Heat, pressure toughened Martin

Dec 21, 2010 | By: Austin Meek / cjonline.com

 

MIAMI - At 29 years old, Frank Martin had the job of his dreams. He was the varsity basketball coach at Miami Senior High, his alma mater, the school that played such a central role in his early life in Little Havana.

 

Shakey Rodriguez picked Martin as his successor because we wanted nothing but perfection for the machine he'd built. But perfection didn't come immediately for Martin, who lost eight games in his first season and heard boos from fans and students after he benched three starters for missing class.

 

"At Miami High, you feel the pressure," said Art Cabrera, a former Miami High assistant and Martin's longtime friend. "Even Shakey. It's not your normal high school. When I was there, you got people following the team who were questioning things."

Some fans felt Martin was underqualified because he hadn't played the game. His temper had become legendary by then, and Rodriguez sensed the pressure was pushing Martin toward the edge.

 

"I saw him coaching a game, and I thought he was going to kill somebody," Rodriguez said. "His face was contorted every second. I told him, 'You need to relax a little bit. You're the same guy that I had to chase kids out of the office because they wanted to be around you all the time. Be yourself. Yourself is pretty good.'"

 

By the end of that first year, 1996, Martin had mellowed - slightly - and the Stingarees were winning again. They advanced to the state championship, and Martin's mother, Lourdes, made the annual pilgrimage to Lakeland, Fla., for the title game.

"Shakey, can you imagine?" Lourdes said, turning to Rodriguez in the stands. "I can't believe we're here, that he's playing for a state championship."

 

"You know why I'm here?" Rodriguez replied. "I'm here to watch him win his first state title game."

That's what Martin did, avenging an earlier loss to South Miami in the city championship. South Miami's best player averaged 32 points, but the Stingarees played stifling defense and won 46-33.

Martin had his first state championship.

 

***

 

Frank Martin always liked math. He enjoyed the process of problem-solving, the way you could always find the right answer by following the rules.

 

Teaching at an inner-city school was a tough job, though. Martin was a security guard at Miami High before he became a teacher, and he remembers yelling into his walkie-talkie as he chased a gunman out of the school.

 

Once, while he was teaching at North Miami, Martin caught one of his students with a gun in his pants.

 

"I'd have 28 textbooks to teach 37 students," Martin said. "They didn't get to take textbooks home. You've got to figure out a way to make that work."

 

For all the challenges, though, there were even more success stories. The students loved Coach Frank and gravitated towards him. Cabrera remembers going to Martin's house for New Year's Eve and finding four kids from the basketball team there.

Martin firmly believes those experiences made him a better coach.

 

"Kids, they want structure," Martin said. "They want guidance and they want somebody to believe in them."

As a coach, Martin had exceeded even Shakey's standards. The Stingarees had become the Yankees of Florida high school basketball, earning sponsorship from Nike and traveling to prestigious tournaments around the country. They went 36-1 in 1997, Martin's second season, and his 1998 team was easily the best in the state, featuring future pros Udonis Haslem and Steve Blake.

 

Late in the season, with Miami High rolling toward Martin's third straight state title, he got a call from a reporter with the Miami New Times, an alternative newspaper. When they met for an interview at the school, Martin said he didn't sense anything was amiss.

The story was published March 5, 1998, two days before the state championship, alleging eligibility issues within the Miami High program. Martin took the newspaper to his principal.

 

"This," he said, "could become a problem."

 

***

Twelve years later, the scandal that cost Martin his dream job still elicits strong emotions from the people who lived it.

"Frank had nothing to do with it," Rodriguez said. "He got railroaded on a lot of things. I'm talking to you frankly about how this thing went down."

 

Another friend put it more succinctly: "That was bulls-."

 

The story alleged that five players, including Blake and Haslem, had circumvented residency requirements to become eligible at Miami High. Addresses listed for Blake, Haslem and others were traced to Miami High boosters and assistants, and regardless of the details, most readers saw only one ugly word: recruiting.

 

"Say what you want, but it's now 12 years later — shockingly, 12 years later — but it's like yesterday," said Mark Baranek, a Miami High assistant and Martin's longtime friend. "I remember going to meetings, going to courthouses. I remember talking about it. We had these T-shirts.

