Zack Martin has seen the 86-hour television series “The Sopranos” five times and the 105-hour “Sons of Anarchy” about as many. Notre Dame teammates teased him for coming to classes with his ankles taped. By visiting the athletic trainer’s office hours before practice, he avoided a player line and felt a greater sense of order.
Prior to every Sunday Cowboys game, he takes an Epsom salt bath on Wednesdays and orders a No. 9 on wheat, Mike’s Way, for lunch at Jersey Mike’s Subs on Fridays. In 2014, when his future wife visited him in Dallas during his rookie year, she suggested they have lunch, envisioning a nice local spot. She was more than welcome, he told her, to meet at Jersey Mike’s.
Routine and repetition.
“If I enjoy something and I really like it,” Martin said, “I go all-in.”
Said his younger brother Nick Martin, a center for the Houston Texans: “He’s a creature of habit.”
Within the highly visible Cowboys franchise, Zack Martin is the greatest player about whom the public knows the least. There is little flash or pizzazz here. He plays the unglamorous right guard position and, while outgoing, is a private person, keeping a tight circle of friends and family members.
Those in the trusted circle consider themselves fortunate. They know a man whose consistency and reliability on the field are only matched by his consistency and reliability off it.
Martin is one of six NFL players since 1970 who, through their first six seasons, were named a Pro Bowler six times and a first-team All-Pro selection at least four. Lawrence Taylor, Emmitt Smith, Barry Sanders, Patrick Willis and Aaron Donald are the others. On Sunday, he will start at AT&T Stadium for the seventh consecutive Cowboys home opener.
Lately, there’s something different about Martin.
This creature of habit, this football fiend who cannot delay a morning workout, who has seen the movie “The Town” more than 100 times, who hung posters of actor John Wayne in his bedroom wall and named his dog “The Duke,” is increasingly willing to adjust his regimented, ritualistic life.
It took an extraordinary reason.
All-in on football
Decades ago, Keith Martin chose football.
He did not pressure his sons to do the same.
He played defensive tackle at Kentucky where he met his wife Pam, a swimmer who became a student athletic trainer. Their friendship formed over conversations and silly trivia games in the athletic trainer room while Keith’s ankle was taped. That blossomed into a first date on a racquetball court. Be it bike rides, card games or occasional staircase races, the relationship included a good-natured competitive streak that trickled down to three sons, each born about two years apart.
Zack, the middle child, was exposed to swimming, tennis, baseball, basketball, football and wrestling. Basketball emerged as a passion, but a stocky 6-foot-4 frame limited any tangible future on the court. In 2006, at Bishop Chatard High School in Indianapolis, Keith and Pam watched Zack gravitate to football during what they consider today their most enjoyable season to spectate as sports parents.
Zack, a sophomore two-way starter on varsity, played offensive tackle and defensive end. Older brother Josh, a senior, started at tight end and defensive end. Indiana Football Hall of Fame coach Vince Lorenzano lined up the brothers beside each other in his run-heavy offense, as the two disrupted the line of scrimmage on defense. At home, Keith helped Josh and Zack scout upcoming opponents’ tendencies on film. The nearly daily gatherings around the Martin dinner table were especially lively that fall en route to an Indiana state title.
In the end, two brothers embraced inside the RCA Dome.
“That year kind of changed football for me,” Zack said. “I knew it was the sport.”
A letter from Boston College marked the start of Zack’s football recruitment. He chose to accompany older teammates to a camp at Michigan. There, he stood out, and the recruiting interest intensified. Lorenzano, 61, regards Zack as the best player he coached in 34 years. He recalls a Michigan coach visiting the Catholic school and, apparently believing religion might sway Zack to Ann Arbor, fumbled with his pocket.
The coach “dropped a crucifix and holy cards,” Lorenzano said with a laugh.
Unlike most NFL athletes, Zack’s journey to the league doesn’t involve a brush with terrible adversity. He avoided major injury while starting 53 games at Notre Dame. Two devoted parents supported and prioritized their children’s experiences. They did not pressure them into specializing in a specific sport. He had influential, quality coaches from his father in the fifth and sixth grade to Lorenzano to then-Notre Dame offensive line coach Harry Hiestand to various Cowboys coaches and others in between.
Zack took something from each. Lorenzano, for example, preached finishing as one of his program’s main tenets. At Bishop Chatard, Zack finished one defender to the ground so hard during a game, the defender was knocked unconscious and loaded into an ambulance. In one practice drill, he dislocated a teammate’s hip.
Keith did not push his sons to play football.
But he did push them.
While working in finance at the NCAA’s headquarters for 29 years, he awoke early to work out. The boys could hear the weights clanging in the house. They noticed his example of work ethic. He also was in charge of starting up their day. Often, Keith told them there are two different types of people in this world: those who kick butt and those who get their butt kicked. What’s it going to be? He told them that anything worth doing is worth doing right. Life requires commitment and accountability. And choose your friends wisely. If they can’t walk into the Martin family’s living room and look Keith and Pam in the eye, that is a red flag.
What sport or hobby their sons pursued did not matter.
How they pursued it did.
