Update:
This story from 2018 is being republished because Marshall has announced her retirement from the Mavericks.
Cynt Marshall beat cancer, domestic abuse and racial barriers, but can she save the Mavs?
Marshall was tasked with resurrecting the spirit and the reputation of an organization rocked by allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior.
Barely two weeks into her new job as leader of the Dallas Mavericks, Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall already moves with the urgency of a team behind in the fourth quarter.
Marshall, known as "Cynt the sprint" from her high school days running track, has been tasked with resurrecting both the spirit and the reputation of a championship organization rocked by allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior left unchecked for years.
It's a challenge she does not underestimate.
But as a person who has been through a lifetime of great joys and catastrophic difficulties, the job doesn't scare her.
This is a woman who came out of an abusive household and persevered to build a strong family. She escaped the housing projects of Richmond, Calif., to become one of the most successful women in American business.
And she beat cancer after a diagnosis seven years ago.
So fixing the Mavericks' front office doesn't seem to her like the Mount Everest climb that many may think it is.
Marshall initially was introduced to the sports world in February as interim CEO of the Mavericks. Within days of her arrival in mid-March, the "interim" qualifier was dropped. The job is hers, making her the first black woman to serve as business leader of an NBA team.
She was drafted after shocking reports of sexual harassment surfaced, revealing what some women described as a corrosive “locker room culture” in the Mavericks’ front office.
Multiple women alleged that former team president and CEO Terdema Ussery, who left the Mavericks in 2015, was a serial sexual harasser. Ussery has said the claims are false.
The accusations of misconduct in the Mavs' organization keep piling up almost weekly, the latest reported Friday by Deadspin, which talked to eight current and former employees who described a toxic atmosphere.
It will take all of Marshall's much-lauded leadership skills and drive to right the ship.
But she's confident she has the plan and the resources to do it with owner Mark Cuban giving her the keys to change the organization.
"Dream. Focus. Pray. Act," she said, citing one of her favorite reminders of how to handle life. "And we'll get through this together."
Hit the ground running
At the end of her first official week on the job, the new sheriff was still in unpacking mode at the Mavs' headquarters.
But she's not standing still.
Marshall has already drafted a four-point plan to improve the culture of the organization's workplace. And she has begun to act.
She's scheduled respect-in-the-workplace training for later this month.
She's setting up a hotline to register complaints.
She's hired two human resources professionals, both women, who are "seasoned in ethics and compliance."
Ticking off each element of The Marshall Plan, she notes that it fits on only one page. And like the woman herself, it's very no-nonsense.
"Soup to nuts we're going to make sure that this is a great place to work," said Marshall.
She has launched into community outreach, heading to the practice courts around the corner one day to see “the honeys” — children participating in a Mavs-sponsored basketball camp — as they lined up to practice free throws.
Marshall, who lives with husband Ken in Richardson, is a natural around children. The couple has four children, all adopted, the youngest of whom attends Paul Quinn College.
As the campers clustered around referees, moms clustered around Marshall seeking selfies.
That included Mesquite resident Tameka Cass, whose son was approaching the basket.
"She brings a lot of expertise from the corporate environment," Cass said of Marshall. "She's intelligent, obviously, and very well-educated. So I think she can get the job done. Not saying that a man couldn't. But I'm biased because I'm a woman. So I feel as if we have to support and encourage her and stand behind her to ensure that she's successful in this role."
As controller of the Mavs' atmospheric pressure, Marshall takes her post seriously and bristles at the notion that she's at least partly there for show.
She is eagerly anticipating a report, due out after the NBA playoffs, from a team of investigators looking into reports of the unfettered sexual misconduct in the Mavs' front office.
When the report comes in, Marshall says, she won't be shy about taking action.
“This is like when I had colon cancer,” she said. “I had to get the tumor out before we could start to heal. Before I even had chemotherapy. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll get tumors out.
The Mavericks hired Evan Krutoy and Anne Milgrim, a former prosecutor and a professor, to conduct an independent probe into the allegations that have surfaced and any potential new ones.
"The investigation results will be very insightful for us in terms of where do we start," Marshall said.
