Dwork On Sports: Jonathan Martin Tweets Retirement Message
Welcome to the Dwork On Sports blog. This is a place where I'll cover all things related to South Florida sports, with a steady combination of facts and opinions while ultimately keeping a close eye on anything and everything related to our local teams.
The NFL career of Jonathan Martin will be remembered by many, but not for anything having to do with what he did on the football field. His name will always be an instant reminder of the Miami Dolphins bullying scandal.
After being traded away from the Dolphins, Martin had a brief stop in San Francisco and an even shorter one in Carolina, where he retired just before the beginning of training camp this year.
He injured his back less than a week before the start the camp and was told that it would require surgery if he wanted to play football again.
Now let's fast forward two weeks to Monday morning where Martin decided to tweet out some final thoughts on his pro football career.
A few minutes later, Martin posted another tweet that has since been deleted. It read: "But, in the end, football was just a job, albeit a fun and well-paying one. Being in a wheelchair at 50 isn't worth any amount of money".
I'm not sure why he would delete that tweet, unless he was concerned that people would criticize him for saying that playing pro football was "just a job", which it clearly isn't in the minds of most players and fans.
Martin's final tweet sent a message that didn't really require clarification, but here it is anyway.
Shocking that he doesn't look back on his time in Miami with fondness. Things happen when you are a sports team, professional or otherwise, and spend the majority of your time with a bunch of super-competitive athletic personalities.
Some people embrace the NFL locker room lifestyle, some just tolerate it, but he seems to be the only one that felt compelled to quit his team because of it. I don't think anything happened to Martin that didn't happen to thousands of NFL players before him over the past several decades.
It is truly unfortunate that it affected him in such a negative way, but if he'd been playing football for most of his life I'd be shocked to learn that he was never exposed to anything similar.
You can consider me happy that this will hopefully be the last we hear of Martin. Now if only we could say the same about Ted Wells…
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