From the NBA to the senior amateur golf circuit: Jack Marin remains immersed in sport

USA Today

20-03-2025

From the NBA to the senior amateur golf circuit: Jack Marin remains immersed in sport
Sure, some elements translate from basketball to golf – competition is competition – but Jack Marin cannot name a tangible correlation between the two sports that drew him from the former to the latter.
'I think I just liked golf because I liked golf,' the 80-year-old Marin told Golfweek. Still, what Marin, a standout collegiate basketball player at Duke (now in the Hall of Fame) who moved on to an 11-year NBA career as a first-round draft pick in 1966, learned on the court has now translated into a golf career that keeps him grinding.
'I think the one thing people will say when I'm playing is that I have a good touch, I have a good putting stroke, I have great lag putting,' Marin said in assessing his game. 'My speed on greens is sometimes uncanny, I really have a feel for that.'
Marin struggled with golf for a period as a result of trying to play mechanically. He credits AJ Bonar, an instructor based out of Southern California, with helping him understand that golf doesn't have to be that much different than basketball or any other sport. It's a hand-eye coordination game, Marin began to learn, and if you understand how your hands work in a golf swing, the rest can follow.
In Marin's case, 'the rest' has come to mean multiple club championships at his home course, Hope Valley Golf Club in Durham, North Carolina, as well as an impressive run in senior golf. Marin capped 2024 by winning the Golfweek Senior Tournament of Champions at PGA National's Fazio Course in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Marin, as a small forward, was a two-time NBA all-star whose NBA career included stints with the Baltimore Bullets, Houston Rockets, Buffalo Braves and Chicago Bulls. At six-feet-six-inches tall, his height gives him the ability to generate considerable clubhead speed, but it's also been a challenge. Tall players like himself sometimes have difficulty standing to the ball because they have to bend to it. Then again, everybody comes to the game with something different, he acknowledges.
One thing Marin has appreciated in his work with Bonar, which began roughly 20 years ago, was the instructor's ability to talk about more than just those kinds of mechanics. Bonar is a guy, Marin says, who will never talk to him about his golf swing, but rather how to hit the golf ball.
Growing up Farrell, Pennsylvania, Marin came to the game of golf through his dad and would often caddie for his father's group as a boy at nearby Tam O'Shanter Golf Course, where he wound up falling in love with the game.
'When we played in the summer when we were kids, we played in the summer with our shirts off and hit it around,' he said. 'I didn't know how to play golf but I surely enjoyed being out there.'
Golf remained a constant in Marin's life even as he moved through college and transitioned into a successful career in the NBA. It was after arriving in that league that he bought his first set of real golf clubs.
But Marin, when not playing basketball, was testing himself on a level that most amateurs never reach. Upon being traded to Houston in 1972, Marin joined Champions Golf Club, the club famously founded by Jackie Burke and Jimmy Demaret. Marin called that his first real test of golf, but more followed.
Marin worked his way to what he called a 'very weak' 2-handicap and received an invitation to the 1973 Northeast Amateur, a long-running elite amateur event loaded with the country's top college players.
'The only thing I can say is that I don't know that I played in any event in my lifetime in which I was more terrified than playing in that event,' Marin said. 'I was a two-time NBA All-Star at the time, but I was now a fish out of water.'
If the Northeast Amateur served as his introduction to competitive golf, then Marin's first (and so far, only) foray into U.S. Golf Association championships was a sign that he could be competitive in the sport. Marin was 36 and had moved on to a career as an attorney when he qualified for the inaugural U.S. Mid-Amateur in 1981. He made seven birdies in his qualifying round to reach the tournament proper at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, and then advanced to the first round of match play once there.
'The thing at Bellerive kind of made me think that I really could play competitive golf and I'd won a club championship by that time and so I'd tasted a little bit of victory in that way and even winning the qualifier at Wilson was important to begin to think that you could win,' he said. 'Because I think golf – one of the real problems in golf is you can play awfully well and finish fourth or sixth or eighth in a field of 40, 50, 60 guys – you beat a lot of people but you didn't beat them all.
'Getting the taste of beating them all is a special place and doing it once is good but you almost have to back it up. You have to win at least twice to begin to think that it's not something that you can't catch.'
Marin has learned that victories only come after a player has put himself in that position time and again. Sometimes he'll use those scenarios for motivation.
'When I'm back a few or back a lot, because I've come from behind and won more often than I've won out front, I say to myself, 'You know the greatest stories in all of sports are what kind of stories? They're comeback stories,'' he said. 'Every time I'm down, I say, 'Let's try to write one of those comeback stories,' because they're fun and those are the ones you remember.'
In the collection of great sports stories that make up Marin's life, those are just a chapter.