Banks’ Weight Is Off, So His Waiting Is Over : College basketball: Minus 45 pounds, the SDSU sophomore starts to progress as few thought he could.

By the end of what was a sad and lonely first year of college basketball, everybody had an opinion about San Diego State’s Marcus Banks.

An outcast. Odd man out. Immature. A maladjusted freshman. The runt of the litter.

If you can call a 6-foot-9, 290-pound 18-year-old a runt.

“It was sad and pathetic,” Aztec assistant coach Jim Harrick Jr. said of Banks’ freshman year.

“I wouldn’t say he was alienated from the team,” teammate Courtie Miller said. “But he was very young and immature.”

Banks was a nice, quiet kid from San Antonio, Tex., no mistaking. But he was also unmistakably overweight, under-athletic and exceedingly slow.

Most figured by the end of the Aztecs’ disastrous 2-26 season, Banks would go the way of Jim Brandenburg, the coach who signed him out of East Central High.

Brandenburg was fired late in the season, replaced on an interim basis by Harrick. Banks, sparsely recruited, gained a reputation that grew like his waistline by season’s end: a failed project, a bust.

The center/forward who averaged 25 points, 10 rebounds and nearly six blocked shots per game in high school played 48.3 minutes all season. Coaches barely gave Banks what they call “garbage time.”

When new coach Tony Fuller arrived in March and told Banks to lose 45 pounds over the summer, people figured it was just the ultimatum that would push him over the edge. They figured Banks would be gone--especially when they learned Banks would spend the summer working in a bakery.

They figured wrong.

“When they heard that, some of the guys thought I was going to come back big as a house,” Banks said. “But when I got back . . . they couldn’t believe it.”

The flabby freshman returned from his bakery job a svelte, serious sophomore.

Five games into the 1992-93 season, Banks appears to be running away with the team’s most-improved-player award. The kid who had difficulty getting up the floor a year ago cut his time on the team’s two-mile training run from 18 to 12 minutes--and was barely winded after.

The same player who drew cold shoulders last year now leads the pack during warm-up jogs.

Banks is the Aztecs’ seventh leading scorer and third leading rebounder. Though his play is still limited, he averages 6.2 points and 4.2 rebounds in 13.8 minutes per game.

“Coach Fuller asked him to come back at 245 or don’t come back,” Harrick said. “The first day of school he walked into this office with his dad, and Coach Fuller and I both hit the floor.

“I was shocked. So was the trainer and the medical staff and the strength coaches.”

Said Fuller, “We took him over and weighed him immediately--just out of amazement. I think he was 230.”

“I remember I saw him maybe 50 yards away,” said Keith Balzer, the Aztecs’ 6-8 starting forward and leading scorer. “I could tell it was Marcus, but he looked totally different.”

Dropping 45 pounds in 90 days will do that.

“Well, you won’t believe this,” Banks said meekly. “I lost all of my weight in a month’s time.”

It just took a while for Banks to move into action--some six weeks. He initially felt intimidated by Fuller.

“I got on the defensive,” said Banks. “He was a new coach from UCLA, used to winning. Maybe he was going to demand a little too much out of everybody.

“He was telling me things about myself that I knew were true. But you know how people are when it’s hard for them to accept the truth. They try to rationalize everything.”

His eating habits were well documented. He didn’t need the job at Lone Star Bakery to stimulate his salivary glands.

“I wouldn’t say I had a sweet tooth,” said Banks. “I had a taste for just about anything. I liked to eat.”

And since Brandenburg and Harrick refused to let him play, Banks kept on eating. Guiltlessly.

Said Miller, “He’d gain 15 pounds just going on the road with us. He probably knew he wouldn’t be playing . . . so he ate.”

“When I was little, I got to eat a lot, and it would come right off,” Banks said. “I had a metabolism that was the speed of light. After a while, it caught up with me.

“My senior year of high school, after basketball, I just went on a (eating) tear.”

