ROBERT ANDREW POWELL GUEST COMMENTARY
GUEST COMMENTARY
INSIDE frank MARTIN’S MIAMI HIGHBy ROBERT ANDREW POWELL
Special to The Star
As soon as I saw that Bob Huggins ditched the Kansas State basketball team to coach his hometown West Virginia Mountaineers, I watched the Web closely. Huggins holds one of the worst reputations in college sports, and his sudden departure left K-State officials furious at his opportunism.
But that’s not what I was interested in. I wanted to see who would get the top job at Kansas State. Within a day, and as I expected, there came the news: Frank Martin, Huggins’ assistant, had been elevated to the Wildcats’ head coach position. I found the official press release at the K-State Web site. Please, I thought to myself, clicking the link. Please tell the truth.
I know Martin from his days as a high school coach in Florida. He had been the head coach at Miami Senior High when I was a staff writer at the Miami New Times newspaper. His team was a perennial superpower, marching to two state championships in a row and on track for a third when I started looking at it, in 1998.
I’d read Martin’s complaints that his team, known as the Stingarees, had become so dominant they could no longer find competition in Miami; almost every game was a boring blowout. I noticed that the Stingarees reloaded every year with stud transfers from around the state. I saw that Martin’s 1997-98 team at Miami High, a public school located in Little Havana just a couple of blocks from Elian Gonzalez’s temporary home, somehow featured three African-American players 6 feet 8 or taller. I wondered how that was possible.
“Some people like to say that our program is one of cheaters and underachievers,” Martin told the Miami Herald, in that paper’s 1997-98 high school basketball preseason preview. “But it’s not that way at all. Miami High has always had a great basketball tradition. We work hard to earn it. Some kids in the past have legally transferred to Miami High because they want to play for the best program in town. I can’t help that. Every kid on this team is legally registered.”
Not exactly. By going into the school system database and simply looking up the given home addresses of the players, I found a nest of rules violations.
•A star point guard, Steve Blake, who now plays for the Denver Nuggets, claimed to live with Joyce Lund, a Stingarees booster who owned a home a few blocks from Miami High. Blake actually lived with his family in Miami Lakes, an upscale suburb miles outside the school district.
•Another player, Udonis Haslem, who now plays for the Miami Heat, claimed to live with the team’s scorekeeper in a studio near Miami High. In truth, he lived with his father and stepmother in Miramar, Fla., in a different county.
•Forward Antonio Latimer, a 6-10 Puerto Rican, claimed to live in an apartment owned by a secretary in the Miami High athletic department. One-third of the team — an entire starting lineup — claimed to live with a school employee, a coach or a team booster.
That’s against the rules in Florida. My article came out just before the state playoffs that Miami High easily won. Almost as soon as Martin and his squad cut down the nets, the Florida High School Activities Association (FHSAA), the agency that oversees scholastic sports, launched its own investigation. It confirmed my findings and then some. Miami High was fined $2,500 and forced to reimburse more than $5,000 in expenses incurred during the FHSAA’s investigation. Five players, including Haslem and Blake, were barred from playing at Miami High again. Blake was actually banned from playing high school ball in Florida, and ended up transferring to Oak Hill in Virginia. Miami High was required to return the 1998 state championship trophy. Martin was fired, along with the school’s athletic director.
“This is one of the most, if not the most, blatant violations of FHSAA rules against recruiting that I have encountered in my seven years as commissioner of this association,” said Ron Davis when he handed down the penalties in August 1998.
After the basketball team was stripped of its title, I endured a period of harassment from Miami High boosters, including the obligatory death threats. “You’re dead, buddy,” said one caller, which I took to be a mixed message. At a Boys and Girls Club charity dinner, I sat near a table where Martin sat, and spent the evening watching him point me out to his friends.
In time I moved on, and so did Martin. He took a job as an assistant coach at Boston’s Northeastern University, a basketball nonentity he stocked with south Florida players. He soon tapped his Miami High contacts to hook up with Huggins at the University of Cincinnati. After Huggins moved to Kansas State, Martin joined him. The press release announcing Martin’s promotion to the top job started simply enough.
“Frank has played an invaluable role in the turnaround of Kansas State basketball,” stated school president Jon Wefald. “I have the utmost confidence in Frank’s ability to lead this program while continuing to attract high-caliber student-athletes who can compete for championships in the Big 12 Conference.”
I scanned down farther, looking for anything on Martin’s Miami High past. I didn’t see how they could ignore his time in Florida, since he’s never served as a head coach above the high school level. A few paragraphs down, I got to the part I’d hoped not to see.
