Iowa State's Monte Morris lives to give, on the court and off
AMES, Iowa – Monte Morris, the junior point guard for No. 14 Iowa State who may be the best assist man in college basketball, drives a Bugatti around campus.
OK – so that’s not 100 percent true. He does call the car he drives around campus his Bugatti, and so do his teammates, but you would never mistake his ride for the sleek French sports car that’s among the most coveted automobiles in the world. Morris’ vehicle of choice is a 2004 Chevy Impala, the same car his mother used to drive him from their home in Flint, Mich., to AAU tournaments all over the country. It’s burgundy, it has more than 200,000 miles on it, and “it’s the furthest thing from a Bugatti – the wheels are about the fall off,” laughed his teammate Naz Mitrou-Long.
The reason Morris’ car matters, Bugatti or not, is because of how frequently he uses it to help his teammates. Mitrou-Long borrows it. Other teammates, too. When DeAndre Kane transferred to Iowa State for Morris’ freshman year, Morris was pretty much his driver since Kane didn’t have a car, and Morris always did it with a smile. He did the same thing back in high school, adding an hour to his drive home after a practice because he was dropping off teammates on the other side of town.
When you watch Morris on the court, you see a player who embodies selflessness: He’s 10th in the nation in assists and seventh in assist-to-turnover ratio and is well on the way to becoming college basketball’s career leader in assist-to-turnover ratio.
Off the court, it’s not just about his car: If a teammate runs out of meal money, he’ll pass along his sandwich. He lends out his Xbox when someone asks. His Instagram posts are often compliments about his teammates. When he was a big-time high school recruit in Michigan, he purposefully waited to trim down his list of schools; he’d call up his friends whenever a college coach was coming to see him work out in the hope that the coach would take a shine to one of his friends instead.
It’s almost as if the 20-year-old NBA prospect can’t decide which character he is from the ubiquitous State Farm commercials: Chris Paul, the NBA All-Star point guard who feeds buckets to his teammates, or Cliff Paul, the insurance agent who is always there for an assist in a family’s time of need.
Truth is, Morris is both.
“That kid would give his last shirt to somebody, and that’s the way he is on the basketball court, too,” said Spencer Eason, who coached Morris in elementary school and in AAU.
There’s a story that Mike Williams, the coach at Flint Beecher High School who won two state championships with Morris at point guard, loves to tell about Morris as a servant leader.
Williams has a rule for his high school teams. Not everybody can afford the newest Jordans or the snazziest LeBrons or the coolest socks or the sleekest arm sleeves their NBA heroes are wearing. So Williams tells his players that his team must match head to toe every game.
Before a game with his team’s biggest rival, Morris approached his coach. He had these cool black Nike socks that went all the way up his calf. He told his coach that when he dresses well, he plays well; could he wear the Nike socks for this one big game? Williams said no. They would wear their regular old white socks because that’s what the entire team had.
The next day, before the team boarded the bus to the game, Morris walked into the locker room with two bags filled with black Nike socks that went all the way up the calves. He’d taken all his pocket money to buy new socks for his teammates.
“He has such an amazing ability to understand that he’s no bigger than anybody else,” said Williams, who watched Morris win Michigan’s Mr. Basketball award his senior year. “His dream game is to dish out 20 assists and have 10 rebounds, 10 steals, and four or five blocks – not score a point and dominate a game. That’s his dream game. He told me that. He makes people want to play with him. He makes people around him better.”
NBA teams want a point guard who can score as well as distribute the ball, so Morris is showing he can do that, too.
College may be the most selfish time in anyone’s life. Students are in their own bubble. They ignore parents’ phone calls. Their sole focus is on No. 1. For a player like Morris, who has to prove to NBA scouts he’s an aggressive playmaker and not simply a ball-control point guard, it could easily be even more so, especially this season. He’s the Big Man on Campus at a school starved for athletic success. And at the prodding of his new coach, he’s showing some of the selfishness he needs to display to impress scouts at the next level, averaging a career-high 15.2 points and frequently taking the big shot when Iowa State needs it, including the game-winner that downed No. 1 Oklahoma last week. He’ll certainly take center stage Monday night when his Cyclones take on No. 4 Kansas.
