The two Jordans: Mizzou’s Jordan Geist got into trash-talking from his quiet demeanor

The Jordan Geist who Missouri basketball fans see now — a bit brash, plenty confident and living inside his opponents’ heads — first emerged through plenty of tears.

It was 2005, and Geist, then just a third-grader, had just faced off against Vijay Blackmon, currently a redshirt sophomore at Indiana. They were just boys, but Blackmon had an advanced vocabulary for their age, and he cussed at Geist throughout the game, until finally, when the contest was over, Geist started to cry.

After the game, Geist’s father, Scott, saw his son’s tears as they were leaving the gym, and he didn’t feel bad for his son when he found out why he was so down.

“He’s going to try and get in your head,” Scott Geist told his son. “And he did, and now you’re crying about it.”

Jordan Geist realized Blackmon was on to something when they played each other. If Blackmon could get in players’ heads, why couldn’t he?

Shortly after that game, Geist’s current on-court persona, the in-your-face, trash-talking defender — the one that has kept Mizzou in multiple games this season — was born. The senior is averaging a team-high 14 points per game, and SEC coaches have repeatedly called him one of the league’s most improved players as the Tigers open conference tournament play at 6 p.m. Wednesday against Georgia.

Geist’s personality operates like a switch. The 6-foot-3 senior guard is tough, suffocating on defense and tries to rile up his opponents, but he’s extremely quiet and reserved off the court.

“I don’t like to be recognized,” he told The Star. “I like to just be chill. I don’t like talking to people, but when I get on the court there’s a different kind of passion that comes out of me.”

“It still confuses me,” Scott Geist added.

Geist’s trash-talking took off shortly after facing the Blackmon. He started running his mouth at recess in fourth and fifth grade, and eventually carried that his attitude to the AAU circuit.

It took a while to really frustrate players, but during his sophomore year of high school, he got his first public reaction.

While playing in the state sectional playoffs, Geist was hit in the groin and wound up on the floor. The officials didn’t see the foul, and the opposing players went unpunished. But Geist took note. He said the action was the first proof he had that he was capable of getting in players’ heads, and his offensive game allows him to back up the trash talk.

After not getting any offers he liked out of high school, Geist bet on himself and went to Ranger Community College in Texas, where he played for former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie.

The bet paid off, as Geist was a second-team juco All-American, but his recruiting process wasn’t easier. His “in-your-face” style was a turnoff to some coaches. Scott Geist said Gillispie tried to sell Kansas coach Bill Self on Geist becoming the Jayhawks’ next Frank Mason, but Self wasn’t interested.

Geist ended up at Missouri mainly because he’d be able to play immediately. He canceled a visit to Purdue to commit to former coach Kim Anderson. And shortly after arriving on campus, Geist’s on-court personality revealed itself.

During summer school, Geist butted heads with MU sophomore Mitchell Smith during a pickup game, which marked the first time his teammates saw Geist’s in-game intensity up close.

“That’s when I knew it was going to be a fun ride with this guy,” MU senior Kevin Puryear said. “On the court he’s just fierce. Off the court, it’s sometimes hard to get a word out of him. But he’s very content with the person he is.”

In the closing seconds of the first half in Missouri’s game at Georgia in January 2017, Geist tried to rip the ball from star Yante Maten, which led to a scuffle that included the coaching staffs. Missouri was up six at halftime but wound up losing by five as the skirmish seemed to ignite the Bulldogs. Geist said it was the first time his play cost his team a game — but in the process he seemed to win over his locker room.

“I put my mark down that I’m not really afraid of everyone,” he said. “Yante Maten is a great player, but I wasn’t backing down from that. I’m not afraid of anyone. I might lose a fight, but I’m going in there and give it my all.”

Lindsey Cunningham, Geist’s longtime girlfriend and a former MU basketball player, said his personality comes out in stages. When they first met, he was quiet and reserved. The first time Geist met Cunningham’s parents at the Lake of the Ozarks, it was tough to get a word out of him.

“I was like nudge, nudge, talk,” Cunningham said. “You might be the quietest person in the world, but when you’re around my family, they force you to talk. They get it out of you.”

As Geist got more comfortable with the Cunninghams, he began to feel comfortable having individual conversations with some of their relatives. The more he got to know them, the more he came out of his shell — even if that never meant becoming the star of a conversation.

A year into dating Geist, Cunningham said he finally started to regularly show his sense of humor and personality around her family and went from being the guy in the back of the room to someone who ran the grill at family dinners, steered the family boat and made fast-food runs for the Cunningham sisters, Lindsey and MU star Sophie. Geist even felt comfortable enough taking an RV down to Florida for the NCAA women’s tournament with the Cunningham family, but without the safety net of his girlfriend.

Geist was in Florida when he learned of Martin’s hire, and had to drive 14 1/2 hours back to Columbia to make Martin’s first meeting with the team. The Indiana native knew a bit about his new coach from his playing and coaching days at Purdue, but not a lot about his style and whether he’d fit in with Martin.

But high school teammate and current NBA player Caleb Swanigan texted Geist and Martin vouching for Geist’s style of play. Swanigan nearly signed with Martin when he was California but elected to play at Purdue.

After Anderson left, Georgia State, Texas State and West Virginia all inquired about Geist, asking if he was thinking about transferring, but he shut down any thought of leaving after Swanigan’s text.

When Missouri blew a late lead to West Virginia in the Advocare Invitational finals in November 2017, a Mountaineers assistant pulled Geist aside in the postgame handshake line with a simple message: “We still wish we had you on our team.”

Instead, Geist has excelled under Martin, especially defensively. Martin prefers tough players with strong work ethics, men who don’t back down from challenges.

Years before Martin coached Geist, when he was working at Cal and recruiting Swanigan, Martin though Geist was “was more of a dirty, wild-type guy on the court.” He also didn’t think Geist was a point guard but later became sold on him at the position because of his play and work ethic.

Mizzou entered Martin’s first season with four point guards on the roster, but for various reasons, found itself with just one — Geist. Thrust into a role many fans didn’t expect for him last season, Geist became the last person fans wanted to see late in a game. He threw away a ball to Florida and took the last shot at Arkansas, both of which ended in tough losses. A leftover from the Anderson era and not one of Martin’s flashy new recruits, Geist was an easy scapegoat.

Twitter would get so brutal that Lindsey Cunningham would take her boyfriend’s phone after games to try and delete all the direct messages aimed at him before he could see them.

With the return of Jontay Porter, Geist was expected to be a role player on this year’s team until the 6-foot-10 sophomore went down with a season-ending injury. Geist’s reputation started to change after scoring 21 points against Oregon State, 24 against Kansas State in the Paradise Jam and sending MU into overtime against UCF a few weeks later with an improbable buzzer-beater.

“I felt like a thousand pounds had been lifted off his shoulders,” Cunningham said of Geist’s shot against UCF. “Just to see one go through, people really rallied around him.”

Lindsey and her sister, local celebrities in Columbia, are used to having fans stop them for pictures, and Geist is used to being the person tasked with taking the photos. But recently, whenever the sisters have hung out with Geist, something new has happened. Instead of wanting pictures with the Cunninghams, fans want to pose for photos with Geist.

Once an afterthought and scapegoat, Geist has spent his senior season as Mizzou’s unlikely but unquestioned star.

This story was originally published March 12, 2019 at 1:17 PM with the headline "The two Jordans: Mizzou’s Jordan Geist got into trash-talking from his quiet demeanor."