THERE’S a sign with the word “Winner” on a wall inside the Jets’ locker room in the bowels of Giants Stadium.
On Sundays, as Curtis Martin would head out toward the stadium tunnel, he would slap that sign for good luck.
Martin hasn’t carried a football since last Dec. 4 in New England, where his Hall of Fame career began in 1995. Yet he still joins his teammates in the pregame locker room before home games and still slaps that sign on the way out.
But instead of trotting through the tunnel onto the field, Martin, dressed in street clothes, steps onto an elevator and watches from a luxury box.
He’d probably rather be in a jail cell than watching his teammates play without him.
“He wishes he was still out there with us,” Jets’ running back Kevan Barlow said this week. “He has a lot of pride and doesn’t want to go out the way he did.” Barlow should be the last man in the Jets’ locker room who wants to see Martin return to the field.
He is, after all, a competing running back.
Barlow, though, is a number of other things to Martin, the NFL’s fourth-leading all-time rusher.
He’s a huge fan of Martin, having grown up one neighborhood from Martin in Pittsburgh, idolized him and followed his path to the NFL, through the University of Pittsburgh and then the NFL draft.
Barlow, six years younger than Martin, revealed that he calls Martin after every game seeking feedback.
“I call him to ask what he saw or if I could do something else,” Barlow said. “I try to absorb as much as I can from him. I try to ask as much as I can. Fourth all-time leading rusher?
Yeah, I try to listen to the man.
“I emulated Curt coming up. That was, like, my hero.” Now that Martin is eligible to practice and come off the physically unable to perform list, Barlow wants to be able to get that feedback much more immediately, like on the sideline during games.
Whether that’ll ever happen is, sadly, very much in question.
The fact that the Jets said Monday that the earliest Martin will practice is after the Oct. 29 game in Cleveland has to make you wonder what another two-plus weeks will do for him.
If his ailing right knee is not ready now, will it ever be ready again?
The Jets have until Nov. 8 to decide whether to allow Martin to practice or to place him on injured reserve, officially ending his season and probably his career.
Until the team makes a final decision, Martin – 10 months removed from the supposedly successful arthroscopic surgery on his right knee, remains a mystery – even to his teammates.
“Curt is the sneakiest guy I know,” Barlow said. “I don’t see him one minute and then we’ll be in here, ready to go to a team meeting, and he’ll just come in, right before, like 8:29. He’s just as elusive on the field as off the field. You don’t hear anything out of Curt but two peeps, except when he’s trying to help you out as far as football.” Here’s hoping Martin is helping the Jets out on the field in uniform soon and that we have not seen the last of the great No. 28.