 

"But everyone stood behind Frank, and Frank still wanted to protect all the guys that were with him."

The story spawned an investigation from the Florida High School Activities Association, a prolonged and painful saga that stretched from March to August.

 

On Aug. 11, 1998, the FHSAA handed down its ruling. Five Miami High players had received special inducements in the form of housing assistance from school employees and boosters, a violation of the organization's recruiting policy. The school was fined $2,500, ordered to reimburse more than $5,000 in legal costs and forced to forfeit its entire 1998 season.

Martin wasn't named in the FHSAA findings, but he and the school's athletic director were fired.

 

Those close to Martin maintain he was the scapegoat for a system that provided countless loopholes for parents and students to pick and choose their school.

 

"I'd love to take credit for where these kids go to school, but I think mommy and daddy have a lot to do with that," Rodriguez said. "If they're willing to do whatever it takes to get them to a school and do it legally, I'm not going to sit there and say, 'You don't have a right to play here. I don't want you, because people are going to talk a lot of crap.'"

 

If anything, Rodriguez said, Martin was guilty of overlooking the minutia.

 

"One thing I told him was you've always got to cross your T's and dot your I's,

because that's the way people want to get you," Rodriguez said. "They ain't going to beat you on the court, so they're trying to look for all the little details. You've got to be meticulous."

 

In the wake of the scandal, Martin was out of a job and away from basketball for the first time in years. A friend hired him as dean of students at a middle school, but finding another coaching job in Miami would be difficult.

 

"He was a pariah," Rodriguez said. "Nobody would touch him down here."

 

Martin sank into depression, friends said, and Lourdes called Rodriguez, desperate for a way to help her son.

"Let's let a little time pass," Rodriguez told her. "We'll get him back in — somewhere, somehow. He may have to leave the city."

Martin found another coaching job in Miami, but he was essentially starting from scratch, coaching a brand-new varsity program at Booker T. Washington High.

 

That's when opportunity came, in the form of a Puerto Rican point guard named Jose Juan Barea.

 

*****

 

The office of the CEO is lined with jerseys, including two in K-State purple. Against one wall is a glass case containing a basketball autographed by Barea, who plays for the Dallas Mavericks.

 

Art Alvarez made his money in construction, but now he deals with Nike. This is the same guy who knew Frank Martin in the old Orange Bowl neighborhood, the older kid who broke up fights and kept Martin out of trouble.

 

Now, Alvarez is the president of the Miami Tropics AAU organization.

 

"All these people you're talking about, we all became successful," Alvarez said, dressed in a black Miami Heat hat and a black jersey. "But we had to fight for it."

 

Barea was the first big-time prospect Alvarez coached, both with the Tropics and Miami Christian Academy. Barea was being recruited by several high-major programs, but one mid-major coach, Ron Everhart of Northeastern, was particularly enthralled.

To have a chance with Barea, Everhart needed an assistant with South Florida connections. Who better than Frank Martin, the former Miami High coach trying to work his way back into the game?

 

Everhart made an offer: For $12,000 a year, Martin could leave Miami for snowy Boston and become an assistant on Northeastern's staff.

 

The decision was gut-wrenching. Martin had dreamed of working at the college level, and his departure from Miami High created a natural opportunity.

 

At the same time, Miami was Martin's home. Plus, he now had a young son, Brandon, and Martin was determined to be part of his life.

 

Martin decided to take the job, hoping Brandon and his mother would join him in Boston. Instead, it was Frank and Lourdes who packed the U-Haul and made the long drive up the East Coast.

 

"Knowing that I was going to get up and go at the time, it was understood that Brandon's mother was coming too," Martin said. "She changed her mind. Here I am - I left family, friends, a comfort zone, a community to go to a foreign place, to go to a job where I made less money than I was making as a teacher."

 

Martin moved in with a friend in Boston, planning to stay for two weeks. It turned into three months.

 

To compound matters, things weren't going well with Barea. Martin convinced him to come to Northeastern on a visit, and he hated it. Barea called Alvarez from Boston, miserable in the cold and rain.

