A Clemson Tiger from the Past: Grayson Marshall
This week’s Clemson basketball player from the past is one of the best assists men in college basketball history, Grayson Marshall.
As a freshman, Grayson Marshall quickly established himself as a floor general and averaged 7.3 points, 6.6 assists, 2.1 rebounds, and 1.3 steals per game. He was a model of consistency throughout his four year career and ended his career with averages of 7.4 points, 7.0 assists, 2.5 rebounds, and 1.5 steals per game. The 6’2 point guard started all four years and his ability to pass the ball was the most glaring part of his game.
In 1988, he left Clemson as the All-Time assist leader and the All-Time leader in the ACC. He also left with a single game record of 20 assists and career records of 7.02(career average) and 7.71(season).
Today, Marshall still leads Clemson with 857 assists for his career and a career best 7.02 per game. The 857 assists is also fifth All-Time in the ACC and 22nd nationally.
I caught up with the ultimate assist man and asked him about Clemson, basketball, life, and being named Clemson’s 2016 ACC Legend.
Q: How does Clemson get you from the basketball rich D.C. area?
Marshall: Well, it’s a crazy story. Clemson was recruiting a guy named Quentin Jackson, who was the point guard at Dematha High School and Bill Foster and Clint(Howell) had been recruiting him for a while. We were playing Dematha that night and Clint happened to be at that game. I had a great game that night and after the game was over Clint came to me and he said that we have never seen you play before. We were here watching Quentin and we believe that he is going to N.C. State. Which is what he ended up doing. And they said that we think that you would fit into what we do. We would love for you to come for a visit. So I came down the next day for a visit and verbally committed. Then Bill Foster subsequently didn’t get his contract renewed, so I was going to go to the University of Richmond. Clemson ultimately hired Cliff Ellis and Cliff Ellis at the time was the head coach at South Alabama. Well that year in the Sunbelt(conference), my uncle, who was the first black referee to work a Final Four, knew Cliff Ellis. Ellis found out that Jim Howell was my uncle and he called my uncle and said that I need to talk to your nephew. My uncle called me and he said that I know how things look but you need to talk to him and Cliff came to my living room and sold me on one of the best things that ever happened in my life.
Q: What do you remember the most from your playing days at Clemson and competing in the ACC?
Marshall: I got to be honest with you, my greatest Clemson experiences were just being a student. I loved the campus, I loved the people, and I loved everybody I met. We had a great basketball run, but my friendships probably were more niched in the regular student body than from my own team. Memories from the conference were the elevated notoriety that the conference had and then the great competition in the conference that I had every single night out. Every night I went out, I was playing not only the best in the conference but the best in the country. When I was a freshman, N.C. State had Spud Webb and Nate McMillian, North Carolina had Kenny Smith, Georgia Tech had Mark Price and Bruce Dalyrmple , Duke had Johnny Dawkins and Tommy Amaker, and Wake Forest had Mugsy Boggs and Delaney Rudd.
Q: Did you have any opportunities to play professionally? If so, why didn’t you pursue them?
Marshall: I probably did. I’ll say it this way, that was never on my radar and here’s why. I grew up in a family that was educated. My father was a principal and my mom a teacher. My parents kind of gave me a different philosophy on life than the sports arena would allow. They always told me who didn’t make it. Being from DC, there were so many stories of guys who didn’t make it and came back to the streets with nothing. So what was instilled in me was-don’t be those guys because there is something after sports. It was more of a play it safe, plan B kind of life. The only thing that I wanted was for my parents to not have to pay for college-that was it. I never aspired for anything more. I totally believed that I was equipped unlike some of the other guys that only had basketball. There was so many guys that I was around growing up that if it wasn’t for basketball, then they wouldn’t be in school and I never wanted to be that guy. Knowing what I knew about the career of sports players averaging 3.5 to 4 years. It was in my mind that if it didn’t come to me, or didn’t just show up, then I was ready to do the next thing.
