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| Harvey Martin |
Whereas most people will remember Martin as one of the many great NFL football players of the 1970s and 80s, I will always remember him playing the role of fictional sportswriter Oscar Madison.
I interviewed Harvey Martin very briefly in October 1992 during Alumni Week when I was a student at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas (now called Texas A&M University-Commerce). He, and another ETSU alum and actor, Don Shook, were doing a one-night performance of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple”.
Martin’s rise to fame began in fall 1972 when he led East Texas State’s football team to the NAIA Division I championship. The following year, he was selected to play for the Dallas Cowboys.
Back in 1992, I was serious about pursuing a lifelong career in journalism. I was a reporter for the college’s newspaper, “The East Texan.” Besides writing and turning in more than five news stories a week (which affected my grades greatly), I would also write reviews of films and sometimes plays.
I wanted to review “The Odd Couple” because other than seeing the film version from the 1960s with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and later the television series in the 1970s with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, I had never seen it done on stage. Besides that, Oscar was my favorite character because he is noticeably short on patience (like me), rarely cleans (I clean at least once a month if that much) and his career was in journalism.
All right, I confess. I clean more than that and do not live in a room full of day-old food and do not leave clean clothes all over the floor.
I remember Martin getting the most laughs that night and he played the role of the sloppy roommate flawlessly though some of the lines and the setting were rewritten so people living in Texas can identify with the characters. Instead of New York, the apartment was someplace in Dallas. Shook’s Felix was still the clean-cut neat freak but instead of being a photographer, he was a meteorologist. Martin’s Oscar was still a sportswriter.“On our fifth wedding anniversary I took Blanche to a Dallas Mavericks game where she got hit with a basketball,” Martin’s Oscar told Felix when it came to talking about his relationship with his wife. “I still don’t know why she left me.”
Besides writing a review, my editor asked me to get some quotes from the main cast particularly from Martin and Shook since they were both ETSU alumni.
I took that as just being a part of my job. I did not see it as exciting.
I learned more about Martin reading his career highlights in the sports section of The Dallas Morning News and from people who knew him who were interviewed on the local news than I ever did that night I spoke with him. Looking at those highlights, I could tell Martin was at his greatest when he was on the field.He played in three Superbowl’s with the Cowboys, losing two, and had his own radio talk show on KRLD-AM (1080). The stories I liked most that were discussed by sportscasters and by those who knew him was how the six foot five, 250-pound frame would point at certain players on the opposing teams before game time. It was his way of intimidating the players that eventually earned him the nickname, “Too Mean.”
Then there was that famous incident where Martin walked into the Redskins locker room after Dallas beat them 35-34 in December 1979 with a funeral wreath the opposing team sent to Martin. Martin yelled, “Take this damn thing back to Washington with you,” according to the 12/26/01 front page news story in The Dallas Morning News.
One of the news stations ran an interview of Martin laughing about the incident and recalling about how Cowboys coach Tom Landry made him go and apologize.
I had no idea the Harvey Martin I spoke with that October night was THE Harvey Martin who played with the Dallas Cowboys from 1973 until 1984.
Sadly, it wasn’t until I saw Martin being interviewed by TV reporters in August 1996 talking about the $1,000 fine and seven years’ probation he received on charges of felony cocaine possession that I realized this was the same person I had seen act on stage that night.
I took note as I read that list of dates chronicling Martin’s career in the sports section of the Morning News that his triumphs on the field were almost equal to his downfalls off.
Then again, those ugly tales about the star’s drug and alcohol problems, money troubles and many failed business ventures were not how I wanted to remember Harvey Martin.
Instead, the Harvey Martin I will always remember is the one who was soft spoken when I asked him a couple questions and how I had to keep up with his fast pace as he was in a hurry to get some place else. If I remember correctly, I really had to peer my head up farther back than normal to get a good look at him as he was talking.
When Martin died unexpectedly Dec. 24, 2001, of pancreatic cancer at a still-too-young age of 51, I looked for that October 29, 1992, play review I wrote for The East Texan to read what the athlete had said about returning to the place where his career had all started.
“I liked it a lot,” Martin said. “Lots of times, God has been so good to me, and you can sometimes get in another world, and forget where you’ve come from and what you are all about.”
“Coming back to ETSU, I was thrown back into reality-what I’m about, where my dreams started-and they started right here,” he said. “It was a great time to be back.”
©2/13/02
