Beyond the X: 'God of Dunk' Malik Monk leaves poverty, strikes gold, beats buzzers in land of Walmart

The Monks grew up in Lepanto, in northeast Arkansas.

It's a place where you'll find cotton, soybean, rice and corn farmland on the edge of Delta, land as fertile as any you'll ever find with about 2,000 people as friendly as you'll ever meet. With a per capita income of $12,550, this is also one of the poorer areas of one of the nation's poorest states.

"We lean on each other so much because we have to," Marcus said. "In my neighborhood, you ask anybody to come [over], they drop knowledge on you. The older guys - they try to help you out. There's just a lot of love."

Community support can be especially important to a single mother like Jackie Monk. It wasn’t easy raising Marcus and Malik mostly on her own. Last school year, she made $14,649 working as a teacher’s aide, but she has help. Her cousins, the Maddens, live across from the Monks' Lepanto home. That family has produced some of the region's most outstanding athletes, including Jordan Madden, a former Baylor player who started alongside Brittney Griner, and her younger brother Rashad Madden, a starting guard for the University of Arkansas. The town's disproportionately high percentage of Division I football and basketball players meant Malik never lacked for good competition growing up.

He also got coaching in his youth leagues from his father, Michael Scales, a local carpenter (Marcus has a different father). Good coaching played a role in Malik's rise, but so did unorthodox training methods. Malik credits some of his standing 39-inch vertical leap (42 inches running) to running through the fields behind his home toward a local court, especially after it rained. The mud's resistance made his leg muscles stronger, he said. All that preparation helped Malik emerge last season as the state's most promising freshman when he racked up 22 points per game and led East Poinsett County (Lepanto, Ark.) to a finals appearance in the 2A state tournament.

East Poinsett lost but looked to be on the cusp of a dynasty with Malik entering his sophomore year and his teammate brothers Byron and Aaron Scales entering their senior and junior years, respectivelty. But the town's athletic brilliance contrasted with its dismal economic outlook. Like so many other towns in the area, more employers have left Lepanto in recent years than moved in. More residents have to commute to new-found jobs in places like Blytheville, Osceola, Jonesboro or Memphis, said Brian Parrish, who lives in nearby Marked Tree.

"A bedrest community is what we're gonna be before long," he said.

"There are just no jobs," Marcus told WholeHogSports.com. "People have to go out 40-45 minutes from here to find work."

During Malik's ninth-grade year, he and his mother discussed moving to northwest Arkansas. They wanted to be closer to Marcus, a Masters of Business Administration student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and they knew Malik could better reach his college/NBA potential if he attended a bigger school with a more rigorous curriculum and played in a conference with better competition.

"God blessed me with something special," Malik said. "I want to be a superstar."

Northwest Arkansas, one of the nation's most economically vibrant regions, simply has more resources to help make that happen.

Marcus especially likes what Bentonville High School, about 30 minutes from his Fayetteville apartment, has to offer. Last spring he interviewed for a junior high job in that district and was impressed with varsity coach Jason McMahan's grasp of the game, organizational skills and involvement in players’ lives. He felt he could trust McMahan and his staff to not only develop Malik's game, but make sure he stayed on track in school. Marcus told his mom and Malik, and they eventually decided on Bentonville and two weeks later they left Lepanto.

"It was a shock to everybody," Jackie recalled. Her relatives "didn't think (she) was going to make the move. They were all like, 'You're not leaving. You're not going anywhere. You've been saying that for a while.'"