Walking down the halls of Los Angeles’ most privileged high schools, you are taught at an early age the best way to settle a score is through reason — not starting a brawl or throwing a punch. How would I know? I was there, alongside Jonathan Martin.
Long before Martin was drafted by the Dolphins and his teammates coined him the “Big Weirdo,” he roamed the campus of John Thomas Dye, a private elementary school located in the hills of Bel-Air, and was known as “Moose.”
This nickname, which originated from his sheer size, had nothing to do with his physicality. In a world where flag football trumps Pop Warner, there was no room for brutality. However, as Martin towered over his peers, even some of his teachers, there was ample room for understanding and sympathy.
Scott Wood, who is now vice president of DRH Investments, coached Martin in both basketball and football at Harvard-Westlake, a highly regarded preparatory school in Los Angeles where Martin and I went to high school and were football teammates. Wood played college football at Boston College, graduated from Harvard-Westlake in 1988 and grew up in a similar environment to Martin.
“You’re 5 years old, twice as big as everyone, and you knock a kid over by accident. In the culture we grew up in, you’re taught to say sorry, and you feel bad,” Wood said. “Never are you supposed to handle altercations physically. We learned to solve problems with other methods.
“When it came to football, growing up in Los Angeles, there was just a different mentality. And football is the toughest game in the world.”
Football was never the end-all be-all for Martin. It wasn’t his only possibility. This is why Jarrail Jackson, director of player relations at Washington State and former All-Big 12 performer at the University of Oklahoma, tends to have reservations when recruiting from our high school.
“Harvard-Westlake has the label of kids who have a fallback plan,” he said.
Before Martin protected Andrew Luck’s blindside at Stanford, he defended Sean Berman’s at Harvard-Westlake. Berman, currently a backup quarterback at Louisiana Tech, exercising his fifth year of eligibility after playing at, and graduating from Amherst College, described his current college teammates as a “different breed” than those he previous played with.
“There seems to be a deeper fire or passion for the game here. Football is a chance for some of these guys to change their lives around in a big way,” Berman said. “A lot of my other teammates, including Moose, probably always knew they had other things to fall back on and Moose certainly carried himself with that air of confidence in all aspects of life, not just football.”
Whether it was playing chess with his parents as a kid, or studying ancient Greek and Roman classics at Stanford, there always was more to Martin than football. But was this a problem for the Dolphins? Why did this make him the perfect target for Richie Incognito?
For Dave Levy, who was our offensive coordinator at Harvard-Westlake, it simply doesn’t make sense.
“Just because a kid could read and write, it shouldn’t be a put-down. Rather, it’s an accomplishment,” Levy said. “Maybe the other guys were jealous.”
Levy, who coached in four national titles for USC, was an offensive coordinator for the Chargers and Lions, and would have wanted Martin blocking for Barry Sanders.
“Jonathan is a solid individual. You want that at any level,” he said. “He is smart and tough — mentally tough. If you have an offensive lineman who’s a dummy, he’s going to get you beat.”
When asked if he were surprised Martin was in the middle of a bullying scandal, Levy said: “Without question. Something like this couldn’t go on unnoticed. Any coach coaching the offensive line sees things, hears things, that someone is going to mention.
“There are never major conflicts between linemen. They are their own clique.”
Wood recalls a time when he was at Boston College when a teammate of his used a slur referring to Wood being Jewish.
“He would make slurs to everyone, though. I realized that was his particular way of expressing love and friendship,” he said. “It didn’t bother me.”
It also disturbed former Harvard-Westlake teammate, Terry O’Neal, to the point where he chose to leave the UCLA Football team in 2010.
O’Neal, a fellow African-American, is confused regarding the notion Moose has been reported by media outlets as half-black.
“Moose is black,” he said. “And even though we grew up in environment where we were the minority, it was very difficult for me at UCLA when I turned to members of my team, from the same race, who refused to acknowledge I was actually black.
“You’re white, teammates Reginald Stokes and Brian Price [former second round pick of the Buccaneers] would tell me. Because of the way I dressed, because of the way I talked.”
O’Neal said he felt like he was “getting dumber” by being on the team.
“Some of these guys were poor influences because of their single-minded outlook on pursuing a professional career in the NFL,” O’Neal said. “They went to college to play football when there were so many other opportunities higher education can offer.
“At Harvard-Westlake, as Moose knows, we had a great community. We had access to networks across the board, networks across the world. We were fortunate enough to not have football as the only avenue.
“A lot of professional athletes, that is their livelihood, their only path to getting out of the neighborhood they grew up in. We weren’t taught at any early age that showing our emotions was a point of weakness or vulnerability. Unfortunately, it’s something these athletes may never had any exposure to.”
Corey Vann is a 2009 graduate of Harvard-Westlake School, where he was football teammates with Jonathan Martin. Vann went on to play football for Dartmouth.