CANTON, Ohio – Curtis Martin brought down the house last night, flooded the Hall of Fame with tears and cheers with a powerful tribute to his mother, to Bill Parcells, and to God.
Four times during his speech, a speech entirely from the bottom of his giant heart, Curtis Martin had to pause to keep from crying. Tears welled in his eyes and in a seat below him, his mother Rochella was busy wiping away her tears with a tissue. And in a seat on the stage behind him, Big Bad Bill Parcells, who presented Martin for induction, looked as if he might have been crying on the inside.
Martin travelled back in time, to a time and a place no child should ever have to revisit, not even once, so the world would understand the courage of the woman who raised him and endured the wrath of a sadistic, violent husband.
“When I was 5 years old, I remember watching him torture my mother,” Martin said. “I don’t necessarily have notes, but I’m gonna kinda bare my soul, so just bear with me.
“He had my mother locked in a bathroom, had her sitting on the edge of the tub, and he turned on all the hot water so that the hot water would eventually flow on her legs. He dared her to move. As the hot water flowed up and started going on her legs and going on her feet and she would flinch a little bit, he would rush into the bathroom, take her hair and burn it with a lighter. … He’d come back out, watch her some more, she’d move again, he’d go in there with a cigarette and put cigarette burns all over her legs, which she still bears to this day. I’ve seen him beat her up like she was a man. I’ve seen him throw her down the steps. … I’ve witnessed this woman …”
Here Martin choked up for the first time.
“I’ve watched my mother get punched in the face, have a black eye and then go to work with makeup on just to support our family. … My mother was dealing with so much hurt and pain and …”
He addressed her directly then, saying, “I know that she had to take some of that out somewhere, and I’m so grateful that I was there for you to even to take some of that pain out on, ’cause you deserve it.”
Applause in the stadium now.
Now he wasn’t a 5-year-old boy anymore, but a 9-year-old boy, who remembered her mom finding her own mother bloodied and murdered.
“I just heard everyone saying, ‘If that happened to me, I would go crazy, I would lose my mind,’ and for me, crazy was kinda like what my dad was,” Martin said. “My mother told me the only thing that got her through that, was that I came up to her and I grabbed her hand, I said, ‘Mom, are you going crazy?’ And, she looked down on me and said, ‘No. Why you ask me that?’ I just said, ‘Well that’s good, because if you go crazy …’ ” and here again his voice cracked, “ ‘nobody’s gonna be here to take care of me.’
“I’m so grateful to my mother. That is the strongest individual that I’ve ever known, and I appreciate her so much.”
Now he was a 15-year-old problem child.
“I had so many brushes with death,” Martin said. “And I remember one distinct time, a guy had a loaded gun to my head, pulled the trigger seven times, God’s honest truth, the bullet didn’t come out. He wasn’t pointing the gun at me, and pulled the trigger, the bullet came out. I was too young to even recognize this — God saved my life.”
Now he was a rookie being taught by Parcells about stamina and endurance in his first preseason game.
“It was a very hot night, he was gulping for air, we finally took him out,” Parcells said. “So he came to the sideline [panting], he was exhausted. I said, ‘Do you have any idea what kind of stamina you will need to do this job?’ He nodded his head kinda, I said, ‘Well you know, there’s 56 minutes left in this game, do you think you can play anymore?’ ”
He sure could. He was surrounded by media after diving in for the winning touchdown against the Browns that capped a 102-yard performance in his first regular-season game.
“This was after my press conference. I had just seen him as I was going back to change,” Parcells said. “So I said, ‘Fellas, just leave him alone, he’s just a one-game wonder.’ And then, after that, we changed it to Boy Wonder. It was really a term of endearment, really.”
And 14,101 yards later, there Martin was last night, standing tall with defensive end Chris Doleman, center Dermontti Dawson, tackle Willie Roaf, defensive tackle Cortez Kennedy and defensive back Jack Butler in the Class of 2012.
Now Martin was a 39-year-old Hall of Famer reeling off Parcellisms.
“There’s a big difference,” he remembered Parcells telling him, “between routine and commitment.”
“Thank you, Coach Parcells,” Martin said.
Martin and his mother had reconciled with the brutal man who turned their house into a torture chamber before he died when the boy was 5.
“My greatest achievement in my life was helping my mother and nurturing my mother from the bitter, angry, hurt and beaten person she was,” Martin said.
Towards the end, he asked his former teammates, at the University of Pittsburgh, at the Patriots and at the Jets to stand up. Then he said, “I really wish I could ask God to stand up.”
God already was. God was standing and cheering this Hall of Fame man.