Given his stats as a center at Loyola of Chicago (18.2 points per game over three years), Martin should have been a low first-round pick at best. But what he did on consecutive nights in January, 1972 changed that. Loyola, which would finish with an 8-14 record for 1971-72, met No. 1-ranked UCLA and No. 2 Marquette in Chicago. Although Loyola lost both games, Martin outrebounded and out-scored UCLA’s Bill Walton (18-16 and 19-18) and Marquette’s Jim Chones (22-14 and 32-23). The scouts were smitten, but none more than Portland’s Stu Inman, who wanted a "franchise" player to turn around the fortunes of his 2-year-old team.
"After 10 minutes, we knew he wasn’t the player they thought he was," says Jack McCloskey, then the Blazer coach and now the Detroit Pistons’ general manager. "I was always rushing," says Martin, who’d signed a six-year, $1.2 million guaranteed contract. "I wanted to do everything and do it perfectly." He ended up doing neither, averaging only 4.4 points and 4.7 rebounds per game as a rookie and losing the starting job to Lloyd Neal, a first-year man from Tennessee State who’d been picked in the third round. What was worse, North Carolina’s Bob McAdoo, who had left college after his junior year and was chosen second in the ‘72 draft by Buffalo, led the league in scoring from 1973 through 1976, was the MVP in ‘75 and is still a productive player with the Lakers.
"They would call me LaRue Who? and say I was the worst pick in history," Martin says. "It wasn’t fair. I was 22 at the time, and it hurt me. It hurts me still."
