Over the years, Syracuse basketball players have gone on to become FBI agents, school teachers, dentists, ministers, professional athletes and more.
And one of them is a janitor.
His name is Martin Headd. People call him Marty.
He rises in darkness every morning at 3, sets out for work against the whipping, snow-filled north wind and walks to the university. He crosses Euclid Avenue without breaking a stride. By 5 a.m., he punches in. He spends the next eight hours doing the work that most of America doesn't want to do.
"From the minute I get there, I'm cleaning," Marty said. "I'm pulling trash, I'm mopping floors, I'm cleaning bathrooms. I really like to work with my hands. I don't think I can have an office job where I talk on the phone, sit in front of a computer. ...I need to work."
As Marty does his job, he looks at the sea of student faces. They don't see him, though. All they see is a janitor. The cast-off working clothes on his back, the caked-on dirt on his battered New Balance sneakers.
They don't have a clue he's been laboring at this job for more than 14 years now. And before that, he was an Orangeman, part of Jim Boeheim's second-ever recruiting class. They don't know that he was an All-Big East conference selection his junior and senior years, that he scored nearly 1,200 points while playing at SU, and that he was an NBA ninth-round pick by the New York Knicks. They don't know that he arrived at SU as a freshman in 1977 and received his diploma in 2008.
They wouldn't understand why, despite all the accolades and the promise out of college, he believes he's lucky to be a janitor.
"This job has a lot of hidden rewards, I look forward to it every day," Marty said. "It keeps my upper body strong. My body's real good, I don't have a bad back, my feet are good, my hands are good…"
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"Nobody's ever worked harder," Boeheim said. "He never missed a day. If he was sick he played, if he was hurt he played.
"That's what Marty is."
Marty was born in Syracuse on January 10, 1959, and he came of age at a time when SU coach Roy Danforth was leading the (vertically challenged) 'Roy's Runts' through their gilded age.
By the time he graduated from Christian Brothers Academy, he had led his team to three consecutive city and sectional titles. He was a high school All-American, and he had basketball scholarships and letters of interests to well over 50 colleges.
"They say he was slow, but he had a quick release and probably one of the quickest first step I have ever saw," said Earl Belcher, a 1981 NBA fourth-round draft pick for the San Antonio Spurs and Marty's teammate at CBA. "He could get his shot off anytime he wanted to."
But none of this was remotely foreseeable in the beginning, back in the days he spent on the playgrounds of Wadsworth Park, on the streets of Syracuse, where he dreamed of playing basketball at SU.
That was every local kid's dream back then.
Weekends and summer days, Marty walked the dirt floor of Manley Field House, breathing the dusty air and sensing the magic others said he would never touch. Marty's grammar school coaches had told his father he would never even play high school basketball.
It took a long time for people to see that Marty was worth a second look. As a kid he was smallish, balding (he started losing his hair at 16) and heavy.
"A lot of people underestimated Marty," Belcher said. "He's always been deceiving."
Barely 6 feet tall, stoop-shouldered and slow, he was easily overlooked. So Marty did 5-mile roadwork and wind sprints two or three times a day, often around the Westcott Reservoir, to improve his endurance. He would dash into the playground of Onondaga Park well after midnight to squeeze in extra workouts on his footwork, knifing through imaginary opponents and shooting a ball, shaved smooth from use, at crooked, net-less rims and rotting wooden backboards.
"I used to shoot outside in the rain," Marty said. "Inside the gym, I used to switch the lights off and shoot in the dark."
That work ethic came from Marty's father.
In his father, Marty had found the fuel for his dreams, someone with an incomparable appetite for work and an affecting quality of meekness and humility.
In Marty, his father had found a mirror image of himself, someone who outworked the more talented.
"I remember him wearing weights on his ankles and dribbling from the Westside to Manley or (SU men's basketball assistant coach) Bernie (Fines)'s house, bicycling all over the city with a weight vest on his back to make himself stronger, doing defensive slides with bricks in his hands," said Gary Barnaba, CBA's athletic director from 1970 to 1985. "Just an unbelievable work ethic."
He was also, according to Hal Cohen, a former SU teammate, the best pure shooter in Syracuse basketball history - hands down.
By the time he completed his senior year at Syracuse in 1981, Marty had led SU to three NCAA Tournaments (including a Sweet 16 run during the 1978-79 season) and an NIT finals.
He had also amassed 1,159 points (and there was no 3-point line yet), while shooting 53.8 percent from the field. He'd earned a spot on the coveted Big East All-Tournament team and Big East All-Conference third team his junior year.
"I think I got more out of his abilities than anybody Boeheim ever had up there," Marty said, too matter-of-factly to be bragging.
When the chance presented itself in 1982 to play professionally in England for the Planters Peanuts of Leister, Marty accepted. The experience there proved to be pivotal. He was living alone in a foreign culture and had a great deal of time between games to think about his future.
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It is quite a hike from the house where he spends his nights to the campus where he spends his days. Marty likes to walk to and back from work. He hasn't driven a car in 14 years.
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