It’s senior year and Lawrence North, Ind. is playing Terre Haute South Vigo. Terre Haute’s All-Indiana star, Armon Bassett, is averaging 22.5 points per game. Thirty-year Lawrence North coach Jack Keefer, the “Dean” of Marion County, knows that all roads go through Bassett: They stop him, they win. So, Keefer picks Tyler Morris and sends him to the Bassett island and tells all of his Lawrence North teammates to just “latch onto their man.”
“At halftime Bassett had 19 points and Tyler was about ready to cry,” Keefer said. “But the score was 36-19 [LN]. ‘Why are you so upset?'” he asked Morris.
“I don’t like him scoring on me,” Morris replied.
Bassett scored just three points the second half.
“He wore him out,” Keefer said. “Bassett was one of the best players in state that year and he just shut down.”
Three years later, Morris is at Boston University, seven months removed from winning the America East Rookie of the Year award, and the Terriers have just entered Case Gym for Midnight Madness. He’s wearing his game uniform, No. 24, but he looks strangely uncomfortable without the sheen of warm-up sweat in his hair.
The 6-foot-2, 190-pound Morris is competing in a 3-point contest with the women’s basketball team, and he’s paired with junior Kristi Dini. His first shot bounces off left, the second taps back iron and the third hits the rim three times before leaving the cylinder. Dini has only made one of her 3’s and the clock is winding down.
From the stands you can see his motions become more deliberate, but he is unflappable. Morris’s next shot barely skims nylon as it drops through. The next, perfect. The rim might as well be a peach basket. As the buzzer sounds, the third shot falls true. In Morris’s mind, he didn’t make three out of six, he made three. Not good enough.
“Every time I go into the gym to shoot I only count the number of shots I make,” Morris says. “You put up 15, 20 shots a game you are going to get points by default. We’re D-1 players; we’re good enough to get points by default. If I’m taking 20 shots and I’m only hitting seven or eight of them that’s taking shots away from other people, and I think that could potentially hurt the team.”
All I want to do is win. Basketball players say it every day. But for most it’s a stock phrase. There are too many easily labeled prima donnas for it to sound honest. Telling isn’t enough; they’ve got to show it. And you’ve got to see it.
In Morris, you can.
You can see it when he’s standing on the sidelines during practice, unable to participate in drills because he’s still rehabbing an ankle injury. He shouts, not only words of encouragement, but strategy, telling the team how many 3’s they need to complete the shooting drill. They fail, so BU coach Dennis Wolff tells them they’ve got to run sprints.
“Can I do this, run sprints?” Morris asks team trainer Will Rondeau.
The response is no, and Morris’ face briefly tightens with displeasure before he walks away and does ball-handling drills on the sidelines at full speed.
Three days before BU’s home opener against St. Bonaventure University, Morris found out that the shin splints that nagged him during training camp will keep him out indefinitely. This time, he has to wear a protective boot so he doesn’t develop any stress fractures.
“I could barely get up the court,” Morris said. “That’s when I started to realize it was a little more serious than just the normal shin splints.”
At practice, Morris is forced to sit in full practice uniform next to the athletic trainers, and watch with the face of forced neutrality — all while Matt Wolff, his teammate who spent hours in the gym shooting when he was injured during Morris’ freshman year takes jumpers from the top of the key, healthy for the first time in two years.
“He’s confident in himself and that’s something I’ve tried to learn from him is to be mentally strong,” said co-captain Matt Wolff, whose shot has improved dramatically from his freshman year. “We got hurt at the same time and we kind of just fed off each other.”
But in shaking off the blank stare that occasionally drifts across Morris’s face as he sits watching his teammates run shooting drills, you can see the character and integrity that both his parents, Steve and Vanessa, know. If there are any doubts about the sincerity behind a player’s statements — of which there are none with Morris’ — about showing good character as both a winner and a loser, just ask the parents.
Growing up in Indianapolis, Morris fell into basketball. Steve, who works for a construction company, gave him options. Morris’s mother, Vanessa, would drive him to basketball camp after school in third and fourth grade every day. But even in the basketball biolabs disguised as gyms of Hoosierville, kids can get pulled down different avenues.
