the year last year but hurt his back in the opening minutes of the first game of this season and has been lost for the year.
One quote from Porter to explain why - other than the fact that his father is a Mizzou assistant - he chose to spend his one collegiate season with Martin before heading off to the NBA: "I heard people say, 'If you can play for Coach Cuonzo, when you get to the league they don't even question your toughness.'"
Martin does let loose about his time with the Vols, especially that final month in 2014, when UT was rolling to the Sweet 16 as the petition to bring back Pearl was passing 30,000 signatures.
Said Martin: "Here we're trying to win and you have a fan base - and not all of them - going against you. So I was thinking, I really don't want to win this game for them. Let's win because of who we are. This is what I go always go back to: Whoever's against me didn't grow up in that house with me, and they won't be put in a casket with me. So it doesn't really matter what they think."
Perhaps it's also interesting to note how much alike Barnes and Martin are, apart from the color of their skin. They both believe in hard work, strong academics, withering defense and an offense that goes inside before fanning out for 3-pointers.
"Cuonzo's really become a role model for not just basketball and other sports programs," David Steelman, chairman of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, told SI. "He's been good for the entire university."
And had things been different four years ago in Volsville, had Martin been embraced rather than becoming embittered, he might have become just as good for the entire University of Tennessee.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.