Letter to Cal reveals Marcus Lee's good deeds

LEXINGTON, Ky. – To: John Calipari. Subject: Marcus Lee. "I am writing this letter to tell you what a remarkable young man he is and how he has blessed my life."

It should've come as no surprise. This is what Lee does. The University of Kentucky's 6-foot-9 sophomore power forward works quietly, behind the scenes mostly, until you need him. That's when Lee, like a kangaroo in sneakers, springs into spectacular action.

Last year's Elite Eight game against Michigan, when he came off the bench to replace an injured Willie Cauley-Stein and dunked his way into Wildcats lore, was the most visible example. But there are others, and they reach far beyond a basketball court. Like the note from Kim Bennett.

Calipari stood in front of his team early this season and started reading it. Bennett, a nurse practitioner at UK's student health center who had treated Lee for a minor ailment, described an act of kindness that "inspired me to be a better and more compassionate" caregiver. "I thank the Lord for him," she wrote.

Bennett explained that while tending to Lee, she'd told him about her stepson, a freshman soccer player away at college whose season was cut short by mononucleosis. That, coupled with homesickness, led to depression. The young man, Noah, didn't want to get out of bed.

His story struck a chord with Lee, who'd fallen ill in the middle of his own trying freshman season at Kentucky. Once he was finally healthy, the former McDonald's All-American returned to find that his role on the team had all but disappeared. A California native, Lee also caught a case of homesickness.

But he eventually willed himself out of the darkness of his dorm and went back to work, quietly as ever, until the Cats called upon him to ignite them in March. Sparks seem to be his specialty. Just ask Noah. Lee wrote him a letter, sharing the secret to his success – "faith over fear" – and encouraging Noah to get up and go.

"I cried as I read the letter," Kim Bennett wrote to Calipari. She'd phoned her stepson and shared Lee's words to him. "When I finished, he was as high as a kite. He couldn't believe Marcus would write him. He immediately got out of bed. The next night, he was on the sidelines cheering and encouraging his soccer team. … It's amazing what a few kind words can do."

Just like that, Lee's secret was out. It would've gotten out soon anyway. Bennett's was just one of many emails and letters that began pouring in to Calipari and the UK athletic department, all with the same general theme: You won't believe what Marcus Lee did. His coaches and teammates had no idea he'd been moonlighting as a do-gooder, that he was on a mission to make the world a better place "one smile at a time." Now they know.

"Why didn't you tell us you were doing these things?" Lee remembers Calipari asking him. "And my first reply was, 'What do you mean?' I thought it was just a natural thing to help people, and I didn't think it was a big thing to tell anybody."

The Southeastern Conference thought otherwise when it named Lee to the league's Community Service Team this week. His listed credentials for the award are impressive: coordinating a blanket drive for patients at UK Children's Hospital, filling backpacks with food and supplies for local elementary schools through God's Pantry, working with Samaritan's Feet to help put shoes on feet that need them around the world.

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Those are grand gestures, though, and Lee also believes in the power of individual outreach. Like being there for his new friend Kelly Melton, a 9-year-old boy battling leukemia, to turn syringes into squirt guns for water fights that make him forget about the taxing treatments for a little while. Or writing a letter to a stranger in need of inspiration. Calipari has three "pillars" for the Kentucky basketball program, and the last of them is kindness. That's why he embarrassed Lee by reading Bennett's note to the team.

"I wanted them to understand what that third pillar means," Calipari said. "We want them to leave here with a kind heart. Being a player here is signing autographs, taking pictures, spending time, meeting a child, going to the elderly home, doing things that take you 30 seconds to change people. Marcus is one of the most conscientious and considerate people I've ever been around. He truly has a kind heart for others."

Lee met Kelly about eight months ago when UK football players Landon Foster and Max Strong introduced them. Now, whenever the boy and his family trek from Somerset to Lexington for cancer treatments – sometimes as often as twice a month – Lee and his fellow athletes stop by to build Legos and shoot Nerf guns and ambush other visitors with those makeshift water pistols. Upon being admitted for a six-day hospital stay last week, the first thing Kelly asked was for his tallest friend to come play. Lee hurried over.

"It makes him feel like a normal kid," Kelly's father, Harrison Melton, said. "Marcus is part of our family. He's one of our adopted sons. To us, that's what he'll always be. We pray that he has a successful NBA career, but what we want to see is Marcus enjoy life, because he's brought so much joy to ours. He's a special person. He's a role model for our son. Kelly knows they play football and basketball, but to him it's really not that big of a deal. What matters to him is they came to see him and try to make him feel better."

For the record, Lee believes the Meltons have it all wrong.

"Kelly makes our day better," he said. "There's only one type of joy. Instead of going out and buying something for yourself to find happiness, you can go help somebody else. I think that's honestly a lot deeper, because no one can take that. With everything else, people can take away your money, take away your favorite car or your favorite shirt. If I break my ankle, that could take my joy because I can't play basketball anymore. But making other people happy, I can do that no matter what."

He gets that from his mama. Sherri Lee raised her four highly successful sons – in addition to the baby, Marcus, one is in the Air Force, one works for Nike and the other moved from Google to Apple to Uber – to put others first. Thanksgivings were spent feeding the homeless. Christmases were about presents for kids who didn't already have a room full of toys.

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"I always thought that they should give back and they should understand that there were people who didn't have as much as they had," she said, and Marcus never questioned it. "I'm very proud of him. He's so unselfish. I think that has served him well (at Kentucky), because Coach Cal is looking for team players."

Lee is certainly that. A former five-star recruit and future NBA draft pick – DraftExpress.com projects him to go in the first round in 2016 – he's averaging just 2.7 points and 2.9 rebounds in 11.7 minutes per game this season for the top-ranked and undefeated Cats. Of the nine major contributors on a loaded roster, Lee gets by far the least playing time. The other eight average between 17.3 and 25.8 minutes.

But when the Wildcats need him, Lee always seems to come soaring out of nowhere – for an impossible rebound, an absurd slam or an emphatic block. He provides boosts in bursts. Extrapolate his stats and Lee averages 9.2 points, 9.9 rebounds, 2.9 blocks and 2.1 dunks per 40 minutes. Perhaps more important is what he doesn't bring: a bad attitude. Teammate Karl-Anthony Towns called him "one of the best human beings I've met."

"The way I see it is we all need each other to get to our one goal," Lee said. "That's how I feel about life: If I'm helping somebody else and trying to find a way to make them smile, then just trying makes me feel better. If I pass a smile on, then they'll pass a smile on, and then it's just one big chain reaction and I get to my big goal of making some type of change in the world, and that's all I've ever wanted to do."

Seeing the world this way, wide-angled, is wise beyond his 20 years. But his brother Bryan said Lee, a creative marketing major who wants to someday become an ad manager for Apple, has always been like this. When Bryan mentioned that a friend's father had discovered a tumor recently, Lee and Towns sent the man a video pick-me-up.

"Even with a great NBA career, he still finishes at 30, 31, and that's kind of just when life begins. He knows there's more, a ton more to do in this life," Bryan said. "I think he just kind of sees that basketball is a page or a chapter and he still has a full book to write."

Kyle Tucker can be reached at (502) 582-4361. Follow him on Twitter @KyleTucker_CJ.

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