 

Friends came to visit Martin in Boston, saw how he was living, and wondered if it was time to move back to Miami.

 

"He left here to take a chance," said Cabrera, Martin's longtime friend. "At first I thought, 'All right, great, he's going for his dream.' But after awhile at Northeastern, he wasn't making the money.

 

"I went to his apartment - it was a little small apartment. He was driving an old jalopy car. I thought he would be better off just coming back here and teaching and coaching. He did mention to me once that he was going to give it a little bit more time, and then he was probably going to come back and just coach high school ball."

 

Stuck in a foreign land, robbed of the life he'd built in Miami, Martin followed the lesson he learned from his mother. He worked.

Slowly, Barea began to warm to Northeastern, a small school where he could play 35 minutes every game and showcase his skills. With Martin's relentless recruiting and some coaxing from Alvarez, Martin's friend from the old neighborhood, Barea agreed to sign with Northeastern.

 

"I know he wanted to get that one done pretty bad," Alvarez said, "and because of some convincing on my end to the Bareas, we were able to get that one done."

 

The dividends were profound. Barea revitalized the Northeastern program, Everhart moved up to Duquesne, and Martin earned a reputation as a strong South Florida recruiter. He also had developed a pipeline with Alvarez, who later would help Martin land players like Denis Clemente, Luis Colon and Freddy Asprilla.

 

Martin considered returning to his home state, looking at head coaching jobs at Florida International and Florida Atlantic, as well as a spot on the staff of Miami coach Frank Haith. Haith didn't hire Martin, though, and he landed instead with Bob Huggins at Cincinnati.

 

Martin followed Huggins to K-State and, after Huggins bolted for West Virginia, was introduced as K-State's next head coach. That's the way Huggins wanted it. Keep it in the family.

 

After Martin signed his contract, his first call was to Lourdes.

 

"The only time I've seen Frank cry was when my mom, his grandma, passed away," Lourdes said. "When he called to tell me, he couldn't speak. We were both crying on the phone. One minute, just quiet, both of us."

 

***

 

One question is posed to everyone from Frank Martin's Miami: Had things ended differently, would Martin have been happy to become the next Vince Schaefer, to coach 40 years at Miami High and retire as a Florida legend?

 

The answers vary.

"No, no, no," Lourdes said. "He's always been a leader. He's always been determined to go better and better and higher and higher."

 

Mark Baranek, Martin's longtime friend: "Frank was very comfortable here. Frank had everything going here. But I'm sure he would say, he would never have met his wife. He would never have met some of the people that have really helped him along the way, too."

 

Even Martin himself has to wonder.

 

"There was a culture there," Martin said. "I always wanted to coach college basketball, but it was going to be hard to get me away from there."

 

Today, though, Martin's path feels almost predestined. He is happy in Manhattan with his wife, Anya, and kids. He returned to Miami on Saturday with a team ranked No. 6 in the country. The Wildcats played Florida in front of many of the characters who starred in Martin's story, including the city itself.

 

There is some good fortune involved, but no one can say Frank Martin hasn't paid his dues.

 

"At the bottom of my heart, I knew he was going to be very successful one day," Lourdes said. "I didn't know it would come that soon, or in Manhattan, Kansas, but I always knew he was going to make it big."

 

Martin still goes back to Miami High on occasion. There is talk that he will be inducted into the school's next hall of fame class, and his influence is evident: principal Benny Valdes played for Martin and Rodriguez, as did basketball coach Marcus Carreno.

Lourdes, now retired and living in nearby Doral, goes back to Miami High, too. Brandon, Martin's oldest son, plays basketball there on weekends.

 

The last time Lourdes was there, she noticed the 1998 banner hanging crooked, ripped by the wind, and she started to cry.

The tears passed, though, and the memories flooded back.

 

"I told Brandon, 'You don't know what it is for me to be sitting here,'" she said. "I came here with your daddy when he was going through high school. My daughter was a cheerleader.'

 

"I told Brandon, 'Can you imagine? Now we're here, you're my grandson, and you're the one playing on this court?' I couldn't believe it."
 

 

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