Couch: Marcus Taylor at peace with basketball

LANSING – Marcus Taylor’s life is not a great American tragedy. He wanted to make sure that came across Wednesday at the end of an hour-long interview.

He does understand, though, that his is a quintessential story of what might have been. He was a childhood basketball legend — that's perhaps an understatement — who fell short of his dreams and expectations. Then, to a world that once followed his every move, he disappeared.

If Taylor is still bitter about an NBA career that didn’t happen or longs for a relationship with Michigan State’s basketball program that doesn’t exist, he hides it well. At 34, the former Waverly High School and MSU star seems fervently at peace, energized by a life that revolves around a career in pharmaceutical sales, a 6-year-old daughter he adores and his mother and friends. He is back where he grew up, on Lansing’s West Side. 

Basketball is no longer part of his routine. He can’t do much more than shoot around due to a foot injury that ended his professional playing career in 2010. He doesn’t have much interest in watching the game, either. Hasn’t for a while. Definitely not since cancer took his father’s life in December of 2014. There is a correlation there, Taylor realizes. Basketball was their thing together. His father molded him as a player, spending hours upon hours, year after year working with him. “He was my best friend,” Taylor said.

Taylor will probably forever be known at MSU primarily as a player who left too soon, a cautionary tale about a bad decision and how quickly the NBA can spit out college basketball’s emerging stars if they’re not ready. 

In Lansing, Taylor’s legacy is deeper. Here, he’ll always also be the kid who led Waverly on a state title run 16 years ago. That 2000 Warriors team — including Taylor, several of his closest friends and his favorite coach, Phil Odlum — was inducted into the Greater Lansing Area Sports Hall of Fame Thursday night. 

“It was amazing,” Taylor described the feeling riding the bus back to Waverly after their state championship win over Detroit Pershing, which followed an improbable win over Saginaw in the semifinals. “I haven’t had that feeling since.”

Wednesday, in a coffee shop a quarter-mile up the road from where that bus dropped the Warriors off, Taylor delved into his past — his early celebrity, his relationship with his father, his time at MSU, his decision to leave after his sophomore season and the years that followed. 

Hindsight

“Obviously if I’d known I was going to go 52nd (in the 2002 NBA Draft), I would have stayed in school,” Taylor said Wednesday, an admission I’m not sure he’d made publicly before.

The Minnesota Timberwolves selected Taylor late in the second round and released him before the season began. In later years, he played for the Washington Wizards’ summer league team and had workouts with Cleveland, Miami and Atlanta. But he never played in an NBA game, spending of bulk of his career in France, Greece and Germany. Not a bad life. But not the one he envisioned or was envisioned for him when he was a teenager.

He was among the top five high school recruits in the country in 2000, a household name around here since he was in elementary and middle school. He was thought of as a Spartan savior, the prodigy who would take MSU back to where another Lansing kid took the Spartans two decades earlier. Marcus was the next Magic. Their fathers even knew each other through General Motors. As a child, Taylor hung out in Los Angeles with Magic’s family.

Like MSU’s Denzel Valentine — who won two state titles at Lansing Sexton a decade later — Taylor felt the weight of Magic’s Lansing legacy as he chased a state title at Waverly.

“In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘Magic won a championship his last year (at Lansing Everett),” Taylor said.

In December of 1998, Magic spoke at halftime of an MSU game. Taylor, then a recruit, was there with his father in the stands. Magic began imploring Taylor to come to MSU, to stay home to win his collegiate national title.

“He’s like, ‘I did it in my hometown, that’s the exact same thing I’m going to tell Marcus,’” Taylor recalled of Magic’s speech. “I already knew where I was going to go.”

Mateen Cleaves and Co. beat him to the punch, winning a national championship a year later. Had Taylor been four years older, he might have been that guy. Taylor was no longer as needed — not by MSU or a once-desperate fanbase whose best chance at such a player in earlier years would be if he were a hometown kid. Taylor felt it.

“When I was in high school here, it was like, ‘This is going to be your team, Mateen’s leaving,’” Taylor said. “I didn’t get that feeling when I got there. And (fellow top-rated prospect) Zach (Randolph) will tell you the same thing. We got there, it was like, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, fit in where you can.’ We weren’t used to that. We were used to being the man on whatever team.”

