LOUDONVILLE, N.Y. (NJCUGothicKnights.com) | The true sign of sports immortality is the day you get your own bobblehead—or your own monument. For New Jersey City University men's basketball head coach Marc Brown, the 2019 New Jersey Athletic Conference Coach of the Year for the third time in seven seasons—that day will come this fall.
 
Brown, the greatest player in Siena College basketball history, and a former 16-year professional player, will appear on the proverbial 'Mount Rushmore' of Siena College as part of a promotional giveaway by the Division I MAAC conference institution. Each Saints fan who purchases a 2019-20 season ticket will receive a 'Mount Bernie' figurine gift depicting the likeness of the top four players in school history and will resemble the actual Mount Rushmore National Monument.
 
Brown was selected as part of a recent Siena legends fan vote with the top four vote recipients enshrined. Brown will join such Siena greats as Kenny Hasbrouck, Doremus Bennerman, and Ronald Moore on Mount Bernie. 
 
It's the latest lifetime honor for Brown, whose legendary No. 4 jersey was retired on December 13, 2010 as part of a Division III/Division I basketball doubleheader at the Times Union Center in Albany which featured his NJCU basketball squad in game one and Siena in the nightcap.
 
"It means a lot," said Brown. "It's an honor to be considered one of the best players to come out from a pretty historical program that had done a lot of things in the last 20 years. I feel like I was part of one of the first real classes. I have to give a lot of credit to [Coach] Mike Deane. It's another notch under my belt at Siena. I had a great career. I enjoyed myself. It's a special place and this is a special honor."
 

Simply known by Siena fans as 'Showbiz', Brown is still the all-time leading scorer in the distinguished history of the Saints with 2,284 career points (18.6 ppg) and he helped bring Division I national acclaim to Siena during a four-year career from 1987-91. Known as a flashy, playmaking point guard, Showbiz, could do it all on the court and at the time of his graduation was one of only three players in Division I history to score over 2,000 career points and accumulate at least 750 assists. His 796 career assists stood as a Siena record until 2009 and his 6.5 dishes per game remains the program standard.
 
Among his long list of honors, Brown was the 1991 Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Player of the Year and a 1991 Division I Honorable Mention All-American by both the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI). In 1989, he was selected Honorable Mention All-America by The Sporting News. A four-time First-Team All-Conference selection, he was enshrined in the Siena Athletic Hall of Fame in 1998. 
 
His most recent honor came on September 16, 2017 when he was inducted into the MAAC Honor Roll—equivalent to the conference's Hall of Fame—and enshrined in "The MAAC Experience" exhibit at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. 
 
In 1989, Brown's play put Siena basketball on the Division I map, when he hit the winning free throws in a 32-point outburst as the #14 seeded Saints stunned #3 Stanford in the opening round of the 1989 NCAA Tournament. He also helped Siena reach the NIT in 1988 and 1991; the 1991 NIT run ended with a two-point overtime loss to UMass in the quarterfinals.
 
Amazingly, 30 years after his collegiate career ended, Brown still holds numerous individual game and season records at Siena, as well as individual NCAA and NIT thresholds. Among the records, he still has the marks for most assists in a game (15) and his 44 points against Fairfield in 1991 are the second most ever in a game for the Saints. That year he averaged 23.3 points per game and scored 816 total points; those single-season records are both now second on the all-time list. His single-season record of 222 assists stood until 2009 before it was broken by a player who played an additional six games. His 7.7 assists per game in 1988 are still a single-season record. He currently ranks fourth in career steals (221) and three-point field goals (224) and sixth in three-point percentage (.423).
 
"I have not coached or recruited a finer player," Mike Deane, who coached Brown at Siena, said in 2010 prior to the retirement of Brown's jersey. "He generated a following that put Siena in a place as probably the strongest Low-to-Mid-Major on the East Coast because of the atmosphere he created. I may have orchestrated it, but he created it. It was a pleasure to coach him. He was one of those once-in-a-lifetime kind of guys. His career was unprecedented and unparalleled there."
 
Brown, who will enter his 13th season at NJCU in 2019-20 just four wins shy of the 200-win plateau (196-130), is the second winningest coach in program history, behind only his father, Charlie Brown (483 wins). Together they are the winningest father-son combo at one school in Division III history.
 
Brown, the 2019 NJAC Coach of the Year and Division III Met Basketball Coach of the Year, guided the Gothic Knights (20-8) to their third consecutive NCAA Division III Tournament at-large appearance. NJCU won the NJAC regular season title with a 14-4 league record and was ranked as high as No. 10 in the nation in one preseason poll and No. 16 in another. It was NJCU's fourth appearance in the NCAA Tournament during his tenure and the Gothic Knights made NCAA Tournament appearances in three consecutive seasons for the first time since being selected five straight years from 1994-95 to 1998-99.
 
In 2019, NJCU was the league's preseason favorite and held true to that throughout the regular season. The Knights were the No. 1 ranked team in the Atlantic Region in back-to-back weeks.
 
Brown was previously the NJAC Coach of the Year in 2013 and 2016 and the Met Coach of the Year in 2013. He also was named D3hoops.com Atlantic Region Coach of the Year in 2011.
 
Among the numerous standout players he has coached and recruited in his career is Sam Toney (Plainfield, NJ/Williamstown), who was voted a First-Team NABC All-American this year and is the school's first-ever two-time NABC All-American. Toney, who will be a senior next season, was the NJAC's first back-to-back Player of the Year since 2001 and became the first Gothic Knight voted NJAC Male Athlete of the Year in all sports. 
 
Brown succeeded his iconic father, Charlie Brown, for whom the NJCU arena floor is named, as Gothic Knight head coach during the 2007-08 season after concluding a 16-year professional career in the United States, Europe and South America.
 
Asked what he will do with his Mount Bernie, Brown laughed: "I'll wait to see what it looks like and I'll decide then."
 
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