Alumni Magazine - Summer 2008 - (Page 25) Mario West Talent, Work Ethic, Intensity “Not a lot of people expected me to have the success that I’ve had,” says Mario West, a former Georgia Tech basketball standout under coach Paul Hewitt who now plays for the Atlanta Hawks. “I didn’t do it all by myself. First, I would have to thank God for blessing me with the opportunity to attend Georgia Tech. I had great family support from my parents and I had a wonderful basketball coach,” says West, Mgt 06, a dean’s list student who also has taken classes toward a second degree in economics. “To go to Tech and graduate — also to start my pro career in my hometown, for my home team — is just a great feeling. This is something everybody dreams of and I’m very fortunate to have this opportunity.” West was the Douglas County High School Player of the Year in Douglasville, Ga., but was a walk-on at Georgia Tech in 2002. He was red-shirted, earned a scholarship and by his senior year was team captain. At the end of Tech’s 2006-07 season, West earned the Michael Isenhour Inspirational Award and the team’s Excellence Award. West also won the State Farm Slam Dunk contest held during the week of Final Four playoffs. At 6-5, 210 pounds, West made the Hawks as a free agent and played with such intensity and energy at the Hawks training camp that he earned the nickname Truck. “I’ve been around this league a long time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy play as hard as Mario plays,” said Hawks head coach Mike Woodson. “He pushes guys in practice to play hard and if you don’t play hard he embarrasses you in terms of just knocking the hell out of you. He is contagious, he wants to do right, he wants to learn, he’s coachable. That’s a guy you want on your basketball team.” Playing professional basketball was never a given and while he says earning his degree required discipline and hard work, West adds, “My Georgia Tech experience prepared me for the real world. A degree is so important because it gives you options in life and corporate America.” West says he is grateful to the Hawks organization “for believing in me and giving me a chance. My main focus is my career and that’s basketball right now.” — JD Clint Zeagler Country-fried Fashion W ith the tagline “Revival,” Pecan Pie Couture’s fall 2008 line of T-shirts conjures up visions of weekends in the South, with afternoons spent on the front porch sipping sweet tea and evenings feasting on a home-cooked supper with family. A Yankee could develop a Southern drawl sporting a T-shirt with “Well Just Bless Your Little Heart” printed across the front in large, white type. Whether it’s filled with squash casserole or sweet potato pie, a pie dish surely holds a meal baked with love as the words “The Holy Southern Casserole” hover above it on another shirt. The collection is the fifth line of T-shirts from the Atlanta-based Pecan Pie Couture, launched by fashion designer and Tech alumnus Clint Zeagler in 2006. “I named the company Pecan Pie Couture because it’s got that tongue-in-cheek Southern reference to it, but it’s also got that irony of juxtaposition of pecan pie, which is this Southern staple, and couture, which is high French fashion,” Zeagler says. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in industrial design from Tech in 2004, Zeagler studied in Italy’s fashion capital, Milan, and received a master’s in fashion design from Domus Academy. The 28-year-old has twice been voted Best Local Clothing Designer by the readers of Atlanta’s Creative Loafing newspaper. In 2007, he was named one of The Atlantan magazine’s Men of Style. Pecan Pie Couture doesn’t just take its inspiration from the South — all of the materials for its shirts also are made there. “Our T-shirts are a hundred percent Southern,” Zeagler says. From cotton harvested in the South to the natural dyes that are applied to the shirts by hand, each step in the creation of a Pecan Pie Couture original is made on Southeastern soil. When he’s not designing new shirts for the runway, Zeagler is dreaming up ready-to-wear technology. He returned to Tech in the spring of 2007 to teach a course on wearable designs in the College of Architecture’s industrial design program. For the fall 2007 semester, he partnered with College of Computing associate professor Thad Starner to teach a course on wearable electronics and mobile and ubiquitous computing. — LO >>> Photo: Melissa Bugg Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2008 25
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