But selfishness is not something that comes naturally to Morris, and he’s just fine with that.
“I just feel like when you give back to people,” he said, “the blessings come back around 10 times better.”
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To understand Monte Morris, you must understand where he came from: the hardscrabble city of Flint, a place known more for what it had been – a thriving automobile manufacturing hub – than what it now is, a Rust Belt city that’s fallen on hard times. Morris can remember playing basketball on a Fisher-Price hoop in his driveway as a little kid and never quite understanding why so many of the houses on his street were boarded up. Sometimes, it felt like a ghost town.
But this is not your typical story of a rough-and-tumble kid who worked his way up from the tough streets. Sure, Morris’ competitiveness is very much of Flint, and his chip-on-the-shoulder mentality is too. But if we’re being honest, Morris’ life wasn’t filled with that many hard times. Because one woman wouldn’t let it be.
Tonya Morris was a single mom, but she always had a good job, and she always made sure her only son came first. He was, she says, her “honeybunch.” His nickname, “Man Man,” comes from a song she sang when she was trying to get him to sleep as an infant: “You’re just a little man man, you’re just a little old man.”
“You can say it’s a tough childhood, but the way his mom laid his childhood out, he always knew he had a support system,” said Damon Allison, Morris’ AAU coach for the Michigan Mustangs. “I’ve never seen a lady embrace her experience the way she did. She was a mom and a dad, and she was able to get it done.”
Morris’ father was not in his life. He remembers when his mom got a phone call at 3 a.m. one morning when he was in high school. His father had passed away of a heart attack. Morris had never met his dad. His mom asked if he wanted to go to the funeral, but Morris told her he didn’t want that to be the only memory of his father.
And so Tonya Morris took on both roles, and she did it with vigor – especially with basketball. She’d been a pass-first point guard when she went to high school in Flint, and she still coached there, so from when he was a toddler she would school him on the game.
When he played basketball video games, Morris’ mom would wander into the room, watch the video game for a few minutes, then grill young Monte about his strategy. They watched NBA games differently than most people: Why should that player have made a cut? How could that turnover have been avoided?
When he was a little kid, Morris would go to the gym when his mom was coaching. He heard her talk about unselfishness. It must have stuck. And it just kept sticking as he played against players three or four years older than him, from elementary school on. He knew he couldn’t overpower the bigger, older players, so he outsmarted them instead.
“You could really see he understood the game,” said Williams, his high school coach. “You couldn’t just take the ball from him, even when he was in the fourth grade. In order for a grown man to take it from him you’d just have to push him down and take it.”
One of his coaches took Morris to a Michigan State game when he was in fifth grade. The coach was used to kids just oooh-ing an ahhh-ing over dunks and highlight-reel plays. Instead, Monte looked at his coach and wondered why Spartans coach Tom Izzo hadn’t taken Drew Neitzel, Michigan State’s point guard, out of the game. “He’s got like three turnovers!” Morris said.
“What I grew to love about him was his court savvy,” said Mateen Cleaves, the former Michigan State star and Flint native who has worked with Morris for years. “He has a great poker face. That helps out when you’re a quarterback or a point guard. Always under control, never fazed by the big moments. You gotta play the game two passes ahead. You take away this, he’s going to do that.”
There was one other early interest in Morris’ life that plays itself out now on the basketball court: chess.
“My high school coach used to tell me, ‘You take care of your pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves,’ ” Morris said. “I feel like my smart passes are the pennies, and when I make a spectacular pass, those are my dollars, just because I made the smart play so many times. It’s a feel. It’s an IQ. When I catch the ball coming up the court, I’m looking at everything. The game has slowed down for me now. If Georges (Niang) tells me, ‘Outlet!,’ my first look is to Jameel (McKay) running down the court. I can tell if he’s got a step on somebody so I throw it over the top. Even if I get into the teeth of the defense, I know they gotta help back side, so it’s an automatic skip pass.”