But Banks’ problem might not have been what he was eating--or how much--but rather what was eating him.

Banks found no open doors his first year at SDSU. Coaches discovered that, not only was he hampered by his weight--which wavered between 281 and 290--he knew little about basketball.

“It was a combination of youth, laziness and total frustration,” Harrick said of Banks’ freshman year. “He was homesick. He couldn’t find a church he liked . . .”

“I came here thinking that I could come in and make a difference--like I was going to jump on the scene,” Banks said. “ ‘Here’s a guy from San Antonio whose going to turn the program around.’

“But I started to feel sorry for myself. I thought I’d never be able to play with everybody else.”

With the Aztecs losing night in and night out and Brandenburg fighting to keep his job, Banks got no support from his teammates.

“Last year was a difficult situation for everybody,” Miller said. “I don’t think anybody turned their back on Marcus. We had ourselves to worry about, too.

“But everybody’s changed their mental approach, including me. I think Marcus is the prime example of the kind of change that’s occurred in this program from top to bottom. I think we all knew he had it in him.”

Harrick said, however, “I don’t think anybody saw any potential in him. He didn’t work at his game, he didn’t practice hard. He was going through the motions. I just think it was his mentality.

“I don’t think he was ever coached, ever pushed.”

Harrick remembers how Banks, weighing 286 at the time, bristled when Fuller delivered his mandate in May.

Said Harrick, “He told us he would prove us wrong and show he could play at this level.”

A week later, however, Banks was cleaning flour vats in a factory filled with buttermilk biscuits.

And he weakened.

“There were pies,” he said, “banana cream, lemon meringue, pecan, pineapple, apple . . . a lot of cookies, brownies. I did eat some of that pastry. . . .

“But I knew the future was in my hands. It was up to me to decide what I was going to do. That’s when I got with my father.”

It was mid-July. Not one pound had been shed.

Emmanuel Banks put his son on a diet of chicken, fish, green vegetables, juice, water and all the fruit he could eat. No fat. No starch. He also prescribed a daily 1 1/2-mile jog through the neighborhood. With his physically demanding full-time job, the fat on Banks’ body dissolved at a startling rate: two to three pounds a day.

“To tell the truth, it wasn’t really hard because I had my father behind me every minute,” Banks said. “He was calling the house, making sure I was never snacking between meals. He was always on guard to make sure I wasn’t bringing anything home from work or going over to somebody else’s house and grabbing anything to eat.

“I wanted to come back and play.”

Banks has a lot to learn, but he proved he can be effective in the low post on offense Saturday against Nevada Las Vegas, scoring 10 points.

But Fuller said Banks still does not know enough about basketball to anticipate and visualize things on the court.

“But I wouldn’t say he’s raw,” Fuller said. “He’s pure.”

Balzer, one inch shorter and now about the same weight at 230, has trouble with Banks in practice.

“He’s realizing he is a big guy and he can be dominating in the middle,” said Balzer, who averages a team-high 14 points per game. “He blocks my shots in practice all the time.

“All the time.”

“He can cover the entire painted area,” Miller said, “because he’s honestly got the longest arms I’ve ever seen. They’re incredible. All he does in practice is send shots out.

“And he’s going through a lot of walls in practice, where last year he’d come up to a wall and quit. Personally, I’m not that surprised. He’s definitely very talented--a very deep individual.”

Harrick, once among Banks’ harshest critics, now praises him the loudest.

“He’s the greatest kid I’ve ever been around,” Harrick said. “He’s humble. He’s got his priorities. If he continues to grow at this pace, he’s got a chance to get to the next level.

“He’s got great ability yet to be tapped. A lot of guys’ abilities are maxed out when they get to this level. He’s just learning. He has a chance to be a real man.”

“I’m happy, after what I’ve been through,” Banks said. “I’m glad for what I’m doing for the team, but I’m not really satisfied yet.”