Marjon Beauchamp, the Milwaukee Bucks Indian rookie

Marjon Beauchamp seems to have found his Ithaca in Milwaukee, who recorded 7 appearances with 4 points and 2.4 rebounds per 11.9 minutes in the first 10 games of the season.

You see, the 22-year-old Bucks rookie, who as a true Native American with roots with the Mission Indians and the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians has the nomadic life in his blood, wandered around a lot before finding a place in the NBA through the Draft from 2022 where he was voted 24th by the Stags.

bracket. Native Americans are commonly called Amerindians, meaning the people who inhabited the Americas prior to its discovery and conquest by Europeans in the 15th century. Legend has it that Christopher Columbus thought he had reached India and not America, hence the term Native American. The same name is still used by certain national minorities whose roots come from these historical peoples. The bracket closes.

What do we mean when we say he hiked a lot?

Beauchamp left his hometown of Yakima, Washington to move to Seattle and play basketball at Nathan Hale High School. The following year he transferred to another school in Seattle, Garfield High School. A season at Rainier Beach High School followed, while his senior year at Rainier Beach High School found him in Arizona. But when he finished his athletic duties there, he returned to his hometown to graduate from Eisenhower High School.

His next stop is college, one would reasonably assume. But no. Beauchamp took a different route, which turned out to be much more difficult than he had anticipated. A path that brought him to despair, to the brink of depression.

Although it was ranked 47th in 2020^O On ESPN’s list of the 100 Most Talented High School Players and with multiple scholarship offers from Alabama, Arizona State, Georgetown, Southern Cal, Washington State and other universities, Botchamp chose the newly formed athletic program Chameleon BX.

This special program was led by Frank Matriciano, a personal trainer who offers prospective NBA prospects the opportunity to get physically prepared for the worldwide Premier League. That’s exactly what Botchamp won, who was weak and slow enough to stare down most NBA players.

“I didn’t think I would go to college and be the X Factor. I was pretty skinny so I went to train in the Chameleon BX and straight away I thought, ‘Damn, I feel like this can really prepare my body.’ I know it doesn’t.” I would play games, but I focused on my body. The training sessions were so hard that you had to be mentally strong to cope with them and gained about 13 kg.”

However, in the winter of 2020, Botchamp had to leave Chameleon BX and San Francisco early due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and global restrictions making training impossible.

“I didn’t know what to do. It was one of the most difficult and darkest times for me. I just wanted to quit. I watched the NBA draft draft and my name was nowhere to be found”said Beauchamp, who found refuge in his father’s house alongside his family.

At the urging of his own people, he attended Yakima Valley College with the intention of finding a place for individual training. Instead, the college convinced him to sign up and play with them in the “abridged” 2020-21 season, where they would only play 12 games. It was there that Beauchamp fell in love with basketball again. Game after game, he looked more and more like the good old self, averaging 30.7 points, 11 rebounds and 5 assists.

LSU, Arkansas, Oregon, Washington State, Texas Tech and Xavier all showed interest, but Botchamp and his family felt G-League Ignite would be his ticket into the magical world of the NBA. Also, the young forward didn’t have a great attraction to reading, so he would have a hard time meeting his academic commitments if he decided to attend college.

Her father Beauchamp then contacted G-League Ignite manager Rod Strickland, who had shown an interest in MarJohn since he was still in high school. At some point in there, his career got back on a solid track. Beauchamp went to Tennessee to train with veteran shooting guard Mike Miller. There he met Strickland, and he was confident in what he saw both on the field and in the player’s thirsty eyes, so he offered him a $75,000 contract (while other players on the team got half a million ) and warned him that he should have earned his playing time.

Botchamp put his head down, worked hard and got the results he wanted, averaging 36.6 minutes in 12 games with the G-League Ignite, averaging 15.1 points, 7.3 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1, 6 steals.

Those numbers, and the hundreds of eyes of scouts watching Ignite games, brought Beauchamp to the front door of the NBA last summer and into the Draft Green Room, where he tearfully heard Adam Silver call his name after them from the Milwaukee Bucks .

The number he wore to the Stags? Zero to remember where he started. That’s why he now has a golden opportunity to go from zero to the top. After all, neither will be the first nor the last. And he could not have had a better and brighter example beside him than that of Giannis Antetokounmpo.