Todd Mayo finds himself after life at Marquette

His feet couldn’t move fast enough, his pace couldn’t save him and for the fourth time in three years, Todd Mayo paid the price.

For what seemed like forever, Mayo, Marquette’s former stud guard, could never get it right. He was an eyesore on the bench when he sulked, bringing more attention to himself than the Golden Eagles at times. But Mayo kept moving.

He shuffled out of his building and sprinted to the gym to practice. He saw the door to the hardwoods and arrived in a huff, but when he looked at the clock, it ticked frantically, almost mocking him.

One minute late.

It’s what cost him a one-game suspension against Wisconsin last December, resulting in a six-point Marquette loss. But behind the scenes, during a clandestine meeting between Buzz Williams and his guard, Mayo found his love for his “father-figure” like role model.

It never seemed like it, but Mayo and Williams had a bond unlike many in the Golden Eagles locker room.

“He said ‘I don’t want you to be just a basketball player.I want you to be perfect,’” Mayo reflected during a phone interview with SB Nation earlier this week.

”‘I want you to be a great father. I want you to be a great man.’ That’s when I knew Buzz was there for me. Everything he said to me my freshman year, it came back to me my sophomore year, and every year. You have to have a plan after basketball. I never had a coach like him. He kept saying ‘you have to be perfect.’ And when he left, I didn’t know how I was going to make it another year without him. How was I going to make it another year without Coach Williams?

“We had our ups and downs. We had times I cried in his arms. It was tough. I still call him. But this is a business, so I made a business move to approach my pro career. I want to be prepared for the 2015 NBA Draft, that was a big thing.”

Mayo said that when Williams left it was “nothing there for me” which led him to make the leap to his professional career. The 6-foot-3 guard will be taking online classes in the future and will attempt to get his degree. Prior to his departure, he would have been a senior, a 24-year old one at that.

But the most important step for Mayo will be changing his poor image from his time under Williams at Marquette. He said that as a player “you can barely do anything” and that players are managed under a microscope due to the fact that basketball is the bread winner at the university.

It’ll be a tough road, but Mayo said that his mindset is on becoming something other than “OJ’s little brother” and that starts with a stint in the NBA Developmental League.

“It’s a day to day thing,” Mayo said. “When I got suspended or certain things I got suspended for it was [Buzz Williams] teaching me a lesson. Whenever I got suspended, he wanted to make it hard for me because he knew whose footsteps I was following. That’s the trend he set for me. He wanted to make it extremely hard...I want people to view me, not as OJ Mayo’s little brother, but as Todd Mayo...I want a different image than what was heard or read in college.”

The Huntington, West Virginia native was third on the squad in scoring with 11.3 points per game last season, playing largely as a sixth man and leading Williams’ offense from the bench. But with his departure, Marquette loses a big piece of their projected scoring for the incoming season.

Though he’ll be missed on the court, Mayo has large expectations for the Golden Eagles this season and said that his former team shouldn’t be overlooked this season, even in his absence.

“[Coach Wojciechowski] is coming from a great staff at Duke and they have the best tools to attack the new Big East,” Mayo said. “With the previous players that they have now and with me being gone, they are going to be a better team. They’ve raised their standards after certain players left. When I left, Marquette was on a great track. When the season approaches they will surprise a lot of people.”

The brutal, brisk Milwaukee winters that slowed his footsteps, that dulled his mind, were finally over, and when the season ended and the sun appeared, two big pieces had vanished from Marquette’s sidelines. The winning atmosphere that Williams brought to the quaint Wisconsin campus, a share of the 2013 Big East regular season title, back-to-back Sweet Sixteens and more, had faded but it wasn’t gone.

A companionship between a troubled guard and a winning coach blossomed behind closed doors. Mayo will never forget Marquette and will always treasure Williams’ love off the court. But as the door closes on this chapter in the college’s recent history, Mayo still, and likely forever will, call Marquette “home.”

“Our personalities were the same. Behind the media and the suspensions, Buzz loves me and I Iove him. Him leaving just hurt,” Mayo said of his and Williams’ relationship. “Marquette is always going to hold a special place [in my heart]. I don’t regret anything I went through at Marquette. It was the best situation for me growing off the court. It will always be home for me.”