Soccer coach wakes up after month-long coma with no arms and one leg after doctors mistake his symptoms
Thomas Bamford
Featured Image Credit: Scott Martin
Scott Martin was sitting in his car in the garage when the thought first crossed his mind.
He'd just driven home from the courthouse having lost a two-week, $10-million medical malpractice trial against the doctor who had misdiagnosed him years earlier.
He had no job, no income, and no clear path forward.
A man who had spent his entire adult life defined by sport, by ambition, by forward motion, reduced, in his own words, to having hit "the brick wall of depression."
Advert
"I pulled into the garage, and it occurred to me that there are a lot of people who wouldn't have been surprised if I didn't turn the car off," Martin tells UNILAD of that moment in 1993.
"Or if I'd gone out and bought a pistol."
He did neither. What follows is the story of how he got there, and how he found his way back from the brink.
In the summer of 1993, Scott Martin was exactly where he wanted to be. A Wisconsin-born coach with a year of college-level experience already under his belt, he had been handpicked to take a group of top college players to Europe, and Nike had invited him to speak at a major Midwest scouting camp outside Chicago, the kind of event that put you in rooms with national team players and opened doors that stayed shut for most people.
"Everything was moving in a positive direction," he says. It was at that camp where he first started to feel wrong. He had to pull himself out of a coaches' match, something that had never happened before, and spent the night either vomiting or shaking with chills in his dorm room. He drove to his mother's house the next morning. She took one look at him and sent him straight to the emergency room. He has no memory of anything after his stepfather began reversing the car out of the driveway.
He was in a coma for a month.
When he came round, he was told he had contracted necrotizing fasciitis, flesh-eating disease, likely through a small skin abrasion on his back. He thinks he got it while at a gym. The emergency room had sent him home with a diagnosis of heat exhaustion. By the time a doctor from the ICU happened to see him on his second visit, his organs were beginning to shut down.
The only way to save his life was amputation. He woke up without hands, and with part of both feet missing.
"The first thing I thought was: I'm done," he says. "Playing was my art. That was my big love. And it was gone."
What followed was four years of what Martin now recognises as wilful denial. He threw himself back into coaching almost immediately, something he describes, with the clarity of hindsight, as a serious mistake. "I dove into my work because that was my way of avoiding the disability and avoiding how to deal with all of this," he says.
"Before, I was immersed in it, now I was drowning in it. Because I couldn't do a cold call, go to a tournament, introduce myself to players. Say, 'Hey, love your game, here's my card.' I didn't feel I could."
Recruiting dried up. Results dropped. And although the program's decline wasn't solely his fault, he felt every defeat personally.
"I was faking it so much," he says. "In public I smiled. In private I toiled."
He resigned. Two months later came the trial. Two weeks after that, the garage.
"I said to myself: I need to break myself down in order to build myself back up," he says. "I got rid of all my awards, trophies, everything. Pitched it. Found a place out in Washington State, on the other side of the country, and started fresh, on food stamps, working for free. Just to cleanse myself. Get back to where I maybe was in college. And rebuild."
The rebuild took a direction nobody, least of all Martin, could have predicted.
Settled in Washington, coaching at Gonzaga University on what he understood to be a path toward the head coach position, he watched a news segment one night about a couple who had adopted two children from Haiti. Within minutes he was researching adoption. The next morning he called the athletic director to withdraw his name from consideration.
"I'm glad he didn't pick up," Martin laughs, "because he probably would have thought I was crazy."
Over the following years, Martin adopted five children, two from Romania, three from Ethiopia. He left soccer almost entirely for two decades.
"I went from coaching soccer to being the parent of a basketball team of five kids," he says. "That's what I did for 20 years."
It wasn't a clean break from the game psychologically, he kept studying, kept watching, kept thinking about tactics, following Cruyff's influence through to Guardiola.
But outwardly, the career was on pause.
When he eventually returned to coaching at a club in Washington, he was handed the under-13s, the third-choice team, passed over by two other coaches. He was told, flat out, to keep the parents happy.
"No respect," he says simply. He took the team unbeaten to a championship.
Martin is now working with an under-19 group, coaching a fluid, position-free system built on the total soccer principles he's studied since the days of Cruyff and the Dutch national team, a high-tempo attacking structure with three number nines operating through midfield and attack, built on freedom and trust.
"I'm probably having the most fun I've had coaching, if not ever, then in a very long time," he says. "I connect with these kids. They work hard. Their biggest problem is themselves, they lack confidence.
"But I think we've finally turned the corner on them trusting that I'm giving them freedom."
For others who have faced serious trauma, illness, sudden loss of identity, the kind of rupture that makes the world unrecognizable, Martin's advice is straightforward, drawn from the years he wasted by not following it.
"Cut yourself some slack," he says. "Give yourself some time. Allow yourself to absorb. The male ego gets in the way, it got in mine. Just be honest about it and look at it for what it is: one hell of a struggle."
His memoir is threaded through with a Spotify playlist of 15 or 16 songs designed to be listened to in real time as you read. Tom Petty, B.B. King, the Rolling Stones. The kind of music you put on when you've got something to prove.
One track in particular tells you everything you need to know about Scott Martin. It's called "I Won't Back Down” by Tom Petty.
"I tried it," he says, "and it's really cool. Something I've never seen before." He's still coaching. Still thinking about the game. Still, by his own account, not quite done.
Scott Martin's book Play from the Heart is available now on Amazon.