During his summers as a basketball player for Purdue, Cuonzo Martin was a construction worker and an employee at a local pizza shop. He was a student who needed to support himself, so he sacrificed training time for a paycheck.
When those paychecks became bigger, when Martin became the star of an Italian professional team, he was still 31 credits away from earning his bachelor’s degree — but he spent his offseasons relaxing, not studying.
The now-Missouri head coach didn’t have time for internships as a college athlete, and he didn’t have a plan for whenever his professional playing career would come to an end — both of which he thought about last week, just before he traveled to New York, where he attended his first meeting as a member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches’ board of directors.