I enjoyed this piece from The Boston Globe’s Amin Touri checking in with new UMass basketball coach Frank Martin ahead of the upcoming college basketball season.
Touri is worth paying attention to because of his unique perspective on UMass athletics. He had a front row seat to the Minutemen’s transformation to nationally-ranked hockey power as editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. And thus, he understands the culture out in Western Mass, appreciates it, and knows how to tap into what keeps the fanbase up at night.
And what drives them nuts is how far UMass basketball fallen off since the “Refuse to Lose” heyday of John Calipari and the 1990’s. They’ve been to just one NCAA tournament in the last 25 seasons, and have been even worse of late.
Frank seems to genuinely understand the magnitude of what things once were, and what they can be again. Probably because of what he’s heard over the years from his good pal Calipari and his wife Anya, a former UMass track and field star, and probably because of the era he came of age in.1
He seems to be having fun with the gig so far. That makes this a fun read as Touri walks around campus with Frank, re-hashing some of the familiar storylines we know by now. The growing up idolizing Julius Erving, baddest man to ever put on the Maroon. The days as a nightclub bouncer before he found his calling as a high school basketball coach. The nights sleeping on his office floor at Northeastern, where he first met Anya.
In previous columns I wrote about Frank’s gift for gab, why his storytelling is so captivating, and why that’s so important in an NIL era that will favor the coaches who are authentic and give their players permission to be themselves.
I want to get into the last line of this piece, and what I think is a hallmark of the Frank Martin mystique — his ability to create proverbs that stick.
“A lot of people run around trying to prove people wrong. I’m the other way; I run around trying to prove people right,” he says. “I want to prove my grandmother right. I want to prove my mother right. I want to prove my high school coach, who got me into this, right. People that have believed in me.
“That’s what I get out of bed for and that’s what I’m excited to do, so those people can go to bed at night and say, I knew that he was the one. I knew he would do it. That’s what gets me going.”
Given his friendship with Calipari—the former Clarion State marketing major who famously reads business books rather than ones on X’s and O’s strategies—it shouldn’t be surprising that Frank knows how to spin a memorable line in the spur of the moment.
There’s a great book from legendary storytelling consultant Ron Ploof, The Proverb Effect, that goes into the psychology and science of how proverbs streamline complicated messages, why certain ones stick more than others, and how you can create your own.
Ploof spells out three steps to creating great ones. Stage 1 is picking one of three “functions” (definition, prediction or prescription). Stage 2 is where you choose a “frame” to lay it on (metaphoric, implied, derivative, conditional or comparison). Stage 3 is where you pick one of nearly a dozen “finishes” from the categories of conviction, ellipsis, negation, poetic and wordplay.
That last one is what I’ll focus on here. All of these wordplays are Frank Martin specialties—especially “reversal”.
Wordplay involves a clever use of words. There are four wordplay subcategories: associations, double-use, opposites, and reversals.
Associations play with the relationships between word meanings. For example, a clever hawk hides its claws uses the association between a bird of prey and its talons
Double-use finishes repeat words to make a point, such as in a friend to all is a friend to none
Opposites make their points paradoxically, through contradictory or metaphorical meanings, such as one man’s gravy is another man’s poison
Reversals are like double-use finishes because they repeat words but differ by reversing their order. For example, it’s not the size of the dog in a fight, but the size of the fight in the dog
When Iowa State running back Breece Hall said “Five-star culture over five-star players”, it took off like wildfire.
Frank did one better at his introductory press conference when he said he’s not looking for “five-star players but five-star people” and that he’d “rather have a three-star player that’s a 10-star human being than a five-star player that’s a three-star human being.”
The example above, proving people right instead of wrong, is another great use of the reversal technique.
I reckon we’re going to hear a lot of clever Frank one-liners clever enough to make their way to a t-shirt. I hope UMass has a screen-printing vendor on retainer.
Perception is everything. Millennial coaches probably look at UMass like a stepping stone job in a stepping stone conference. Frank’s generation has a completely different view. Reminds me of what former Pitt offensive coordinator (and two-time UMass head coach) Mark Whipple said when he jilted the Panthers for the same job at Nebraska this offseason: “It’s Nebraska.” That means absolutely nothing to your average 18-year-old high school recruit, who’s known nothing but mediocrity from the Huskers in his lifetime. But it means the world to folks old enough to remember in the 1990’s, when the Huskers were the most unstoppable electromagnetic force to ever descend on college football.