Sports Heroes

Where Are They Now?

Don “Walk Away” Martin had been strolling through the Alton, Illinois woods cutting bamboo canes long before he became a well-known Springfield Trade High School sports hero excelling in basketball, track, football and, yes, soccer.  Located on the Mississippi River near East St. Louis, Alton, Illinois is where Don’s father moved the family from Cairo, Illinois after he sold the family farm.   Don was five years old but he will always remember the move to Alton.  His father dropped the family off, left for Connecticut and never returned.  Don did not see his father again until his mother moved the family to Springfield in 1955 and enrolled him in the tenth grade at Trade High School.

Springfield soon discovered that Don was the silent, tough type with a Michael Jordan like confidence in his own abilities.  The basketball coach at Trade invited him to join the junior varsity team in his freshman year.  Always polite, Don declined and insisted that he was varsity material. 

Don started playing basketball as a boy in Illinois, where they built their own courts and played with basketball hoops with no backboards.  When he joined the Alton Junior High team, he was additionally motivated by the free new sneakers each player received. The sneakers had to be turned back in after each game until the end of the year, when they were given to the players permanently. 

Don was not bragging when he refused to join Trade’s junior varsity team.  He was simply good and, after thoroughly testing him, the coach agreed and assigned him to the varsity team, where Don played the guard position for the next three years, during which time Trade won All-City and came within one game from winning All-Western Mass in a play-off that Trade entered with a 20 to 1 record.  “I am not bragging,” Don said with no sign of ego in his voice, “but I had no problems handling “Leo,”  “Eddie” and others,” who were the better players of his time.  Leo, who outweighed Don by many pounds, is the father of NBA basketball player, Travis Best, and Eddie Gearing was the high scoring jump shot artist of his time. 

As one of the ten best players in Springfield, Don was selected to form a team to play the visiting Harlem Magicians.  In fact, as many an embarrassed opponent has discovered, Don’s dribbling was styled after Magician Owner Marcus Haynes.  Opponents often asked the question, “Who left the gate open?” and allowed “Walk Away” Martin to get out and score.

After high school, Don went on to play for many years in Hartford with South End Community Center’s, Bobby Knight, who also played with the Harlem Globe Trotters and now spends his time teaching and coaching young basketball players.

Getting back to those bamboo sticks that Don used to cut in Illinois, he did so for business reasons.  He would sell them at fifty cents each as clothesline poles.  He always kept a pole with him to kill snakes in the woods and he developed a habit of using it to vault over streams and fences. So it’s no wonder that he became the pole-vaulting champion of Springfield with hardly any formal training.  His record of 11 feet 9 inches, acquired while using then standard bamboo pole, may still stand.

One person in Springfield doesn’t want the soccer part of Don’s story told. Because he was too late to play football, in his first year at Trade, Don played soccer and was selected All-City. At the time soccer was not a popular sport and some of the guys laughed at Don for playing and called him a sissy. Ever the competitor, Don told one of his tormentors (whom I’ll save the embarrassment of naming) that he would not only play football the next year but that he would also take the tormentor’s position on the team. The next year he took the tormentor’s position as half-back and became the second or third highest scorer in Springfield behind the great Freddie Lewis of Technical High fame.

Don has three sons who are chips off the proverbial block. The youngest, Michael, is a Central graduate who played on the first Springfield team to win an A Division State Championship. They won in triple overtime against Cambridge Latin, Patrick Ewing’s school.  The next youngest, Kyle, graduated from Tech High, where he played basketball and football but was belatedly sidelined by a knee operation that kept him out of the naval academy. The oldest, Don’s namesake, Donald Martin, was an all-around sportsman like his father.  He played basketball and football and was just short of his black belt in karate, when he had an automobile accident that paralyzed him one year after his graduation from high school. He’s tough like his father, though, and continues as a much respected basketball coach. 

Don’s daughter, Angie, was born at a time when women’s sports were not encouraged but she, and all of Don’s sons, are educated, well-mannered, responsible people who stand as Don’s highest accomplishment in life.