Eloy Martinez, Millennium Hall of Fame

It was a Newport Harbor High football team not blessed with

enormous success in the win column, but who knows where Coach Al Irwin’s

squad would’ve been that year without halfback Eloy Martinez?

Before the Fullerton game in Week 5 of the 1953 season, a newspaper

reported that Newport Harbor was unveiling a “new secret weapon” in

Martinez, who scored all 19 points in the Sailors’ 19-12 victory over

Garden Grove the previous week on the Argonauts’ field, the team’s second

straight win.

The Tars wouldn’t win another game. In Week 8 they tied Orange, 12-12,

on Martinez’s two first-half touchdowns, and the “fleet-footed back of

the Tar Eleven,” as one publication described him, would later earn the

team’s Most Valuable Player and varsity captain’s trophy.

Martinez, who died of a heart attack at age 62 on July 22, 1997, was

Irwin’s best ballcarrier and leading scorer. An all-around athlete,

Martinez ran cross country and played shortstop in baseball. On June 4,

1954, Martinez won “the esteemed honor of being the Tar of the Year,” as

voted on by the coaches, the school newspaper said.

In cross country, Martinez was one of the top Junior Varsity runners,

sparking his team to the Sunset League title. In baseball, the school

paper reported that Martinez, “although not too consistent at the plate,

broke up several games with timely singles and saved many more with

spectacular plays from his shortstop position.”

In the football tie against Orange in the fall of ‘53, Martinez scored

on a long touchdown run, in which, according to a newspaper, he “started

around right end, but was trapped. Martinez immediately reversed the

field and skirted around left end, picking up blockers as he ran

laterally, and finally skirted into the end zone standing up for the

Tars’ initial TD of this game and as well as Sunset League competition.”

In the Tars’ first victory of the season, a 12-6 over San Bernardino,

Martinez was the team’s leading ground-gainer with 76 yards.

In a newspaper account of that game, “twice during the game the Tars’

offense was halted on San Berdoo’s 1-yard line, and twice Newport TDs

were called back for penalties. Newport made 12 first downs as San Berdoo

made but two.”

In Newport Harbor’s come-from-behind win over Garden Grove on Oct. 16,

1953, Martinez followed excellent blocking and went 70 yards untouched

for the touchdown. The Tars’ “line-plunge conversion attempt was

stopped,” the report said.

On one play, Martinez took a pitch from Newport quarterback Bob Reveia

and scored on a 10-yard touchdown run. “(Martinez) then ran across the

extra point for a 13-12 lead,” in the days before the two-point

conversion rule.

A 25-yard touchdown sprint by Martinez in the fourth quarter put the

game on ice against the Argonauts, who piled up 14 first downs (compared

to Harbor’s two) and led at halftime, 12-6, before Martinez’s “breakaways

ruined them after intermission.”

Martinez attended Orange Coast College, won a Spanish scholarship

worth $100, then was drafted and served in the military from 1957 through

1964.

From there, Martinez owned a concrete company with the family, Mesa

Cement Works, and later joined a union after his father retired.

Eloy Martinez was semiretired when he died, leaving behind a wife,

Julie, and two children, Valerie and David.

One of the Long Gray Line at Harbor, he joins the Daily Pilot’s Sports

Hall of Fame, celebrating the millennium.