The journey
Born Dec. 15, 1959, Marshall got her own start in Birmingham, Ala., where racially charged violence and the civil-rights movement were daily realities. Marshall's family picked up three months later and moved west.
Before moving, Marshall's parents had attended Birmingham's iconic 16th Street Baptist Church on a semi-regular basis. The church was rocked in 1963 by a Ku Klux Klan-planted bomb.
"If we hadn't moved, we very likely could have been in that church that day where those four girls lost their lives -- Cynthia, Denise, Carole and Addie," Marshall said, ticking off the names as if it happened yesterday.
“My parents moved because they didn’t want their kids growing up in the segregated South, because they had seen a lot,” she said.
That decision landed Marshall and her family in Richmond, Calif., near the Bay Area. It was not the romantic, vibrant and tourist-friendly part of the Bay Area.
One afternoon when she was 11, Marshall heard commotion in their house and went to check it out.
"You could hear some drama at the door and I could hear my dad tell my mama to get us to the back of the house," Marshall said. "But I was curious and snuck out to the front room and saw a man with a silver pistol. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
"I was at my father's side and he pointed it at my father, then at me. My dad, who had been in the Army, shot him in self-defense."
It cost the intruder an eye, but not his life.
After that, it was a journey to get back to normalcy for the family of six that lived in a crowded house. That's when Marshall began getting escorted to school by a police officer to ensure peace of mind for her parents. The service was provided voluntarily by the city and gave Marshall a profound respect for law enforcement officers.
And school was her favorite part of the day.
"That was like the safety zone," she says. "Both my parents believed a good education was our ticket out of the projects. I loved math and science. Your ZIP code shouldn't matter whether you get access to a good education or not."
School was a safe haven for another reason, too.
Her father, while very protective, also was prone to physical abuse within the family, she said. He was abusive to Marshall's mother on a regular basis.
"We saw it," she says. "He was abusive to her and to us. In the summer of 1975, when my parents divorced because it was so bad that my mother had to get out, we went to a relative's house. That's when my father broke my nose. I jumped in between him and my mother one time and it happened.
"It was sad, but my mother made it out and it was a clean break. She didn't want her kids to live like that anymore.
"That's why abuse of any sort is a cause that's near and dear to my heart."
Born leader
As a pre-teen, Marshall fancied herself a future math teacher.
Family members envisioned a post with more authority.
"I always tease her that I saw her in the making," said Cassandra Smith, Marshall's older sister. "I used to call her Junior Mogul."
She always took the lead, Smith remembers. When they played baseball, she was the one who'd say who would play what position.
"And she was good at it. We'd always win. We would all be surprised she'd say: 'Of course we won. Just do what I tell you and you'll win.'
"She just had an incredible acumen, even then, for knowing people and knowing their strengths. That showed up early in life. We'd sit and study people. She just put people where they were supposed to be."
The sisters have been allies and sounding boards for each other all their lives.
It was Cassandra who revealed one of Marshall's few weaknesses: chicken wings.
"Prayer and hot wings -- you can't stop her when she has those," Smith said. "If she's got that hot sauce all over her, she can strategize about anything. She sits, she prays, she strategizes."
One crucial trait Smith sees in her sister, and a key to success in her latest venture, is resolve.
"A hot sun will melt butter, but harden concrete," Smith said. "It depends on what you're made of. With Cynthia, and really with everybody in our family, what's happened in our past has hardened our resolve for betterment."
Lessons learned
Smith remembered when Marshall was just starting out in the business world. It was a bit of a rocky start to say the least.
It's where the resolve got its first test.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in business administration and human resources management from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the first black cheerleader, Marshall began her 36-year connection to AT&T.
At the beginning, she was overseeing the operators in the telecom giant's California region. They were all much older than Marshall, probably about her mother's age.
"It was one of the tough times learning how to be a manager," Smith recalls. "The operators were struggling having this little kid coming out of college telling them what to do -- 'Who do you think you are?' She was getting a lot of opposition.
"So Cynt started thinking, 'How would I manage Mom if she was doing this job in order to make her feel better about the job?' She changed her style a little and the operators started to see her in a different light because she made their work lives better. Your betterment, and the betterment of the company, mean she's doing her job."
