He was 5 when his mother hung the nickname on him.
Valerie Peterson began calling her young son Morris “Man” back then, and she calls him that to this day. But it was only two weeks ago that her son, now a star forward for Michigan State, finally felt that the designation fit, and so he wandered into a tattoo parlor.
He lifts his T-shirt to display the result. Just above his right breast is the Chinese symbol for the nickname his mother gave him 17 years ago. “Man.”
“I got it because I feel I’ve become a man,” Peterson said. “When I first got here I was 17. I was a little more immature than most. Now coach [Tom Izzo] says I’ve come the furthest out of any player he’s seen here. I’ve seen things at the worst end. I’ve seen things at the highest end. I’ve been back here where you don’t want to be. Now I can get as high as I work to be.
“I’ve been through a lot.”
This is not a tale of a phenom, of one of those precociously blessed and showered with rewards from an early age. This is a tale of real life, which involves struggles and stumbles, mistakes and disappointments, realization and maturation and growth that can be painfully slow.
“Morris, in his own way, is a unique success story,” Izzo said, his eyes glistening with admiration and pride.
“Why I feel good about Morris . . . I can say to a lot of kids, `Here’s a kid who truly earned what he got.’ He didn’t come in with a lot of hype, but he’s going to walk out of here with a degree and as a first-round draft pick. And he earned both, which says a lot about him.”
Peterson needs only to complete his current internship to receive a degree in child development in May, and to continue his splendid play to hear his name called by NBA Commissioner David Stern in June.
This season has been his coming-out party. As the Spartans await Saturday’s visit from Wisconsin, he is their leading scorer, their second-leading rebounder, their defensive stopper, their big-play guy, a probable All-American and arguably the most valuable player in the Big Ten.
“Last year Morris was the best sixth man in the nation,” Purdue coach Gene Keady said. “Now he’s one of the best players in the nation.”
Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun concurs.
“He’s one of the five best players in the country,” he said. “The only reason more people around the country aren’t saying that is because he doesn’t have gaudy statistics.”
Izzo is talking him up for Big Ten player of the year.
“We ask him to do everything. We ask him to do a ton,” he said. “I think he’s the most complete player in the league.”
Peterson was hardly that when he arrived in East Lansing in fall 1995. He was a modest recruit out of a good program (Flint’s Northwestern High School) with some athletic ability and a gunner’s mentality. There was little about him to foretell the success he has achieved, and his future was put on hold when he broke a finger and was declared a medical redshirt.
Like too many whose lives are defined by the game they play, Peterson cared little about school, treating his studies as nothing more than chores to be ignored.
“I was sleeping in, I wasn’t going to class,” he said. “You name it, I did it.”
His indifference earned him a private meeting with Izzo. The Spartans were days away from a trip to Maui Classic, and the coach declared: “Morris, here’s the deal. If you miss another class, you can’t go to Hawaii.”
“I had an 8 o’clock class the next day,” Peterson recalled. “I set my alarm clock for 7:15 . . . p.m.”
He pauses ruefully.
“That was the worst,” he said. “I woke up that morning at 8:30. My class was over at 8:50 and it was way across campus. I looked at the clock and just put my head down. I knew.”
He knew he wasn’t going to Hawaii, and when the team departed and school broke for the long Thanksgiving weekend, Peterson vacated his dorm. He lived in the players lounge just off their Breslin Center locker room and for five days did little but eat, sleep, watch TV and work on his game. He also reflected.
“I told myself that when the team gets back, everything’s going to change,” he said. “I’m going to work hard in practice. I’m not going to miss class. I set some goals for myself.
“That was the first time I ever set goals for myself. Coach really taught me a lesson, that there are other things beside basketball I had to be responsible for. It made me realize I had to get my act together or I wasn’t going to be here, or I wasn’t going to graduate, or I wasn’t going to play. And I wanted to be a player.”
That was one step in Morris Peterson’s journey to the present, but as a player he remained little more than a left-handed gunner with no regard for defense. And it was hard to change that perception when injuries kept him off the floor: there was the broken finger in his freshman year and a broken right wrist four games into his sophomore year.
“Oh, no. Not again,” Peterson remembers thinking. But he was back after three games, with a cast on his wrist and, more important, a new approach.
“That’s when he really changed his game as far as being a team player and doing what it took to win,” Izzo recalled. “He did an incredible job that year with that big club on his hand, in all ways.
“He became my kind of player during that stretch. He played hard, he played well defensively, he rebounded with one hand. I remember him diving onto the floor, diving into the band, and the response he got from people, he realized, `Hey, this ain’t so bad.'”
Peterson acknowledged that playing with the cast forced him to change.
“All I thought about is doing whatever I could to help the team win. Coach told me I had to play defense,” he said. “That was something I wasn’t known for, but I started to take pride in it and tell myself, `I’m going to stop this guy. I might not be able to score, but I can play defense.’
“When I got my cast off, there was a game when I didn’t dive on the floor and didn’t play as well defensively. Every time I had a lapse on defense, [Izzo] would tell the trainer, `Go get the cast.'”
The cast sits on a shelf above Peterson’s locker as a reminder of the effort needed for success. The attitude it represented propelled him through a junior season in which he was a splendid sixth man, and into this season, with his sights set on more.
There was one last challenge to surmount, and it confronted him in the final seconds of the Spartans’ game with Kentucky two days before Christmas. Mateen Cleaves, their point guard and leader, was on the bench recovering from a stress fracture in his foot, and Michigan State was down two to the Wildcats in raucous Rupp Arena.
Peterson was open for a three-pointer that could have won the game, but he passed up the shot, and Andre Hutson missed from in close at the buzzer. Slowly, dejectedly, Peterson walked off toward the locker room, but Cleaves was in his face before he got there.
“Pete, if you don’t take that shot again, I’m going to kick your butt,” Cleaves vowed. “You’re the guy we look to. You’ve earned that. You have to take that shot.”
Cleaves made an impression.
“I was disappointed in myself because I felt I let the team down,” Peterson said. “It wasn’t like I was scared or anything, I just didn’t take it.
“I want to say it was part of my maturing process. I’d never taken big shots in games. We always looked to Mateen to make something happen. I learned from that. I learned that’s what separates the good from the great–taking the big shot at the end. After that game I told myself if I’m ever in that position again, I’m going to take that shot.”
Nineteen days later he was in that position again, his team down three in the closing seconds of a game against Indiana. Izzo drew up the same play he had drawn up that night in Kentucky, and as Peterson returned to floor, he told himself, `I have to take this shot. I have to make it happen.’
“I knew what I was going to do even before I did it,” Peterson said. “I came off the right wing, took a dribble, came to the top of the key and told myself, `I’m shooting this. I’m shooting this no matter what.’ I made the shot that put us in overtime and we won the game. That made me feel good. That’s what great players do–make big shots.”