He pauses for a moment, considering his personal basketball philosophy.
“It’s about feel, and thinking two plays ahead, always,” Morris said. “If I don’t do something that possession, there’s a reason: I’m going to come back to it. I try to play the game like chess.”
Seeing the game of basketball with that fourth dimension is an NBA skill in itself. But it’s not something measurable, and Morris’ measurables have always left something to be desired in the eyes of NBA scouts. When he came to college, he was 6-foot-3 but a spindly 154 pounds. He has added plenty of muscle to that frame, and now DraftExpress.com, the most reliable mock draft site, projects Morris to be selected early in the second round in June’s draft.
“I see a lot of Isiah Thomas in Monte,” said Eason, Morris’ old AAU coach. “That’s my favorite player. I’m a fan of Isiah Thomas because he’s small in stature but has such a huge heart and just played smart basketball. Isiah Thomas sacrificed a whole lot of his game for the betterment of his team. He coulda scored just like Allen Iverson, but Isiah wanted to win. Monte knows that everyone on his team should be able to get a piece of the pie.”
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Monte Morris remembers the moment his freshman year at Iowa State when he felt his biggest basketball weakness was exposed.
Kane had transferred to Iowa State for his senior season, and he was a fully grown man: 24 years old, 6-foot-4, 210 pounds, and when he walked into the gym for the first official day of practice, Kane put the freshman in his sights.
“It’s going to be a long day for you, young boy,” Kane told Morris with a smirk.
When they started to scrimmage, Kane picked Morris up full court. He put his shoulders on him, pushed him around. He moved Morris anywhere he wanted with a hand here, a hip there.
“I called my mom after that first practice, and I said, ‘Mom, did I pick the right school?’ ” Morris recalled. “I was dead tired. Couldn’t even shower. Just laid on my bed. My shoulders were hurting, legs, body, all that. And I realized: I gotta do something with my body.”
And that’s what he did. He hit the weights. Kane was hard on him in the weight room, yelling at him: “You’re little!” he’d tell Morris. Morris took the criticism as motivation, with Kane becoming a mentor. Soon, 154 pounds became 160 pounds. 160 pounds became 165 pounds, 165 pounds 170 and then, by the beginning of this season, a solid, chiseled 175 pounds. These days, he can get through screens easier, finish at the rim, move 200-pound opponents around the court, not be dominated by other more physical players.
“I was really hard on him,” said Kane, who now plays pro ball in Germany. “I was yelling at him. But he always took the criticism. He’d say, ‘I’m going to get there.’ You want to see him be more aggressive, but as a point guard you have to know when to be more aggressive. The strength will come, man. He’s still a young kid. He never was a guy who was big, but he always had the heart of a lion.”
When it comes down to it, that’s Monte Morris: a point guard whose brains and heart outweigh any sorts of physical attributes he brings to the table. His game is more subtle than that of other elite college basketball players: He won’t be throwing down gravity-defying dunks like future lottery pick Jaylen Brown of Cal. He won’t be tearing your heart out like player of the year candidate Kris Dunn of Providence. He won’t be nailing threes at an insane rate like player of the year candidate Buddy Hield of Oklahoma. Instead, he’ll be playing mind games with you, always looking at the game a few plays ahead of everyone else, always putting his teammates before himself, always looking after other people before himself.
“I look at basketball players. I don’t look at size,” said Cleaves, who played six seasons in the NBA. “We’ve seen guys able to defy odds. Monte, he’s just a winner. Coaches love him. Coaches love players who have an understanding of the game. You can relax on the sidelines because you know the ball is in good hands.
“I’d take a kid like that any day over a kid who passes the eye test.”
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
