2011-12 BB | With Turgeon, a new look

Writhing in pain on the floor of a Topeka, Kan., basketball court, Mark Turgeon grabbed his wrist, clenched his teeth and slowly got back to his feet.

After jumping for an overthrown pass, the sixth-grader had been undercut by an opponent, and he fell to the ground awkwardly. But the Capital City Youth Basketball League championship game meant too much for him to leave.

So, broken wrist and all, Turgeon played the rest of the game, leading his team to a championship victory.

Growing up, no one questioned Turgeon's desire. The competitive fire, absolute confidence and borderline cockiness that fueled him as a youngster in the basketball-crazed state of Kansas set him apart even when his slight frame and small stature suggested he'd get lost in the crowd.

Not much has changed in the decades since.

Entering his first season at the helm of the Terrapins men's basketball program, Turgeon has the utmost confidence in himself. He has no doubt he can accomplish what he set out to when he started coaching as a graduate assistant at Kansas in 1987. It doesn't faze him that he follows a legend in Gary Williams and inherits a roster barren of much experience or talent.

Turgeon's been told time after time what he could and couldn't do. Reclining in his seat one late September afternoon and looking around his office in Comcast Center, surrounded by reminders of Terps basketball history as he remembered his own, the basketball lifer cracked a wry grin.

"I'm going to be Mark Turgeon, and it's been good enough all my life," he said. "All I needed was an opportunity at a great school, and now I have it."

n GREEN ROOTS

Somewhere in suburban Topeka sits a basketball court with green-painted backboards, a decades-old refuge for neighborhood kids with an affinity for the game.

Turgeon spent countless hours lofting shot after shot toward those rusty rims. After all, the court did rest in his backyard. And when winter came, he and his friends would shovel snow off the pavement to play pickup games in the freezing cold.

Even as a young kid, Turgeon hated to lose. As a fourth-grader, he once spent all night on that court practicing his shot after missing a potential game-winning free throw.

In the eight years following that missed game winner, Turgeon's teams lost 10 games, including just three as a high school point guard. In a family of five, including an older brother and two younger sisters, basketball was life for the scrawny kid.

Ben Meseke, Turgeon's basketball coach at Hayden High School, still remembers the moment he first learned of the young player. Picking up the Saturday edition of the hometown newspaper, Meseke noticed a photo of the high school basketball team sitting on the bench listening to their coach during a timeout.

Just a row behind, a young boy peered as far into the huddle as possible, hanging on the coach's every word.

"He's leaning so far in that his head is actually in the huddle with those guys," Meseke recalled. "All his friends are up there in the balcony, throwing popcorn and chasing the girls — the things that third- and fourth-graders do."

"He was a kid that just lived for that," said Bob Turgeon, Mark's father. "He didn't have the physical talent, but he understood the game when so many kids never got it. There's a big difference there."

Despite measuring in at a skinny 5 feet, 6 inches — "He looked like a toothpick out there on the floor," Meseke said — Turgeon led Hayden to two state championships and an undefeated record his senior season.

Meseke had never seen a player so confident in himself. When his team faced a two-point deficit with two seconds remaining during that final year, Turgeon walked into the huddle and coolly said, "This is ours." It was.

"He really toes the line between confidence and cockiness," Meseke said, "but he doesn't cross it."

"He had a confidence about him, and he just knew he could play," said Mark's older brother, Jim. "Mark's never failed at anything in his life."

n A NEW PATH

Within months of taking the head coaching position at Kansas in 1983, Larry Brown went out for ice cream with that same brash high school player and his coach. His prep career over, Turgeon was hoping to walk on at the school of his dreams. Brown, Turgeon remembered, didn't think he had a chance.