Grand Kenyon

A 6' 8�", 230-pound senior, Martin is best described not as a center or a forward but rather, in the tradition of Manuel Noriega, as a Cincinnati strongman. After all, his dunks are not dunks. They're detonations. He doesn't just block shots. He often catches them. More than any other player in the nation, Martin visibly frightens opposing players. "He gets a lot of credit for the blocks," says North Carolina assistant coach Phil Ford, who watched Martin get four rejections in the Bearcats' 77-68 defeat of the Tar Heels on Dec. 8, "but they haven't created a stat yet for what I call 'scares,' all the shots he makes people miss just by his presence around the basket."

Tales of Martin's blocks are legion on the banks of the Ohio. Take last season, when he swatted the shot of Xavier's Lloyd Price out of bounds...over the opposite baseline. Or this season when, against Gonzaga, Martin appeared out of nowhere for a two-handed denial of Axel Dench's breakaway dunk attempt. Says Bearcats senior forward Ryan Fletcher, "If you're coming down on a two-on-one break against Ken and you pump-fake before passing, he's the only player I've ever seen who's quick enough to contest your shot, land and then step over and block the other guy's shot."

In a remarkable transformation Martin has also morphed into a dangerous scorer only a year after Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins chastised him for taking just 7.5 shots a game. The awakening began at last summer's World University Games, during which Martin averaged more points (13-9), rebounds (6.6) and—get this—field goal attempts (9.8) than any other player on a team that included North Carolina's Brendan Haywood, Texas's Chris Mihm and Ohio State's Scoonie Penn and Michael Redd. "The thing that struck me most is Kenyon's basketball intelligence," says Dayton coach Oliver Purnell, who guided the U.S. team. "You tend to view him as a raw athlete who's really good on the defensive end of the floor, but the guy studies the game. He adjusted to the international style, the rules, the way the game was being called, and he kept getting better."

Martin's long-term growth as a college player—an anachronism in these impatient times—has almost perfectly echoed his slow but sure maturation off the court. Born in Saginaw, Mich., he was raised in Dallas's rough-and-tumble Oak Cliff neighborhood by the two most important women in his life: his mother, Lydia, and his older sister by almost four years, Tamara. (The last time Kenyon saw his father, former New Mexico basketball player Paul Roby, was when Kenyon was seven.) "Tamara has always been like a father for me," says Kenyon. It was Tamara, after all, who took the call from a concerned teacher during Kenyon's junior year at Dallas's Bryan Adams High. "He was being a butt in math class, so I came to school and started whaling on him in the hall," she says. "He's 6' 7" and I'm 5' 5", but he sat there and listened to me, and we never had any more problems out of him."

Well, almost. Martin went AWOL the summer before his freshman year, when he had gone to Cincinnati to cram for the SATs. Suddenly, he returned to Dallas, homesick. Once again Tamara took the call, this time from an angry Huggins. "He said if Ken didn't get back to Cincinnati before he got back from the trip he was on, then don't come back at all," says Tamara, who promptly deposited Kenyon on a Greyhound bus for the 23-hour journey back to the Queen City. Three years later, Lydia and Tamara's efforts are paying off, and Kenyon says he's set to graduate this summer with a major in criminal justice and a minor in psychology.

Tamara also stood up for Kenyon in the one area that he remains painfully sensitive about, the stuttering he has worked diligently to overcome. While walking home with her from elementary school, Kenyon would often endure a stream of taunts from older boys. "They would mock him by saying, 'Duh-duh-duh,' and they'd call him retarded just because he stuttered," says Tamara, who would push her brother out of the way and throw punches at the perpetrators. Recalls Kenyon, who began seeing a speech pathologist at age nine, "It made me mad and sad. When someone's making fun of you, no matter how old you are, it's going to have an effect on you."

While Martin proudly acknowledges that his stuttering has diminished significantly, he adds that it occasionally flares up when he's upset or excited. Last summer, in fact, he turned livid when two of his World University Games teammates started cracking jokes about his speech impediment. "They didn't know me well enough to be doing that," he says. "I was at the point where if they had done it again, I probably would have fought one of them."

Don't let the tough talk fool you, though. Conley points out that Martin has been known to "boo-hoo," as she puts it, on several occasions, whether it was in April 1998, when he proposed to her on one knee at a restaurant, or in July '98, when he served as a groomsman at Tamara's wedding. Martin's sensitivity is also evident when he speaks to children's groups, as he often does. He makes sure to sit, not stand, when addressing the kids. "You don't want them to feel smaller than you," he says, "so you sit down, make them feel comfortable."

Then there's the violin. Though he's no Itzhak Perlman, Martin played a mean fiddle in middle school, and (the cat's out of the bag) Conley plans on giving him a violin for Valentine's Day.

Although Martin and Cincinnati have achieved near-perfect pitch this season—the Bearcats' only loss was a flukish December defeat to crosstown rival Xavier—the only question dogging Cincinnati is what happens next. At around this point last year, recall, the 21-1 Bearcats collapsed with a 6-5 finish and lost for the third straight year in the second round of the NCAA tournament. Martin in particular went into a funk. After blocking 70 shots in the season's first 24 games, he added only eight over the final nine. What's more, he didn't have a single double-figure rebound game after Feb. 1 (his career high is 23) and only once scored more than 11 points.