MarJon Beauchamp is a likely first-round pick you dont know but LeBron does: Inside his journ

May 22, 2024

The stage rose above the court, like a rock concert, with men in black jackets, backward hats and jeans all dancing below in the pit.

Spotlights beaming from the rafters, flashing strobe lamps and pixelated video boards on stage illuminated the arena. The volume of the announcer’s microphone drowned out the music the men in black were dancing to.

MarJon Beauchamp, a 21-year old basketball star from Yakima, Wash., was one of four players on the stage at this particular moment, as part of a team introduced for the Rising Stars Challenge on NBA All-Star Friday. In Cleveland, in February.

To Beauchamp’s right was Cole Anthony of the Orlando Magic. Josh Giddey of the Oklahoma City Thunder was to Beauchamp’s left, and next to Giddey, Jalen Green of the Houston Rockets.

Beauchamp is not yet on an NBA team. He was in the Rising Stars Challenge as one of four players from G League Ignite, the breeding ground for fresh-out-of-high-school prospects the NBA started two years ago for players who do not want to go to college.

If things break Beauchamp’s way in June, he will follow in Green’s footsteps as a player drafted from G League Ignite as a lottery pick. But not even Green got to do this — play a part in All-Star weekend before he made the NBA.

“I started getting butterflies in my stomach like, ‘Dang, this is really kind of everything,’” Beauchamp said.

The highlight of Beauchamp’s short life stood for about 24 hours. It was upstaged the following evening, on the top floor of Cleveland’s Truss building, an office and party center on the city’s west side, with a 4,000-square-foot terrace that offers panoramic views of the downtown skyline.

Beauchamp is a client of Rich Paul’s Klutch Sports Group, and each year, in whichever city is hosting the NBA’s signature midseason event, Paul holds a dinner party for all of his clients in town for the weekend, whether or not they are All-Stars, and for their families.

Paul is from Cleveland, and he picked the scenic Truss building for his bash — lining the hallway off the elevator on the top floor with pictures of each Klutch-represented All-Star, in street clothes, walking into an arena for a game.

Guests at Paul’s party sipped Moët champagne, Lobos tequila and Heineken. They feasted on short rib and salmon, at tables covered in fancy, black cloth.

Beauchamp and his parents sat at a table next to Paul and his world-famous girlfriend, Adele, and at the end of that table was his most famous client, LeBron James. Naturally, MarJon went over to say hello.

“When I first came up to LeBron, he was like, ‘What’s good, what’s good? I heard a lot of good things about you,’” Beauchamp said. “Like, he’s my favorite player, and he knew who I was. He took pictures with me and my family.”

What’s more, Beauchamp is about to become a millionaire, assuming he is drafted somewhere in the middle of the first round of the 2022 NBA Draft, as most experts expect.

It is a good thing, then, that he fought the urge that burned inside of him exactly one year before he found himself hobnobbing with the stars in Cleveland.

He wanted to quit.

MarJon Beauchamp is not so different from many NBA hopefuls, in that getting to the league is something he dreamed about and schemed for, uprooting his life, taking risks and otherwise trying to ensure he’s in prime position for one of 30 teams to call his name on draft day.

The NBA created G League Ignite for prospects just like him – players who either don’t want to go to college, or can’t, but want to stay in the U.S. and get paid until they’re draft-eligible, rather than jet off to eastern Europe or Australia, like LaMelo Ball.

Taking the Ignite path has already worked brilliantly for Jalen Green and Jonathan Kuminga, who were both lottery picks (the Rockets took Green second overall; Kuminga went seventh to Golden State) off Ignite’s first team from the 2020-21 season.

Beauchamp is already different from Green and from Kuminga because he didn’t go directly from high school to Ignite. Signed by Ignite in September, Beauchamp is its first prospect who was already a year out of high school when he signed.

In fact, Beauchamp attended five high schools in four years.

MarJon and his dad, John, a former college player, had already moved from Yakima to Seattle so MarJon could play for former NBA star Brandon Roy as a freshman. MarJon followed Roy when he got a new coaching job at a different Seattle high school, then transferred to Rainier Beach, a third Seattle school, before playing at a private, Christian school in Glendale, Ariz., as a senior. He moved back to Yakima after his senior season (but before school let out) to walk across the stage with his friends on Graduation Day.

While all of this was going on, Beauchamp fell in with a famous trainer who has two funny nicknames.

In the NBA and the NFL, at major Division I colleges and in military circles, they call Frank Matrisciano “Hell’s Trainer” for his unorthodox, grueling workouts, and “The Masked Trainer,” because he always wears masks in pictures and promotional videos. Blake Griffin of the NBA and Von Miller of the NFL are just two of his dozens of famous clients.

During Beauchamp’s junior year of high school, in 2019, one year before G League Ignite even existed, Matrisciano pitched an idea to the Beauchamps that he’d been hatching for more than a decade. Rather than go to college, MarJon could work out in an intense, on-site, all-encompassing program designed to prepare one’s mind and body for the NBA Draft.

Matrisciano sold the idea to Beauchamp’s father. MarJon flew to San Francisco for a trial workout. Matrisciano flew to Glendale to train him as a high-school senior.

“I would go down there at least once a month (to Glendale), and I would train him to get him ready for when he came here,” Matrisciano said.

Beauchamp was already a very good player. He was a league MVP his junior year at Rainier Beach, was rated a four-star college recruit by most experts and drew interest from several major colleges.

But he was academically ineligible for college, and he weighed 175 pounds. Ignite had passed on him. So August 2020, he formally joined Matrisciano in San Francisco.