Former co-worker Tamika Pendleton-Clement remembers Marshall as "a rock star" at AT&T.
Pendleton-Clement, a 19-year veteran who is part of the company's engineering operation, met Marshall about five years ago at an AT&T women's mentoring event.
Her normal reserve went out the window when she learned that Marshall would be the speaker.
"Energetic, phenomenal, high-energy, super relatable," is how she remembers Marshall.
"Only one other person I've met has blown me away like that," she said. It was Dallas' Bishop T.D. Jakes, whom she met when she was a teen.
"If she tells you you can jump off this building and fly, you're going to believe it," Pendleton-Clement said.
Finding strength
One of the roughest spots in Marshall's life was the day before her 51st birthday. The family was living in North Carolina as she rose up the executive ladder at AT&T.
They say you're supposed to have a colonoscopy when you turn 50. She made it by one day, finally scheduling the appointment for Dec. 14, 2010.
A tumor, extracted and tested, revealed the news: Marshall had stage 3 colon cancer.
Just 18 months before that, her father had died from colon cancer.
When she gathered her kids around her to let them know she was sick and going to have to fight hard to beat the cancer, the children were the ones who threw reality right in her face.
"Mom, you're going to die," said her older daughter, Shirley, who was 15 at the time and now is 23. "I have seen this before on television. I saw Stepmom. You're not going to say anything and then one day, we'll come home and you'll be dead."
Her youngest daughter, 12 at the time and adopted like Marshall's other children, was even harsher.
"Everybody always leaves me," Alicia said.
That's when Marshall's resolve took on a harder edge.
She was going to beat cancer, she said.
And while her kids had doubts, Marshall never did.
"I called my mom and I was crying," she said. "Mom said, 'This is for God's glory. God will get the glory out of this. You have a very high-profile job. A lot of people will hear this story and you will be healed and there would be a good story to tell.'"
When five years passed with no cancer detected in her scans, she was declared cancer-free. By then, she was in Dallas, still months away from her 2017 retirement from AT&T.
She said she packed up nearly 40 boxes from her AT&T office. Very little made the journey to the Mavs' Design District headquarters.
The future
On her still sparsely populated desk, along with congratulatory flowers and part of her armada of electronics -- two cellphones and two iPads, which she sometimes works all at the same time like a DJ -- is a purple basketball.
On the ball, the women of the Mavericks organization wrote down the name "of a woman who truly, truly inspired them."
They told Marshall she was one. The sentiment made her cry.
"I haven't even been here that long. And so I'm just keeping this [basketball] just to encourage myself and just keep doing this to remind me of the tremendous obligation that I have and this entire leadership team has to deliver for this community and make this a great place for women."
Marshall measures her life thus far in terms of mountains crossed. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," the soulful version with Marvin Gaye, is her "theme song."
"I've had 58 great years on this planet. I'm blessed with a good brain because I got a good education. Faith. And I know people. I know how to lead. I've made mistakes, so I know how to deal with those, too."
She is determined to deal with the past and move the organization forward.
"We have 140 fabulous people here and we are going to join forces, work together," said Marshall. "I mean they're committed to this community.
"My job is to help lead them and help to make the climate right. ... I'm trying to draw on all of the experiences that I've had."
She knows the road ahead will be filled with obstacles. It's her job to move them.
Dream. Focus. Pray. Act.
More on Cynthia Marshall
There's a new Marshall in town, and she even left Mark Cuban speechless
In wake of sexual harassment scandal, Mavs to hire AT&T human resources officer Cynthia Marshall
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-- Cuban's presidential hopes take on heavy baggage with Mavs' 'culture of sexual harassment'
-- 'I think Mark knew': Former Mavericks employee details organization's toxic workplace
-- What will former Mavs employee tell organization about corrosive workplace culture if contacted?
-- Ex-Mavs writer Earl K. Sneed responds to domestic violence incidents, thanks Mark Cuban
-- Keeping writer Earl K. Sneed on staff was 'horrible mistake,' Cuban admits to ESPN
-- Cuban denies having knowledge of reported misogynistic behavior within Mavs, vows to get it fixed
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-- National reaction: Mark Cuban needs to be suspended next season; Mavs should lose draft picks
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