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Jun 23, 2023

Goodman: Bucky McMillan’s secret is out of the bag

Former Mountain Brook coach Bucky McMillan signals his team in the second quarter of an AHSAA Northeast Regional Class 6A semifinal game at the Pete Mathews Coliseum in Jacksonville, Ala., Wed., Feb.

Former Mountain Brook coach Bucky McMillan signals his team in the second quarter of an AHSAA Northeast Regional Class 6A semifinal game at the Pete Mathews Coliseum in Jacksonville, Ala., Wed., Feb. 17, 2010. McMillan is now the coach of the Samford Bulldogs. (Mark Almond | [email protected])Mark Almond | [email protected]

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There’s critical information about Bucky McMillan that he doesn’t want anyone to know.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a big secret, but he definitely hid it from the public for years and years.

It’s nothing bad, and, truth be told, it’s pretty funny. Still, McMillan is going to hate that I’m putting this out there in a column. Oh, well.

It’s time to expose the truth about Bucky McMillan.

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McMillan is Samford’s men’s basketball coach. A local sports legend in Birmingham for coaching Mountain Brook High School to five state championships, McMillan was hired at Samford in 2020. It’s rare to make the jump straight from the high school ranks to Division I-A. That’s John Thompson-type stuff. Bucky did it, and the people who know him best weren’t surprised.

The people who know McMillan best always knew that he would be a great coach from Day One. Here’s the thing about that. When was Day One? The people who think they know McMillan best probably think they know the date of his birthday. They don’t, and that was by design.

McMillan hates birthdays, and so much so that for years he let his fans believe that his birthday was in the wrong month. It turned into a running gag on Facebook, says Skip Wellborn, who is one of McMillan’s longtime staffers. A date in April would roll around, and everyone would send their well-wishes Bucky’s way.

“It was hilarious,” Wellborn said.

Actually, it’s a little weird, but in a way the Bucky birthday mystery makes sense. For McMillan, his age has always been irrelevant. He began coaching at Mountain Brook when he was still playing basketball at Birmingham-Southern. Then, in a move that shocked the basketball community, Mountain Brook named Bucky its head basketball coach at the age of 25.

Well, I think he was 25. Who really knows? Even with McMillan’s alleged birthday now attached to his Wikipedia page, there seems to be some doubt.

“It’s August 13, right?” Wellborn asked me during a conversation over the phone.

Even Wellborn, who has been on McMillan’s staff since 2013, doesn’t have it pinned down. Wellborn and McMillan have known each other for most of their lives. When McMillan’s new birthday came out a few years ago, Wellborn said it was still one day off.

Samford basketball coach Bucky McMillan during a game between vs. Wofford on January 28, 2023, at Jerry Richardson Indoor Stadium in Spartanburg, S.C. (Photo by John Byrum/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

“He’s not a birthday guy at all,” Wellborn said. “He doesn’t wish people happy birthday. He doesn’t want people to wish him a happy birthday. We’re going to have to do something for him this year, though.”

Wellborn says McMillan had a birthday party at TopGolf five years ago, but it was a surprise. McMillan is the kind of coach who knows every detail. Nothing gets past him. He doesn’t miss anything, and he also doesn’t let anyone miss a practice unless it’s a major life event. Birthdays? Heck no. Bucky Ball does not acknowledge the existence of birthdays.

Bucky Ball, notoriously, doesn’t even really acknowledge the existence of parents.

When McMillan was 25 years old, for example, the first thing he did at Mountain Brook was deliver a message to the parents of players that they could not talk to him about anything ever under any circumstance. Hi and bye and that’s basically it. As a hard and fast rule, Mountain Brook’s new coach was only going to communicate with his players. If players missed even one offseason workout for something that wasn’t communicated properly by the player himself, then that player was off the team. No exceptions.

Image telling CEOs and multi-millionaires to kick rocks about their kids. That was Bucky from the beginning. Mountain Brook is the wealthiest enclave in the state of Alabama. The place is political by nature and, in many ways, it’s a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble. Bucky grew up in Mountain Brook, so he knew all of Mountain Brook’s secrets and all of Mountain Brook’s internal politics from birth.

No one was fooling Bucky about anything. He had the dossiers and the cheat codes. He understood Mountain Brook’s game down cold. He had all the facts and dates memorized.

“Bucky knew about all the beach houses and lake houses and mountain houses and everything,” Wellborn said. “He knew all the ways people do stuff in Mountain Brook.”

McMillan had access to all the birth certificates, obviously. The guy no one in Mountain Brook could fool had an inside joke on everyone, though. Now it’s time to turn that joke around and clown the merry prankster.

Skip is one of Bucky’s loyal lieutenants. He’s a good guy. For the record, this column wasn’t Skip’s idea or the idea of anyone in Bucky’s inner circle. For the sake of plausible deniability, however, let’s just say that Wellborn was a willing participant in my search for the truth.

McMillan is — what’s the best way to put this — not a birthday truther.

In the sports world, in the business world, in the Mountain Brook world, a lot of people tend to act like the smartest person in the room. McMillan actually is the smartest person in the room most of the time, but he’d never let anyone know it. As for his birthday, what does age have to do with anything when McMillan was born to coach?

Some critics of McMillan doubted that Bucky could win at Samford. Who looks like a fool now?

Samford was pretty awful before McMillan showed up. Since then, Bucky Ball has transformed the program in quick order. The Bulldogs won a share of the SoCon regular season championship last season and McMillan was named SoCon men’s basketball coach of the year in 2022 and 2023.

The older someone gets, the faster the years fly by. No one tricks the universe for long. Even child prodigies grow older. McMillan began coaching at such a young age that a lot of his players from Mountain Brook are now coming back after years away and thanking him for all that tough love. The kid coach helped turn boys into men, but now, according to the eternally ridiculous words of Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy, McMillan is about to be the certified age of a man.

It’s time, once and for all, to celebrate the truth about Bucky Ball. It’s time for the misinformation campaigns to end. It’s time to finally wish Bucky McMillan, basketball coaching wunderkind, a happy birthday on the date of his actual birthday.

It’s not in April like McMillan wanted people to believe for the longest time. It’s not August 13 either. McMillan was born on August 12, 1983. His birthday is next Saturday. That gives people a full week to reflect on this very real prospect of everyone’s collective mortality. That gives everyone a full week to make this as awkward as possible for the birthday jokester.

Samford’s basketball coach, the long-ago prodigy of Mountain Brook, is finally turning 40 years old.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.

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