What’s My Name? … Marcus and Markieff Morris
Words. HShoop
Markieff Morris (photo. The South Philly Review)
In Dime #40 (on newsstands now), we profiled Class of ’08 stars Marcus and Markieff Morris, who are headed to the national champion Kansas Jayhawks.
WORDS. ANDREW KATZ
In retrospect it seems impossible. As 6-4 and 6-5 eighth graders, North Philadelphia natives Marcus and Markieff Morris were almost totally overlooked as future hoops stars. Sure, they were destined to fill their respective 6-8 and 6-9 frames someday, but back then the twins really had no idea what they were doing on the hardwood.
That didn’t last long. Today the twins are one of the most dominant one-two punches in high school hoops, starring as fifth-year post-graduates at Apex Academies (Pennsauken, N.J.), where on some nights they account for as many points between them as the entire opposing team. Marcus and ’Kieff are headed to Kansas after de-committing from Memphis twice within the last year.
“It’s day and night,” notes Chris Martin, a teammate at Apex who has known the twins since their freshman year of high school. “When they were young bulls, they weren’t really coordinated like that. I mean they could play a little bit, but they wasn’t half as good as they are now.”
Now, Marcus is a 6-8 guard who can tally his 33-point, 11-board per night average from any one of four positions. He is the ultimate mismatch.
“Little guards get up under you,” says Marcus. “You gotta back them down. If a little guy gets on me, I won’t bring the ball up – I’ll just go to the post.”
Markieff is a 6-9 power forward whose three-point range begs comparison to fellow Philly native Rasheed Wallace. In January, Markieff drilled 10 triples during a 37-point outing, a shade above his 34-point, 15-rebound per game average.
After much consternation about their college destination as seniors at Prep Charter School in Philly, the Morris twins finally decided their nonconformist skill sets would be best served in Jayhawk uniforms. The two decommitments from Memphis might seem scandalous, but it was more about indecision than foul play. While both twins liked Memphis, they weren’t quite taken with the school and wanted to explore other options. Ultimately, both parties decided that they should part ways.
Landing at KU is a dream for Marcus, who pegged the Jayhawks as his ideal destination when he first saw them on TV. That now gives KU coach Bill Self the task of figuring out how to best utilize the talents of his new recruits. Even Dan Brinkley, who coached back-to-back state championship teams with the Morris twins at Prep Charter, doesn’t know the best way to use Marcus and Markieff.
“Marcus, I don’t know what you do with him,” says Brinkley. “You just put him on the floor. I think his minutes will be determined by who he defends the best. If he learns to defend the two, offensively he can handle the ball and play there. But now he’s 226 pounds. If he adds six or seven pounds, is he not a four? He doesn’t have a position.”
“’Kieff is a perfect pick-and-pop guy – he can fade, he can roll,” notes Brinkley. “But he keeps getting better. I don’t know where he’s best yet. When he went into 12th grade, I told him he could start shooting three-pointers and now he’s hitting them with more regularity than Marcus is.”
To call the twins late bloomers would be an understatement. Not only were they nowhere near physical maturity when Brinkley located them as eighth graders, but they had also never really played basketball before in their lives.
“In 2003, I’m talking to my cousin Lenny on the phone, who was a teacher at the twins’ school,” recalls Brinkley. “He says to me, ‘There are these two twins here at this school, these guys are garbage. They can’t play no ball. But they’re about 6-4, 6-5.’ And this is when they’re in the eighth grade. I said ‘6-4, 6-5?’ I said ‘Lenny, they cannot be 6-5.’ He said, ‘Yeah, there are two of them.’ I said, ‘Lenny, I’ll be right there.’”
Within weeks of that phone call, Brinkley was at the Morris’ front door, convincing their mother, Angel, that her sons weren’t just football players. That even though they hadn’t put in work on the hardwood before, she should let them suit up for his Huntington Park Warriors AAU team. Angel didn’t protest – even if she didn’t see her boys as ballplayers.
“They weren’t that good,” says Ms. Morris. “I never thought of the boys playing basketball. They used to play football. But it was something [Brinkley] could do with them and it would be fun. Anything to keep them occupied and off the street.”
In Marcus and Markieff, Brinkley saw two blank slates – two huge blank slates. Brinkley’s basketball crash course started with the most basic fundamentals. The twins hadn’t learned any bad habits that needed correcting; in fact, they hadn’t learned any habits at all.
And there was plenty to learn. While Marcus had shot up to 6-7 by the 10th grade and developed a jumper, Coach Brinkley wanted to see more progress from his budding star before inserting him into the Prep Charter starting lineup. The development Brinkley sought was not simply quantifiable with points and assists.
“This is a guy who was 6-7, shoots the three, handles, but I didn’t feel that he played as hard as he needed to play,” says Brinkley. “I told him, ‘I would ruin your life if I let you start right now. If I allow you to start and do what you want to do when you’re not working hard, that’s just going to set it up for failure. What’s going to happen when your talent comes?’”
“Coach Dan taught me how to play the game,” says Marcus, who is younger than Markieff by seven minutes. “It’s not all about scoring. There are other elements to the game.”
But Brinkley never needed to teach Marcus to share the ball with his brother. It’s almost as if the twins always had a sixth sense for each other on the floor.
“It’s crazy how they know exactly where each other is at,” says Martin. “Say Marcus has the ball and he’ll be trapped or something, he’ll just throw it up and Markieff will be right there to grab the ball. I’ll be like ‘How did you know he was open like that?’”
They’re twins. Their connection runs deeper than wearing the same jersey. However, that doesn’t stop the two from engaging in heated battles on their own time. It’s a healthy sibling rivalry – at least most of the time – when they tee off against each other on the playground and more is at stake than bragging rights.
“The loser has to clean the room,” says Marcus. “Well, sometimes it’s to see who has to wash the clothes, clean the bathroom – it’s usually different. But always pretty bad. And you always gotta do it.”
And there’s no doubt that this tradition will live on next year in the dorms at Kansas. “We’ve lived together forever,” Markieff says, “and the only way that we’re gonna move our separate ways is when we go to the NBA.”
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