By Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
Martin Newton is named after his father, Charles Martin Newton. You just wouldn’t know it.
“For whatever reason, they called me Martin when I was a little kid,” the Samford University athletics director said. “That’s my middle name.”
And not the name he would have preferred.
“I would have much rather been Charlie or Charles than Martin,” he acknowledged. “In fact, I’ve got a son named Charles and a grandson named Charlie. I don’t know why they did that. I got on him and my mom both about that a lot.”
Maybe Charles Martin Newton and his wife, Evelyn, were giving their son the gift of individuality. Maybe they wanted to spare him the weight of being the next C.M. Newton, the former Alabama men’s basketball coach whose career climbed well beyond the Capstone.
If the intent was to set their son on a different path, it didn’t work. The apple wound up landing very near the tree as Martin Newton followed his father into the family business of athletics.
C.M. Newton compiled a record of 509–375 in leading the men’s basketball programs at Transylvania University, Alabama and Vanderbilt. He was chairman of the NCAA Rules Committee from 1979 to 1985 and was the president of USA Basketball, a nonprofit organization and the governing body for basketball in the United States, from 1992 to 1996.
After working on the corporate end of athletics, Martin Newton came home to his college alma mater as the director of athletics. Coincidentally, his father had a stint as AD at his alma mater, Kentucky.
During the August meeting of the Homewood Chamber of Commerce, Newton talked about being on the Selection Committee for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, a role his father previously had filled. In those days, the younger Newton thought the task was easy.
Newton recalled questioning his father about the committee putting a particular team into the tournament.
“I thought I knew basketball,” he told his audience. But father knew best.
“He goes, ‘Did you watch games all season long?’”
“No, sir.”
“Did you look at the analytics?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you in the room?”
“No sir.”
“Then shut up.”
That gentle rebuke aside, Newton relished the counsel he received from his father, who passed away in June 2018.
“He and I spoke every day when he was alive and I never made a decision that I did and say, ‘What do you think about this?’” the son said. “I would make my own decision.
“Now that I don’t have him, I find myself often wondering, What would Dad say about this? We talked about NIL (name, image and likeness) today. What would his take be on NIL?” Newton said. “I still talk to him. It’s just not face to face.”
Coming Home
Like his father, Martin Newton played collegiate basketball. The elder laced them up at Kentucky and the younger at Samford. Like so many college players, he entertained visions of playing professionally.
But that dream was short-lived, fading away early in his freshman season.
“It took me about three games to realize, there ain’t no way,” he laughed. “These dudes are good, man. But yeah, absolutely. Like every kid, I thought I was gonna play in the league.”
The finance major would go on to take his love of basketball to jobs with Nike and Converse until the grind of travel became more than he could bear.
“I loved what I did with Nike and Converse and, quite frankly, just got tired of being on an airplane every week,” he said. “I didn’t really envision myself as an AD and I don’t know that I would have tried to have done it anywhere else but my alma mater.
“I just think this is a special place and, quite frankly, (it) was an opportunity for me to give back to a place that gave me a lot.”
Samford has former football star Jeremy Towns to thank for Newton finding a collegiate home on the Lakeshore Drive campus in Homewood.
“When I met Jeremy Towns on my interview, I was hooked,” Newton said of the former Bulldog defensive lineman who played for the NFL’s Buffalo Bills before becoming an emergency medicine resident physician at UAB Medicine. “I wasn’t going to come. I was just, ‘I’ll go interview, but that’s it.’
“When I met Jeremy Towns, it changed my whole perspective of this place,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to get back.”
And now as an adult, he has come back to lead the Bulldog athletic program to unprecedented success. Samford has garnered 69 sports championships on Newton’s watch.
Samford’s men’s and women’s programs have won the races for the Southern Conference’s all-sport trophies. In the 2022-23 school year, Samford set a SoCon record with 11 championships, the most in school history and the most in the conference.
Real Student-Athletes
But he is at least as proud of the academic successes of the student-athletes, saying that they live up to that label, which can be a misnomer in other places. For the second consecutive year, Samford had the highest graduation success rate in the SoCon, graduating student-athletes at a 97% to 98% rate.
“They are students first and foremost,” said Newton, who sees himself as a parent away from home to the student-athletes under his charge.
“They don’t get everything they want,” Newton explained. “We’ve got to make sure we hold them accountable. We’ve got to make sure that they’re doing the right things.
“When they don’t go to class, when they’re typical 18- to 22-year-olds, we’ve got to kick them in the butt a little bit,” he said. “That’s what my role is. Quite frankly, it’s to make sure that when they leave this place, they’ve had a great experience – not perfect, but a great experience – and that they want to come back and be a part of things in the future.”