After primarily a reserve role as a freshman on a Big Ten championship and Final Four team in 2000-01, Taylor became the man again. He led the Big Ten in scoring and assists as a sophomore with a dazzling and, in hindsight, misleading February. And then, Taylor began to think about the NBA.

Taylor said he only hired an agent — ending his college eligibility — based on information that he’d be selected somewhere between picks No. 8 and 14 from what he deemed at the time to be “credible sources,” even if mock drafts and testimony from others didn’t concur.

By the time he started to hear he was sliding down draft boards, it was too late.

Taylor’s decision to leave MSU was his call, he insisted Wednesday, not his father’s, as is believed by many.

“People had this false perception that my dad was in my ear like, ‘You need to go, you need to leave.’” Taylor said. “My dad, from Day 1, from the time I played organized basketball, ‘Make your own decisions.’ He’d sit back and advise me on things he would see. He was never one to be a puppetmaster.

“It’s like a false perception that he’s everywhere, all the time. Like he just had his hands on everything, every practice. People said that about college. He didn’t come to one practice at Michigan State in two years. But people always thought he was calling the shots.”

Taylor is defensive about his father, as many of us would be about ours. Criticism of James Taylor in the first years following Marcus’ departure from MSU pushed Marcus further away from the MSU community.

“I witnessed everything he did,” Taylor said. “So for people to say, to put a negative take on him, it really bothered me.”

When James became sick a couple years ago, Taylor moved back home from the Chicago area. 

They spent their final months together talking about the future, about Taylor’s daughter, Zoe, and trying to live in the moment, watching football on Sundays.

“We never talked about anything in the past,” Taylor said. “He was always like, ‘Let’s move forward. You know I’m sick, let’s enjoy what’s going on now.’”

Life after ball

The “now” for Taylor begins with Zoe. His face lights up when he talks about her. 

“She’s very sarcastic, very playful, very athletic,” Taylor said. “Gymnastics, she’s getting into that now. She hasn’t touched a basketball too much. I’m just trying to let her feel her way out. Whatever she wants to do, piano, whatever.”

Taylor doesn’t mind if that’s basketball. He loves the game, he said, even if that doesn’t always come across.

“People are like, ‘You should be a coach, you should be this,’” Taylor said. “I’m just done. I’ve been done.”

Taylor returned home for good in 2010, about the time Zoe was born. He went back to school at MSU and received his degree in food industry management. After his father’s illness, he found another calling, working in specialty pharmaceutical sales for cancer patients.

He still resembles the teenager who dominated the court and media in Lansing. He still gets recognized regularly.

“I’m trying to get a beard going,” he joked.

“There’s love in Lansing. I think people for the most part have turned the page. My family is here. My friends are here. My mom is here, chasing my daughter around. She was everything when my dad got sick.”

There is a difference between Lansing and East Lansing to Taylor, though. His neighbors never left his corner. On the other side of U.S 127, he doesn’t feel as welcomed. To a college sports fan base, you’re loved until you’re not. Any love is conditional.

“A certain part of that understandable,” Taylor said. “But from a human being standpoint, OK, I made this decision. That really affected people’s lives? How did it effect your life?”

Taylor lost touch with Magic 10 years ago. He hasn’t spoken to MSU coach Tom Izzo in several years or returned for an MSU event in a decade. 

“It’s not like we have a bad relationship or anything,” Taylor said of Izzo. “It’s just not (a relationship).”

Izzo said Thursday he’d like to have Taylor back in the fold, and that he reached out about five years ago when he saw Taylor on campus. “He was a good kid. He didn’t do anything wrong,” Izzo said.

Maybe that’ll happen now. Maybe in time. Maybe it’s not important to Taylor.

He got a lot out of basketball. Even if not everything.

“I don’t want you to think it was all negative, hell on wheels,” Taylor said. “From the time I played, I accomplished a lot. I saw a lot of great things, met a lot of great people. Got a chance to go to Europe for years. Basketball took me everywhere.

“My dad got a chance to see me accomplish different things. My mom got a chance to see me accomplish different things. I have stories to tell my daughter now.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch