Inside Oliver Martin's uneasy life at the top

It’s usually late when Oliver Martin comes home.

Following a full day of school, football practice and his own workouts afterward, the Iowa City West receiver will get back around 9 at night. By then his family will have already eaten dinner.

Martin will eat his microwaved leftovers and then he might head to his room to do homework. Other days, he’ll get back up and leave the house again.

He drives an aged navy-blue Mercedes SUV that his cousin loaned him. It stinks of sweaty football pads. The radio is broken. When he heads out late at night, he listens to music on his smartphone until he arrives at Sara Sullivan’s house.

Sullivan was his math and science teacher in seventh and eighth grade, but since then she’s become an unofficial part of the Martin family — Oliver’s “cool aunt,” she says. She’s also his math tutor.

Martin would’ve texted her during his dinner, asking if he could come over for help with his advanced placement statistics class. By the time he’ll get to Sullivan’s — sometimes as late as 10 p.m. — her two young kids will be long asleep and her husband not too far behind.

After he arrives at her eastern Iowa City home, Martin and Sullivan will set up at the slate-gray kitchen counter and get cracking on work for AP stats. The thing is, Martin sometimes doesn't need help with his math.

"It’s some time not thinking about football,” Martin said.

Sullivan asks him lots of questions, but never about football. Never about recruiting. Sullivan views herself as Martin’s “academic advocate,” so she doesn’t care much about the football stuff.

Martin loves that. To him, some people seem to care too much.

“Pretty much everywhere I go, there’s talk about football,” Martin said Sunday, recalling his daily routine.

That talk is natural. Martin is one of the nation’s elite high school players who dramatically emerged this summer from a ho-hum prospect to a must-have in a matter of weeks. He’s being courted by Iowa and national bluebloods Michigan and Notre Dame, among 11 other schools.

He’s lethal on the football field, a smooth-operating 6-foot-1, 185-pound athlete who shreds opposing secondaries with ease. His dominance, which included a 117-yard, two-touchdown effort last week, has helped West (10-2) reach Friday’s IHSAA Class 4A state championship game against Dowling Catholic.

He could also swim or play baseball in college, if he wanted. A middle infielder for West, Martin has baseball scholarship offers from Iowa and Illinois, and he swam in West's state champion 400-yard freestyle relay team last year.

“The kid works his butt off,” said Marvin McNutt, Iowa’s all-time leading receiver and one of Martin’s personal coaches. “He literally will just keep going all day until the tank is empty.”

Off the field, Martin is reserved. He doesn’t speak unless spoken to, and that can make it so “you’re not really sure where you stand with him at first,” said Tony Lombardi, one of Martin’s youth coaches.

“I wouldn’t say he’s a social butterfly by any means,” McNutt chuckled. “But he’s a great guy.”

He loves sports. If you mention football or swimming, which was his first passion, he flashes a half-smile. But there’s no middle ground. He’s equal parts academic introvert and athletic prodigy. He's a fly-over state high school superstar who just wants to blend in.

The problem is … that’s impossible.

“He can’t really turn around without somebody asking him what’s going on,” West head coach Garrett Hartwig said.

Sept. 30: Senior year

Martin and his West teammates were at the Steak 'n Shake near Coral Ridge Mall, celebrating a 59-7 win over Burlington. It was late, nearly midnight, and everyone was having a blast.

West dominated Burlington. Every player did his part. Martin snared three catches for 76 yards and two touchdowns.

The night, for Martin, was special for another reason.

He didn’t get to do this very often. Since he became one of the nation’s top recruits, there was little time to hang with friends like this.

On most Fridays this season, Martin would drive with his dad, Jeff, all night to a college for an unofficial visit. Oliver appreciated those visits. But after a while, it’s nice to have some downtime. The week before the win over Burlington, he was in South Bend, Ind., visiting Notre Dame. Before that, he visited Wisconsin.

But not this Friday. Martin was visiting Michigan the following day, but his dad’s friend planned on taking them on a private plane in the morning. This was a rare Friday when he was able to just be the 18-year-old high school senior and not the mega-recruit.

At about midnight, he said he checked his phone. He’d let it buzz unanswered a few times. Texts from his dad filled up the home screen. The latest one read: I need to talk to you.

He left the table to call. It turned out weather was getting too bad to fly that Saturday. Martin needed to come home immediately, his dad said, so they could start the 7-hour drive to Ann Arbor, Mich.

Martin hung up. He said he remembers not wanting to go back to the table with his friends. He didn’t want anyone to ask about the call. He didn’t want to be noticed.

“They’d just give me crap,” Martin said. “Like, ‘Gosh, you never stay around.’”

So he waited. He waited long enough until he thought his teammates devouring their burgers might forget he was there. Then he slipped out of the Steak 'n Shake and left without saying goodbye.

He walked to his cousin’s Mercedes and plopped in the stinky car with no radio. He turned his keys and drove home.

Just for tonight, Martin had wanted to be normal. It wasn't too long ago that he could be.

November 2012: Fall of eighth grade

There were reporters and TV cameras mixed in with the normal crowd of parents at the indoor pool of the Coralville Recreation Center.

Sara Sullivan noticed. Her swimmers might not have realized it, but she knew. This was the most important meet for North Central Junior High’s inaugural swim team and for her as the head coach. They were competing against Northwest Junior High, who they shared a swim team with until this year.

Eventually, kids lined up for the 25-yard freestyle. Martin, North Central’s top swimmer, jumped into the pool and got ready. He’d already won all of his events.

But he wasn’t competing in the 25 free.

Sullivan had pulled 14-year-old Martin aside moments before. Away from the pool, away from the TV cameras. She’d asked him a favor. He said yes without hesitation.

Normally, Martin hovered alone in his lane before races. For this 25 free, Martin hovered with a special needs teammate.

This boy could swim fast, but Sullivan wanted someone to follow behind him to make sure he finished the race. Sullivan picked Martin to do that.

Oliver’s parents, Jeff and Lisa Martin, remember watching as their son pulled up close to his teammate and spoke to him before the race.

"I was trying to encourage him,” Martin said. “Letting him know that he could do it.”

Martin swam with his head out of the water, Lisa Martin said, and his teammate occasionally glanced back at him as he finished the race.

After the meet, those well-dressed reporters with their TV cameras flocked to Martin. He sat slouched — just like he did in class, Sullivan said.

“Little did any of us know that that was going to be one of the first times he's going to be interviewed on TV for this stuff,” Sullivan said.

That was also one of the first times Martin realized something: He didn't like this stuff. The media stuff. The attention stuff.

“I’ve always been kind of the same,” he said. “I want to do really well in sports and achieve my potential. But I don’t like talking about it to people. Like, I want to do good and I want people to know that I’m doing good, but I don’t like talking about it.

“I’m not comfortable flaunting myself.”

October 2011: Fall of seventh grade

After playing football for two years with his football/baseball club team, the Longhorns, Martin earned his first of two invites to the Eastbay All-American Youth Bowl in seventh grade. It’s an event for middle schoolers organized by the same people who run the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Both games are played on the same day in the Alamodome in San Antonio.

North Central had planned an Eastbay jersey presentation for Martin, then 12, during a school assembly.

“He did not want to do it,” Lisa Martin laughed.

“They got the entire school to come to an assembly,” Martin added incredulously.

He didn’t want his parents to come. He was already embarrassed that he’d be touted in front of his peers. If his parents were there? Too much.

Well, of course, Jeff and Lisa Martin disobeyed. The assembly was in the gym, so Jeff remembers huddling over by the cafeteria door. He could crack that open to see inside the gym and snap a few long-range photos.

“I just saw everyone staring at me, and I was like ‘Yeah, I want to go back over there. I want to go sit down,’” Martin said. “I was just standing there. I didn’t know what to do. Do I just look out there?”

He said he avoided eye contact and scanned the crowd. Seconds felt like minutes as administrators listed off his accolades.

“There were some (kids) that needed to be treated like they were special and there were other ones that needed to be treated like they were just like everybody else,” said Sullivan, who was at the assembly. “And I think that’s what he wanted.”

As Oliver played at the Eastbay game on Jan. 8, Lisa Martin pictured her son playing in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, which features the nation's top seniors, one day.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow it’d be a long shot, but it’d be really cool if he got to do this,’” she said.

July 2013: Summer before freshman year

Brian Sauser, West’s former head football coach, was out at the youth sports complex in Coralville, Ia., playing baseball with his sons Dodge and Dallas — 11 and 8 at the time.

It was about 95 degrees, Sauser said. Two o’clock in the middle of July. He said all the fields were completely empty.

“We were the only ones crazy enough to be out there,” he joked.

Eventually, another car pulled up on the other side of the complex, over by the soccer field.

That’s Oliver’s mom’s car, Sauser thought.

He was right. Martin emerged from the car. He walked alone to the soccer field with a bag draped over his shoulder as his mom drove away.

“Hey guys, that’s Oliver over there,” Sauser remembers telling his boys.

Martin sat pretty high in Sauser’s mind that summer. He’d dazzled him a few weeks earlier with one-handed catches during West’s 7-on-7 intrasquad scrimmages.

Soon after, Martin impressed again in a 7-on-7 tournament at Cedar Rapids Prairie. West quarterback Nate Boland approached Sauser after one of the games, the former West coach recalled.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, Coach. I’m not sure what your plan is and I don’t want to overstep my bounds or anything, but I think Oliver should come play varsity with us,’” Sauser said Boland told him.

Sauser felt that way, too. Martin wasn’t like anything he’d seen before, especially from a regular-looking, 6-foot-tall kid. He was planning to start Martin. He'd never started a freshman at a skill position before.

This was all on Sauser’s mind as he watched Martin pull cones from the bag and set them up on the field that July afternoon. He expected friends to come and train with the receiver, but he just worked out alone.

For an hour, Sauser said, Martin remained alone on that soccer field. He ran himself through drills in the July heat until his mom came back to pick him up.

“I never said anything to him about it. But I just knew,” Sauser said. “We had already had him in 7-on-7 that summer, and then you see something like that as a coach — that’s just different from everybody else. There’s not somebody out there barking at him. Nobody made him.

“Nobody would’ve ever known he was out there doing that. It’s things like that that separate kids.”

Sauser left West after Martin's freshman year, and he's now the head football coach at Yukon High in Yukon, Okla. Before each season, he tells his players the story of Oliver Martin that July afternoon.

“Every high school in America has 6-1, 185-pound kids (like Martin),” he said. “What’s going to make you different?

“The kid hasn’t taken one shortcut.”

June 2011: Summer before seventh grade

Whenever 12-year-old Martin traveled with the Longhorns for a summer baseball tournament, Jeff Martin made calls in advance to recreation centers, community pools and private clubs. He was looking for a place for his son to swim during breaks.

Martin played in tournaments practically every weekend, and he needed to stay conditioned for swimming. You can lose your feel for the water over time.

While his Longhorn teammates relaxed after playing in a tournament in Liberty, Mo., Martin went to the local community pool with his dad.

Martin swam about 10 200-yard freestyle reps that day, followed by five 200-yard reps of each of the other strokes. Then he worked on anything else he thought necessary.

He was alone. Just like on the soccer field in Coralville.

His 16-year-old sister, Ruby, a legitimate 2020 Olympics swimming contender, said she counts tiles on pools’ floors to keep her mind occupied.

“I don’t know about that,” Martin said, turning his head on the couch and smiling at Ruby.

Instead, Martin usually pictured himself winning races when he practiced in the pool. He’d conjure up imaginary swimmers trailing far behind him while he swam. Some days he’d hear a commentator calling the race in his head. But that was only if he was swimming in the imaginary Olympics.

In Missouri, Martin pictured himself winning the overall competition at an upcoming regional meet in Indianapolis. That was one of his favorite meets.

When he returned to the Longhorns after his pool time, there were no labored breaths. No mention of the thousands of yards he just swam. It was time for baseball now.

“No one would have ever known he ever (swam),” said Lombardi, the Longhorns head coach and former head football coach at Cedar Rapids Washington. “He’d just go into the next game and get two hits, help us move on to the next round of the tournament. That’s Oliver. I’ve never ever heard Oliver toot his own horn.”

The 12-year-old’s single-minded determination was “something different” to Lombardi. But it’s all Martin knew.

When he was 6, he asked his parents for a pull-up bar. Lisa Martin remembers watching Oliver wake up and work out on that bar every morning.

Now, Martin trains with former Iowa receivers Kevonte Martin-Manley and McNutt on his own time. He works with former Iowa runner Ethan Holmes to refine his sprint during the summer. He does one or two extra workouts per day on his own, whether he’s in football, swimming or baseball season.

“I’m not necessarily obsessed with working out,” Martin said. “I just want to be the best at what I do. So I’ll do that.”

May 14: Spring of junior year

Martin grabbed a blanket and his favorite pillow and headed out the door with his dad.

It was the morning of The Nike Opening regionals in Chicago — a combine for the best talents in the Midwest. The best of the best went on to The Opening later in Oregon. His dad drove to Chicago, while Oliver slept.

Jeff Martin’s thoughts were his only companion for the four-hour trip. He thought of all they had done to help Martin get recruited. Oliver caught 73 passes for 1,187 yards as a junior and his athletic testing scores were off the charts. Jeff’s son had offers from Central Michigan, Northern Iowa, Western Michigan and Eastern Michigan, but none were major Division I programs.

Were they doing enough? Martin’s baseball schedule made it so hard. They’d often have to drive all night after a tournament to get their son to what they thought were the best camps.

Martin’s Hudl video had been online a while. Sauser remembers telling Jeff that Oliver’s tape was as good as any he’d seen and that recruiting was all about getting in the big summertime camps.

That included The Nike Opening regionals.

There, Martin won the wide receiver MVP. He was invited to The Nike Opening finals in Beaverton, Ore., that July. It featured about 150 football players, many of them ranking among the nation's best in the 2017 class.

“He was eating up high-profile defensive backs and catching everything,” 247Sports recruiting insider Steve Wilting said at the time. “He quickly gained the respect of all his peers there. Quite frankly, when he got off that plane in Oregon, I bet if you polled the other 165 players that were there, they wouldn’t have known who Oliver Martin was. When they left, they knew who he was and knew he stacked up.”

Stanford superstar Christian McCaffrey, who was a camp counselor there, called Martin “the best receiver here by far,” 247Sports' Barton Simmons wrote.

Martin picked up offers from Wisconsin, Michigan State and Minnesota after Chicago. Michigan offered him during The Nike Opening finals. The rest of his Power 5 offers came in buckets in a two-week stretch after his performance in Oregon.

Iowa, BYU, Indiana, Oregon, Notre Dame, Illinois, Vanderbilt, Michigan, Wisconsin, Michigan State and Minnesota all wanted him now. Badly. Martin surged in the recruiting rankings as well. He is now 247Sports' No. 68 player in the entire country and the best prospect in Iowa.

“What people don’t understand from Texas or Georgia or Florida or Michigan is it’s twice as hard to do that —  maybe three times as hard to do that — sitting in Iowa,” Jeff Martin said. “Where you don't have people that are looking for players. You have to catch their attention.”

“That’s the fascination of it,” Lisa Martin added. “He says, ‘Why do people care so much what’s going on in my life?’ It’s fascinating. He’s a kid from Iowa that’s got attention from these amazing schools and that doesn't happen all the time.”

College coaches would call Martin and text him every day for that two-week stretch after Beaverton. He tried his best to respond, but he’d forget, he said.

Matt Lubick, Oregon’s offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach, invited him to come to Eugene, Ore., for a workout via a Twitter direct message. Michigan State’s Mark Dantonio took to Twitter himself to send Martin a message.

Now that’s when he knew his life had changed.

“He’s always on the run and he’s got a million things going on,” West quarterback Evan Flitz said.

Earlier this fall, Martin was one of 100 high school student-athletes to get invited to the U.S. Army All-American Bowl — just as his mother imagined years earlier. But before he knew about it, representatives approached Hartwig. They asked how Martin would like to receive his jersey.

Normally there’s some sort of event. A celebration. A dreaded school assembly.

But Hartwig’s known Martin for four years. Hartwig asked for a small-scale ceremony — before school at 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 6, with only friends and family officially invited.

“He was relieved,” Hartwig chuckled.

The big decision ahead

Bleacher Report offered to produce a commitment video for Martin when he decides which college he wants to attend.

“I’m not so sure that’s my style," he said.

Maybe a simple tweet, he said. Maybe something else.

“He’ll probably relax and go take a nap,” Jeff Martin said.

“Have a party,” Lisa Martin chuckled, looking over at her son.

Nah, Martin said. Not that, either.

If he has it his way, Martin said he’ll go to a friend’s house. Something he could rarely do with endless college visits this summer and fall.

He’ll go to Nate Disterhoft’s. Or perhaps Alex Anderson’s. Martin said they both have awesome houses. But Anderson has the better pool, and Martin mentioned he'll want to swim, even though air will likely be frigid by the time he commits.

He’ll eat. A lot. His friend Evan Hermiston is a grill master. Martin said maybe Hermiston can cook up some burgers for the guys.

Then he’ll relax — truly relax — for the first time since The Nike Opening altered his whole world last summer. It’s been a world Martin fully appreciates, but definitely doesn’t love. A world his personality isn’t suited for, really.

Eventually, he’ll head home from Anderson’s house. He said he’ll probably still have his cousin’s loaner Mercedes and it will still stink, even then.

And the radio situation — that probably won’t be fixed either, Martin said. So he might finally turn his phone on. It will have been off for a while after he announces his decision. He might find a song to play and put his phone in a cup, with the speaker facing down to amplify the music.

The song won’t be very good. Texts and calls will interrupt it. Everyone will have an opinion to share. Reporters will want quotes. Fans will want explanations.

Martin might crack his half-smile as this happens. He’ll know he needs to answer the calls and texts eventually. But for now, he’ll just be driving.

And for once in a long time, Martin won't have a care in the world.

Matthew Bain covers preps, recruiting and the Hawkeyes for the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Des Moines Register and HawkCentral. Contact him at mbain@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewBain_.