“During his three-year stint with the Stingarees, (Martin) posted a stellar 102-10 (.911) overall record and captured three consecutive Florida 6A State Championships (1996, 1997, 1998). Martin’s last two squads compiled impressive 36-1 records and finished among the nation’s top 5 in the USA Today Top 25 poll, including a program-best No. 2 following the 1997-98 season.”
Oh, gosh. That’s just wrong. Martin did not win three state championships at Miami High. In his last year at the school, his team did not finish 36-1, the record advertised on his bio. That year, 1997-98, the Stingarees actually finished with a record of 0-37. They forfeited every single game, and Martin was fired. As Stephen Colbert might say: You can look it up.
After Martin’s promotion was announced last week, friends came out to sing his praises. In a long profile in one Kansas newspaper, Martin was often described by those who know him best as a man of high character. For a reference to this character, and to address the Miami High scandal, the reporter turned to Art Alvarez, the head coach of the Miami Tropics AAU basketball team.
“A lot of it was blown out of proportion,” Alvarez said. “When you win state titles back-to-back-to-back, it becomes a jealousy issue. Everybody wants to start coming to your school because you win. The problem is, the FHSAA is something of a monopoly. After so many titles, it wasn’t fair. Nothing was ever proved.”
There was no mention of Alvarez’s own scandalous past. In 2003, the FHSAA determined that tiny powerhouse Miami Christian Academy, where Alvarez was the head coach, was guilty of illegal recruiting. His team was banned from postseason play.
Nice character reference.
I’d always seen my story about Miami High as a companion to stories about voter fraud in Miami elections. At around the same time Martin’s team was cheating to win at basketball, people from outside the city were caught using fake addresses to vote for Miami’s mayor. At least one voter was dead. Such skullduggery is rooted in the culture of Miami, a city where hustle rules above all else.
I recognize that Kansas State, while not a famously corrupt program, is not on the vanguard of sports ethics. For one thing, it hired Huggins, whose Cincinnati program was once put on probation for a lack of institutional control. Then, it hired assistant coach Dalonte Hill to land prize recruit Michael Beasley. Finally, it promoted Martin and Hill in a desperate attempt to keep its recruits and salvage next season.
It’s not the worst choice. As far as I know, Martin has never held up a liquor store, or ripped off anyone in a ponzi scheme. He just cheated at basketball and got caught, nine years ago. That’s a black mark, but it’s not the end of the world, nor does it need to be the end of his career. Over the last decade, he’s logged countless hours in the trenches of college basketball, coaching practices, crossing the country on recruiting trips, and persuading talented players from sunny Florida to attend a snowbound college on the prairie. He has a pregnant wife and two kids. I don’t want to deny him basketball. I don’t want to deny him his livelihood, either.
What bothers me is the blatant and ongoing denial. Martin continues to assert his innocence, but his assertions — an entire starting lineup, including a couple of future NBA players, were all transfer students who enrolled at my school with fake addresses somehow obtained from boosters or coaches, but I never “recruited” — dodge the point, the rules, and any semblance of personal responsibility.
“I wish he would have just said something like, ‘Look, that was a long time ago and I made some mistakes. I learned from them and nothing like that has ever happened again,’ ” Ron Boyd, the former FHSAA commissioner, told me on Tuesday.
For the record, Martin was not “cleared of all wrongdoing” by the FHSAA, as several papers reported. The FHSAA never investigated Martin specifically. The basketball program he ran was investigated, and was found to be guilty of illegal recruiting. Again, Martin was fired. That doesn’t happen randomly.
All of us, as humans who’ve survived into adulthood, have accumulated blunders. These things don’t go away. They can’t. They shouldn’t, either. Without mistakes, it’s harder to know what is right. Accountability is what matters most. Ask Barack Obama whether he’s snorted cocaine and see what he says. Then check the huge amounts of money Obama has collected for his run at the presidency. All we ask for is honesty, for some ownership of actions.
“We’re going to roll up our sleeves and hold people accountable,” Martin said in 2005, in an interview about his then-assistant coaching duties.
Please do, Coach. Now is a good time to start.
Robert Andrew Powell, a journalist in Miami for the last 15 years, is the author of the book, “We Own This Game,” which Sports Illustrated named a Best Book of 2003. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, PLAY, on Public Radio’s “This American Life with Ira Glass,” and in the “Best American Sports Writing” anthology. His reporting on Frank Martin and Miami High, for the Miami New Times newspaper, was the basis for a chapter in the book: “Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed and the Corruption of America’s Youth.” He recently moved to Boulder, Colo., to work on his second book.
INSIDE frank MARTIN’S MIAMI HIGH