Q: I know a little bit about your story. Do you mind briefly telling why you were homeless at 29?
Marshall: When I got out into the world, what I realized was the information that I had from a formal education was not the foundation for entrepreneurial success. I wanted to own my own businesses and to be an entrepreneur, and formal education wanted me to be an employee, that’s how they shaped me and framed me. So because I wanted that so bad. I wanted to pursue entrepreneurism without a coach. But I didn’t have anybody around me who was an entrepreneur nor any family who were entrepreneurs. I literally had to do that on my own. If you understand the trek of any entrepreneur, it involve failures, it involves setbacks, it involves a lot of risk and I was willing to take it. When you take those risks, you sometimes end up on the short side of it and that’s where I found myself at 28, 29. But once I got a handle on it and really understood it. Then I’ve been able to rebuild and become extremely successful, because now I know the information. My whole goal now is to totally give back what I had the blessing to go through and learn.
Q: That leads into my next question. What drives you to tell your story and do what you do today?
Marshall: What drives me is the people who just don’t have the right information. I’m an assist guy, every record that I broke was for an assist. All I’ve ever been good at is helping others, equipping others, and setting them up to be the best that they can be. What I see is so many people with the desire, with a want, with that innate hunger to do but just don’t have the information. At the end of the day, it’s got to be information that moves us from 211 degrees to that 212 degrees. Water gets hot at 211 but at 212 it turns into steam. Steam is what fuels and moves a locomotive. The locomotive that I want to move is the person who wants more out of life. Right now, they are hot and want to do something, but they haven’t got that one degree. They are still short that one degree of information. We’ve got that one degree to enthusiasm but it seems to fizzle out and we always have to keep having it. There is a lot of tolerance and personal accountability, it’s about responsibility in itself so they can have the life that they want to live.
Q: You’re an ACC Legend, and you will be honored in your hometown, at halftime of the first semifinal game of the 2016 ACC Tournament. Perfect timing, right?
Marshall: This is part of how my life has always been. When I was a junior at Clemson, the ACC tournament was going to be held in D.C. at the Capital Center. All I wanted from the day I stepped on campus was to be ready to play in that tournament. I wanted to be a significant part of the rotation. Everything started sooner, I started my freshman year and by my junior year, we were probably one of the best teams in the country. Horace Grant was doing his thing, we had players in the right roles, we were having a good time, I was quarterbacking, and I turned my ankle at Duke. We were 25-2, when I turned my ankle at Duke and we never won another game the rest of the year. And I had to miss the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament and we ended up losing to Wake Forest despite being the number two seed. I had gone home to play against Maryland every year but to play in the ACC tournament in my hometown on national TV with the team that we had. I know without a shadow of doubt that we would have been in the finals and won the ACC tournament. And if we win the tournament, we go to the NCAA tournament as a 1 or 2 seed in the entire tournament, we make a run at the National Championship.
Grayson Marshall was almost a Richmond Spider twice but chose Clemson and never looked back. He was inducted into the Clemson Hall of Fame in 2009 and remains one of the best players to ever wear a Tiger uniform. He doesn’t mind that he wasn’t a big scorer, a highlight real dunker, or a showman. He didn’t mind making the pass that led to a game winning basket, an alley oop dunk, or a player getting fouled with a chance to make a free throw. He just wanted to win and an assist led to wins.
He is winning and he got there by learning that it’s okay to receive an assist in life. Life humbled him a bit, because he thought that he had it all worked out, but he still made it.
Today, Marshall is an entrepreneur, inspirational speaker, and a champion of life. He has written two books and is currently working on a third one.
On March 11, at the 2016 ACC Basketball Tournament, he will be honored as the Clemson ACC Legend at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. Here’s what he said about representing Clemson, “For me, the humbling part is that I have 857 assists, so when I graduated from Clemson I was the All-Time ACC assist leader. I did it at a school that was not known for basketball, I did it at school that was not full of superstars, but we had awesome players, and I did it in an era where the best of the best was playing in the conference.”