Houston to guest host the Kevin Turner memorial golf tourney
Former Alabama fullback Martin Houston will be the guest host of the 23rd annual Kevin Turner Golf Tournament next Tuesday at the RTJ Golf Trail at Capitol Hill. (Courtesy UA Media Relations)
By TIM GAYLE
Martin Houston thinks back on his life as a motivational speaker and pastor and believes all those qualities came from the football field, where he was a star fullback at Cherokee County High and the University of Alabama.
“I tell people all the time, before I was a believer, I was a football player,” he said. “The things I learned as a football player is what made me the believer that I became. I would try to make every kid, if they could, participate in some type of team sports.”
And, to this day, he uses the lessons he learned on the football field to teach others.
“I could teach life’s lessons on football,” he said. “Every part of it has an analogy. Sometimes, you have to back up and punt. And when you do, if you don’t get caught up in the fact that you had to punt, you can actually work that to your advantage.”
Houston, the guest host for the 23rd annual Kevin Turner Golf Tournament next Tuesday at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail at Capitol Hill, converted the football lessons he learned under Gene Stallings at Alabama and developed them into a successful career as a professional speaker with his own Web site (www.martinhouston.org), as general manager of Alabama ONE Insurance, as daily host of the Martin Houston Show on Tide 100.9-FM in Tuscaloosa during the week days and lead pastor of Harvest Church in Coker on Sundays.
Houston remembers the day he arrived on campus at Alabama as the understudy to Turner, the Crimson Tide’s starting fullback.
“Kevin and I were the perfect fullback, there were just two of us,” Houston said, referring to Turner’s pass-catching ability and Houston’s hard-running style. “When I committed, Kevin was injured, Robert Stewart was a linebacker and Wayne Shaw was in a cast. Then, when I showed up on campus, they were all healthy and all at the fullback position.
“The upperclassmen are busy doing what they do and a lot of my time is on the scout team, but I had a chance that first summer to spend a little time with the varsity. Kevin was very beneficial, just willing to help and be a good teammate despite the fact we were competitive. I wish the world could learn something from the relationship Kevin and I developed over the four years. We were competitors and my goal was to beat him out every day and his goal was to keep me from beating him out, but we never once put our desire to beat the other one out ahead of what the team needed. We pushed each other to get better and supported each other. It got to a point where the coach didn’t even substitute us. We handled our own substitution and knew what we both brought to the table.
“He had a few skill sets better than mine, I had a few better than his and we would both knock your teeth loose when we blocked.”
Turner’s skill sets obviously included catching the ball, where he became one of the most heralded pass-catching fullbacks in this state’s history. Houston never did learn that trait from his mentor.
“My freshman season, I didn’t catch a single pass and I don’t know how people didn’t pick up on it, but I never even played in pass plays,” Houston said. “There was one pass play where they forgot to take me out, against LSU, and he (Gary Hollingsworth) looks at me, I’m wide open, and he throws it somewhere else.”
By 1992, he was a valuable blocker for Derrick Owens-Lassic and a valuable rusher in his own right (as the leading rusher in the Iron Bowl that year) that helped Alabama win a national championship. That led to a free-agent contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers and a short-lived career in the National Football League that ended with a dislocated kneecap and a return to Tuscaloosa for a job at Baumhower’s.
“Bob had told me go give (the NFL) a try and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll hold a job for you,” Houston said. “I came back, took a few weeks to rehab, and started working here for two and a half years before I started on some other things. I actually helped with the décor, marketing, promotions. It was a good first job.”
From there, he went to work with BellSouth in sales, then with Alfa and Farmer’s before landing his current job as general manager of Alabama ONE Insurance.
“I started an insurance agency for a credit union,” he said. “The credit union existed since 1951, but they didn’t have an insurance agency. My passion is leadership training. That’s how I started my relationship with Alabama ONE. I was actually working with them on a consulting basis with their leadership team. They had asked me to speak at a Christmas party and then they asked me to come back and speak to their leadership team and from that, they asked me to be on the board and the CEO had a vision for an insurance agency.”
Married at the age of 19, he discovered his knack for motivational speaking in church and at marriage conferences which led to his role as a pastor and as a motivational speaker with his own Web site.
“It has four pillars – encourage, educate, equip and empower,” he said. “If you look at all the craziness that is going on in our world right now, there are some people out there that are where they are because no one has ever told them they can do it. All they need is encouragement. Then there are others that want to do it, they just don’t have the education to do it. Then there are those that are encouraged and educated, they just don’t have the tools. The last one is there is a whole other sect of people out there that are ready to take on the world, they just don’t have the opportunity, so you have to empower them.
“You can take just about any circumstance or any situation and apply those principles, those pillars. And the fifth one I’ve added recently is ‘engage.’ We have a whole society of people that are simply disengaging and letting life happen. It doesn’t matter what you bring, they don’t care about anything.”
It doesn’t take but a few minutes with Martin Houston to realize the opinionated talk radio host doesn’t fit any stereotype. He drives an oversized four-wheel drive pickup truck, is a black pastor at an all-white church deep in the Tuscaloosa County woods and would make a pretty good presidential candidate if he ever decided to run.
“I grew up with a speech impediment, that’s what so funny about me being on radio,” he said. “Being on a sports show, you’ve had to figure out if you were good or not the last few months with no sports. But it’s so much fun because, to me, sports is so much about how to make life worth. Think about all the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the division in our country. You can go to Bryant-Denny Stadium on a Saturday and the guy that is the biggest racist in the world and a guy that is the biggest ‘Black Lives Matter’ supporter in the world, when Nagee Harris runs around the corner, they’re hugging and high-fiving. All of their differences are gone. It’s the unifying power of team.
“When you’re pulling for a team or working on a team, it’s about one goal – beat the enemy. Right now, we’re so confused on who the enemy is, we think it’s each other.”
That’s why Houston believes so much in sports. He took to heart all the lessons he learned from Turner when he first arrived on Alabama’s campus 32 years ago.
“Kevin’s entire goal was to play as much as he could,” Houston said. “My entire goal was to play as much as I could. But because of the way Kevin treated me, when Kevin (had graduated and) was no longer the guy and I was the starter, I did the same thing with Tarrant Lynch. I knew the more I helped him, the more likely I was going to get fewer plays because the better he got, the more he was going to play. And chances are he could have been better than I was, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. But we were never enemies because we had a bigger goal outside of our own agenda. That’s the beauty of sports.”
People wanting to sign up their team to participate in the golf tournament next Tuesday can contact Keith Cantrell at (334) 358-9622 or e-mail him at kcantrell@prattvilleymca.org.