The name of Matrisciano’s new program was Chameleon BX. His first class of recruits included Beauchamp and prospects such as Kyree Walker, Maxwell Lewis and J.D. Tsasa, who was just 16.

At no cost to the athletes, Matrisciano put them and their families up at Harbor Point Apartments, a gated community of townhouses nestled between the hills just outside of San Francisco.

Their living quarters contained two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. There were swimming pools and jacuzzis and a restaurant on site. Tennis courts. Saunas.

Under Matrisciano’s tutelage, Beauchamp added more than 20 pounds of muscle in six months. But he’d barely touched a basketball.

Whereas Matrisciano’s physical training is all done outside, in public parks, he was relying on several former NBA coaches (like Bob Hill, Dave Joerger and Kim Hughes) to come to San Francisco to run basketball training inside of gyms he’d rented.

But due to COVID-19, those gyms were closed. The coaches on his roster either refused to travel, for fear of contracting the virus, or got different jobs. And in January 2021, Hell’s Trainer didn’t know when the gyms would open.

“I said, ‘Listen, I cannot look anyone in the eyes here and say the gyms will be open next week. I have no idea,’” Matrisciano said. “Everyone’s got to do what they have to do now. If they feel they need to leave for something else, then I said, ‘You have to do what you need to do.’”

Beauchamp knew he had to go home. He was on the move for five full years, from Yakima to Seattle to Arizona and to San Francisco, in the pursuit of one specific goal — to be drafted that summer. But he wasn’t playing any basketball.

Beauchamp thought he could keep his dream on life support by playing in Seattle’s notorious pickup games hosted by Roy and Seattle legend Jamal Crawford. But early on in those games, Beauchamp rolled his ankle severely and couldn’t walk, let alone play.

He knew he was finished as far as the 2021 draft was concerned.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Beauchamp said. “That’s probably when I got down to my deepest, like my lowest point in my life. I didn’t really have any confidence in myself.

“I was gonna quit.”

So, why didn’t he?

That story was 21 years in the making.

MarJon Beauchamp elevates for a shot over the Stockton Kings’ Neemias Queta. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today)

MarJon was born to Denise Pleasant, a student at Yakima Valley Community College, in October 2000. On weekends, she, her two cousins who also went to school there and friends gathered at their apartments to play cards. Among the people sitting at the card tables was London Wilson, a player on the Yakima Valley basketball team with aspirations of coaching one day.

Baby MarJon sat in a carriage, in the corner or next to Denise, cooing and crying while they played.

“We’d be sitting there late at night playing, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be a coach someday, and MarJon is going to play for me,’” Wilson said. “Everybody around the table laughed.”

Wilson moved back to Yakima in 2006 and 10 years later was named head coach at the school. MarJon, by then a freshman who had moved to Seattle, used to work out with Wilson when he’d come home to visit his mother. The joke was the same — that MarJon would one day play for him.

When Beauchamp’s much bigger dreams had crashed, he’d forgone college and Chameleon folded (Matrisciano is re-introducing his program this summer under the name “Stealth X”), he made another visit to Yakima Valley, to see friends.

Wilson invited him into his office. MarJon could work out with Wilson’s team, which included many of his friends, or, he could even enroll and play for Wilson. He was in the gym working out and having fun, surrounded by people he grew up with.

“We put together these pro workouts for him and he loved it,” Wilson said. “He was on the scout team for the practices, and he was really, really enjoying it again. There’s no pressure on him. He just was having fun.”

To no one’s surprise, Beauchamp eventually joined the Yakima Valley team, and, looking like the big-time prospect he always was, averaged 30.7 points and 10.5 rebounds in 12 games, including a career-high 50-pointer one night in June 2021.

“That’s when I really, like, found love for the game again, after that,” Beauchamp said.

But he still had to find his path to the pros.

Rod Strickland is a former NBA star, and Kyrie Irving’s godfather. His current job is to pick players for G League Ignite.

When MarJon Beauchamp finished his stint at Yakima Valley last summer, he was invited to work out for a month in Memphis, Tenn. While he was there, Crawford called Strickland.

Please, go to Memphis and take a look at the kid.

“That was big, because I have so much respect for Jamal,” Strickland said. “I think he’s authentic, I think he’s a basketball mind. We had a conversation about him, and that went a long way.”

Strickland had already seen Beauchamp play as a senior in high school, when he was piecing together the first Ignite team. What he saw in Memphis was an athletic, 6-6, 205-pound young man who could handle the ball, showed a nice shooting stroke and a quick burst toward the rim.

Strickland invited Beauchamp to dinner in Memphis. Strickland pitched the idea of joining Ignite to MarJon (who could have still tried to go the college route, or consider finding something overseas), but he also talked to him about how to play.

“He told me when you get to the gym, come in with that attitude, like you’re that guy,” Beauchamp said. “I’m kind of laid back, kind of quiet. He told me to come in right away like I’m supposed to be there.”

The Ignite season ended in March, and Beauchamp played his way up NBA Draft boards. In 21 games, he was Ignite’s second-leading scorer (15.8 ppg). He scored primarily at the rim and in the midrange (his .538 shooting percentage was second on the team), and draft experts typically predict him to be selected somewhere between picks 13 and 25.

If and when that happens, he will be another Ignite success story. He will have been the latest to eschew major college hoops. He will have made good on his best-laid plans that very nearly went awry.

“It’s about opportunity, “ Strickland said. “If we find the right young man and it fits for both parties, I think we have a pretty great environment.”

“If it wasn’t for COVID, he’d already be in the league,” Matrisciano said.

“I completely believe that it was just taking some of this pressure away, and just have fun,” said Wilson, his “college” coach.

“I feel like I had to go through some things to become who I am today,” he said.

(Photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images)

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