Moneyball Pro-Am’s oldest player, Deric Martin, is making up for lost time

HOLT – The young guys at the Moneyball Pro-Am who don’t know Deric Martin simply call him “Old School.” Years ago, that bothered him — an unpleasant truth as he began to lose sight of his best days on the basketball court, and perhaps a reminder of a bygone era.

Today, he wears it with pride. He hears their respect. And he’s grateful that he’s still here, that he can have nights like last Thursday, when on his 53rd birthday, he guarded 21-year-old Jaxon Kohler for 40 minutes because his team was down to five players.

“He probably gave me 30 or 40 points. But I frustrated him,” Martin said.

Martin has been playing in the Moneyball Pro-Am longer than some players have been alive, since it started in 2004, the only original left. He played against incoming MSU freshman Drew Neitzel and with and against Draymond Green and, that first year, reached the championship game with his old high school teammate and Lansing legend Brent Scott. They graduated from Everett High School together in 1989.

“Coen Carr asked me last year when he first met me, ‘What keeps you going, Old School?’ And I said, ‘Man, just the love of the game.’ He got it,” Martin said. “When I was 40, they said, ‘D Martin, when are you going to stop playing?’ I came with different ideologies and said, ‘Well, when I can’t slam anymore.’ Well, that’s been out the window for a couple years now. And I’m still going. So I don’t know when I’m going to hang up my boots.”

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He has a lifetime pass from Moneyball Sportswear president and pro-am founder Desmond Ferguson — who, like a few other veterans, has a grandfatherly pass — as long as Martin continues to play like he does or comes close to it, and he can compete against someone like Kohler, who at 6 feet 10 inches taller than him.

“I’m not going to sit behind you (defensively) and let you post me up and get the ball where you want it and do what you want to do,” Martin said of facing Kohler. “I’m in front of you the whole time, every time you step on the court. I could tell he was getting a little frustrated and agitated. He came on the court (at one point) and he literally put both hands on me and pushed me to get into position. I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s frustrated. I’m in his head a little bit.'”

Martin’s team may have to face Kohler one more time when they meet in the Moneyball Pro-Am playoffs, which begin Tuesday night at Holt High School. Martin’s Team Faygo squad — which also features Carr and MSU incoming freshman Jase Richardson — is the No. 3 seed, taking on 4-seed Motorcars (Jaden Akins, Xavier Booker) at 6 p.m. Tuesday. Up next are Kohler and Gehrig Norman’s top-seed Tri-Star Trust taking on 6-seed Case Credit Union (Frankie Fidler, Jesse McCulloch), before the nightcap between 2-seed Goodfellas (Kur Teng, Szymon Zapala) and 5-seed Snipes (Tre Holloman, Carson Cooper). The semifinals and championship are Thursday night, along with the 3-point contest.

Martin, whose knees were still sore Sunday night from his 40-minute bout with Kohler three days earlier, hopes to be fully fit again by Tuesday. “It’s almost make or break now,” he said.

This competition means a lot to him. The Moneyball Pro-Am is where he rekindled his love for the game in his early 30s. It’s where he competed against pros and college players who were on the path he could have taken if he had made different choices 30 years ago. It’s a place where his play earned the respect of those guys.

“In 2004, if a guy didn’t put his body on me, he could get dunked,” Martin said. “That was my game — above the rim. Every time I got my hands on the ball, I tried to slam it.”

Martin, who went from 5-8 to 6-1 between his junior and senior years in high school, could have played college basketball somewhere if he had put his mind to it. When things didn’t work out at Lansing Community College, things went south.

“I lost my enthusiasm for the game, for basketball, and I started turning to the streets. The streets took up more of my time than what I was giving back to the game,” Martin said. “It was just kind of a fiasco.

“Nobody can tell you anything once you have formed your opinion. I have lost a lot of time.”

In his 20s, he got the chance to play at Jackson State Community College in Tennessee (where he was born, before moving to Lansing as a young child).

“I just couldn’t keep it up,” Martin said. “I lacked the discipline to just keep going with it.

“It still bothers me sometimes. But I’ve learned to deal with it. Those were the choices I made when I was a younger adult. You can’t turn back time. What you can do is share your story. So when I see these younger guys and they’re struggling, they’re talented enough to play, but when they leave the gym, their mind is in a different place, when I see it, I have the opportunity to talk to them. I share that story with them. Like, literally, ‘Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. You’ll regret it in the end.’ ”

By the early 2000s, Martin’s days in organized basketball were long behind him, though he was an avid athlete in pickup games. Ferguson knew Martin from pickup runs at LCC, which at the time had the best games in Lansing.

“He wasn’t a DI guy, but he could play and he was in shape,” Ferguson said of Martin. “I told him, ‘We’re going to do this (pro-am). Do you want to play?'”

“It meant the world to me,” Martin said. “Okay, you’ve ruined your college years. Now you have a chance to have a second chance. I took it and ran with it. And it was a joyous thing, to have a second chance to be with the boys.”

Martin has competed in the Moneyball Pro-Am almost every year. He took a break around 2018 due to the pandemic, when he was just starting his lawn care business.

“I didn’t want to get injured, so I sat out for a couple of years,” said Martin, who owns Your Maintenance Free Lawn Services and also started a trucking company last year.

“Before I hired some help this year, I was probably doing 100 lawns a week by myself,” said Martin, who has three children: Deric Jr., 31, Olivia, 20, and Silas, 18, who will be attending the University of Olivet to play volleyball this fall. “That’s trimming, mowing, blowing. I was going, going, going.”

Martin missed the game during the years he wasn’t in pro-am. Basketball was his first love. As a kid, he played mostly at Wainwright Elementary School and Davis Park, and in the winter he’d shovel snow off the courts with his feet to get some shots.

He can still hear former Everett coach Johnny Jones yelling to box out every time a shot goes up. Those fundamentals have helped him stay on the court as he’s gotten older and have allowed him to continue to give guys like Kohler problems.

“If you have ambitions to do something, do it,” Martin said. “There’s no tomorrow. There’s no turning back. If you love doing something, man, put your best foot forward and go for it.”

Contact Graham Couch at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.