The lake house
They might start up around 4 a.m., their out-of-tune bellows bouncing down the Lake Gage shoreline in Angola, Ind.
Deep into a bender, about 45 minutes from the Notre Dame campus, Zack Martin and his college teammates and roommates — tight end Tyler Eifert, linebacker Dan Fox, quarterback Tommy Rees, guard Chris Watt and, later, center Nick Martin — would gather around and sing from the Eifert family’s lake house: “He said, ‘I wanna see you again, but I’m stuck in colder weather. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Can I call you then?’ She said, ‘You’re ramblin’, man. You ain’t ever gonna change. You gotta gypsy soul to blame. And you were born for leavin’.’”
Neighbors, no doubt, were super thrilled with these regular Zac Brown Band morning renditions.
Noise disturbances aside, the lake house provided the close friends a safe haven, somewhere to escape from the college scene and enjoy each other’s company in relative solitude. They largely lounged and played games. In the summer of 2011, something else happened: Zack Martin began dating Tyler Eifert’s younger sister, Morgan.
Zack was entering his third year at Notre Dame. Morgan was an incoming freshman at Purdue. They took a boat ride, had a nice conversation and their first kiss. Neither considered it best to tell Tyler, now with the Jacksonville Jaguars, about the development until knowing whether a relationship was there to tell. But word traveled fast. Eifert’s relatives were houses down. That same weekend, Uncle Kevin unknowingly let it slip to Tyler that Morgan and Zack paired up.
Tyler, less than pleased, felt this complicated his friendship with Zack, particularly if things didn’t work out.
He and Zack discussed the situation in a grocery store parking lot. There wasn’t much otherwise to do
“You’re not going to beat him up,” Tyler said. “He’s freaking huge.”
In hindsight, Tyler thinks he may have been a bit passive aggressive about it all. Not long after, back at the house in South Bend, most of the roommates were ready to watch the newest episode of “Entourage” in the basement. Tyler was behind on the HBO show and wanted to watch something else. So he started to push buttons, both the remote’s and Zack’s. Tyler stood on the stairs nearby and turned off the television. Zack turned it back on. Tyler turned it off. Zack turned it on with a glare, warning him not to turn off the TV again.
Tyler turned it off and sprinted up two flights of stairs into Zack’s room.
Calmly, Zack stood. He slowly followed. He got to his own door and didn’t hesitate.
“I kicked the door down,” said a laughing Zack, whose foot ripped part of the frame. “It wasn’t locked. I had to pay for a new door. That didn’t work out for me.”
As brothers would, the two started wrestling. According to Tyler’s recollection, the future Pro Bowlers went tumbling down the stairs “like cartoon characters,” he said. Any awkwardness between the two faded because of the regard to which Tyler holds Zack and the nature of their friendship.
“If I could pick someone for her to date,” Tyler said, “he would be the guy.”
Zack and Morgan married on July 2, 2016. Early on July 3, the DJ played the final song. All the friends circled up and hollered a familiar tune: “He said, ‘I wanna see you again, but I’m stuck in colder weather. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Can I call you then?’ She said, ‘You’re ramblin’, man. You ain’t ever gonna change. You gotta gypsy soul to blame. And you were born for leavin’.’”
New chapter
She knows her husband. She knows how he operates: He fixates on football. For cryin’ out loud, the man brought exercise bands to their British Virgin Islands honeymoon and a boys trip in Tahoe, Calif.
In the summer of 2018, she learned it would no longer would be just them.
“When I found out I was pregnant,” Morgan said, “I was like, ‘Oh gosh. With Zack being so routine and so committed to football, how am I going to pivot him to we come first and football comes second?’ In reality, that’s just how it has to be. I mean, I’ve always come first to him before football. But football, to him, is side by side with me almost. And I’m fine with that because that’s why he is the football player he is.
“Now that we have a baby in the picture, it kind of has to turn completely for me. … Is he going to put his workouts before (us) if I need him? I didn’t know. He’d never been a dad. I’d never been a mom.”
March 7, 2019, is the day Charles “Charlie” Richard Martin was born.
It is the day Morgan had her answer.
Zack was the same man of routine but a new kind. He changed the first diaper in the hospital. At home, when Charlie awoke early in the morning, Zack was first out of bed, starting their son’s day. He gently removed Charlie from his bassinet, changing the diaper before bringing Charlie to her for nursing. If she was exhausted in the morning and needed him to watch Charlie for an hour, that was fine, Zack said.
Rest. The workout can wait.
Today, Charlie is old enough to walk. He runs to the door when Zack returns from work. They escape to the backyard and play minigolf together; Charlie received baby clubs as a gift from Uncle Tyler and his wife Rachel. This summer, when Zack worked out in the garage at the family’s offseason home north of Indianapolis, Charlie watched intently. Zack is in charge of bathtime and reads Charlie books in bed.
“He was all-in on us,” Morgan said.
Routine and repetition.
The couple are expecting their second child, a daughter, on Jan. 13.
“He’s one of a kind. I don’t know why I’m getting emotional,” Morgan said, her voice starting to crack. She paused. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what else to say.
“I’m just glad he’s mine.”