“When he was younger he told me he was going to quit basketball to skateboard,” Steve said. “I told him he had to do both. Fortunately he ended up with basketball. I think if you let the kids sort of grow into something, where they start to really hit their stride, then it becomes sort of an internal drive for them. That’s a balance as parents, there’s a certain resentment if you push them.”
“He’s a guy that gets up every morning trying to do the best he can,” Wolff said.
Morris has won wherever he’s played. He won two consecutive Indiana State Championships at Lawrence North with recent NBA draftees Greg Oden (the No.1 Pick) and Mike Conley, Jr. (the No. 4 pick). He won playing summer AAU ball, when, after his junior year, he caught the eyes of college coaches. And he won often when Keefer held open gym. But he’s always won behind the curtain. It didn’t matter that the spotlight was usually on an ESPN monument like Oden.
“They were just better,” Morris said. “If you can’t beat them out and no politics are being played and they are just flat out better you can’t be mad or salty about anything that’s going on.”
There were moments, however, like the Bassett game, when it was Morris’s turn. The one time with Lawrence North – which played multiple games on ESPN that year – that Morris was interviewed after a game was when he defended Eric Gordon, freshman at Indiana and future lottery pick, and outscored him for an entire game. From the way Morris tells the story, it would be hard to imagine him coming off as anything but humble.
“I don’t know whether he was cold or whether he was kind of tentative,” Morris said. “People call it luck or people call it . . . I don’t know, it’s an act of God probably.”
But most of the time, the spotlight was so dim on Morris that even his own coach didn’t see him in the shadows; like during that turning-point summer, after he played a spectacular tournament in Louisville, when 18 colleges took notice.
“Keefer called me and said all these people have called me about Tyler,” Steve said. “Keefer told me, ‘Gee, I guess I don’t know much about talent because I got all these schools calling me and I’m not even starting him.'”
Travis Ford of Eastern Kentucky University was one of the coaches who called Morris’ senior year, and said he wanted to Tyler to play for him – but Morris was leaning toward BU.
“As parents, your first inclination is you don’t want them to go halfway across the country to go to school,” Steve said.
The little nudge from his parents helped Morris make a verbal commitment to EKU. But when Ford left for a coaching job at the University of Massachusetts, Morris was released from EKU and Wolff came calling. Morris’s Terrier career took awhile to get out of the gates, however. A year before averaging 13.4 points and three rebounds, Morris was on crutches, redshirted for his freshman season.
It was an injury that, years later, Morris can reflect on as a blessing.
“I don’t think that if I played out my freshman season that things would have been the same,” he said. “I would never have told you that I had the year I had last year – in a million years I wouldn’t.”
Morris used the year not only to get acclimated to school life, but to improve his jump shot. Playing with Oden in high school, there weren’t many jumpers to go around, so Morris used the time he was sidelined to perfect what has become on of the most automatic mid-range jumpers in the America East conference – shooting .462 from the field, 10th best on a conference list dominated by big men, and a fourth-best .802 from the free throw line.
“Something he’s always done is pretty much just played the game against himself,” Steve said. “He would spend hours in the gym just doing those kind of things on his own.
“There was a year [before high school] he practiced two to three hours a day. He didn’t miss a day playing basketball for a year straight,” he continued.
“You can be hurt and sit on the side and just have time pass,” Wolff said. “Or you can be hurt and get better.”
Before any of the stories Terrier fans have witnessed could come to fruition, however, Morris first had to get onto his high school varsity team. He did it in a way that almost seems too simple for many of today’s athletes. He just made himself better. Better after his freshman year, when he played on the freshman team, better after his sophomore year on JV, and certainly better after his junior year as a swing player on varsity, leading to a senior year in which he would start at guard with two future NCAA Finalists (Oden and Conley Jr. with Ohio St. University).
Yet perhaps the most telling words come from his current coach.
Ask Wolff if he thinks that two summers ago a healthy Morris would have made the difference in how the season would unfold. His reply will run along the lines of, ‘Well, what do you think?’
Even though Morris doesn’t like to let any player score against his team, he’ll have to wait six to 10 games to check the Armon Bassett of the night. When that stretch is over and the plastic boot comes off, ask Wolff again whether Morris would have affected the outcomes of those games. He won’t even need to reply. He’ll just have to send the doubter down to Case Gymnasium where he can see the Hoosier working to make shot No. 300, just so he can get some breakfast.
