Sunday, March 07, 2010

Doc Martin Gone But Never Forgotten

Doc Martin had long been a Wake Forest legend before I got to Winston in 1978, but I was immediately advised to give him a wide berth. He wasn’t adverse to crawling anybody’s behind, no matter who it belonged to. In that I took the advice, I never got to know him as well as I should have. But there are a lot of people around Wake who knew him well enough to be hurting right now. Doc Martin, who was the athletics trainer at Wake Forest for what was pretty close to forever, passed away yesterday in Fayetteville, leaving behind him about a billion stories—most of which can’t be told in a family newspaper or a blog that’s written for a daily newspaper.

Doc, for whom the Wake Forest practice complex is named, was one of the all-time characters, and he was from another time. His language and overall apparent lack of personal and cultural sensitivity probably wouldn’t be tolerated today, and maybe shouldn’t be. I’m more than content to let you make up your own mind about that. In that regard he was like Frank Howard, the salty football coach of Clemson who said and did things that simply couldn’t be said or done today. But Frank, like Doc, could be so rib-splitting funny that you had to laugh along whether you wanted to or not.

And the more you got to know both, the more you wanted to.

If you knew Doc and have stories, let’s hear them. There might be a couple that I can actually post.

UPDATE:
T. Gary Strickland, who was a student trainer under Doc a few years ago, just called to give me the news. He hadn’t seen my blog yet. Gary absolutely loved Doc, and was one of the many who could see that beneath the gruff exterior there was a heart of gold. Gary told me an amazing statistic, that Doc was the Godfather to 22 children of former Wake Forest athletes or student trainers. Gary also said that during basketball games, it was the job of the student trainers to keep Doc quiet. It was a task that often was simply too much ask.