Pressure? Naaah.

This is the Vols' season of succession. Can new quarterback Tee Martin stand more pressure than anyone deserves?

by Brooks Clark

It's the springtime. A Knoxville civic happening. The dedication of the Alex Haley statue in Morningside Park. The muckety-mucks are doing their thing up front, but in a back corner of the crowd is a young man in a warm-up suit, 6'3" tall and obviously an athlete, who takes off his sunglasses and watches the ceremony with quiet respect, then heads back to campus. In a few months, he'll be playing in front of 106,000 people and on national TV, filling the shoes of the most celebrated college quarterback in recent history. But right now there are no swarming reporters. No TV cameras. No sound bites about what Alex Haley meant to him. No entourage. Just a 19-year-old young man taking time out from his sophomore spring to honor something important to him.

Each fall David Moon, the financial advisor and former UT lineman, gives a talk to UT's freshman athletes—men and women. It's the keep-your-nose-clean talk from one who's been there—about being away from home when you're 17 or 18 years old, juggling practices with classes, living in a very visible fishbowl, and not doing anything you don't want to read about in the papers. Two years ago, among that group of 70 or 80, Moon noticed a young man who handled himself in a way that was more mature than the others, and Moon also noted that everyone in the room was following his lead.

"When he laughed, everybody laughed," says Moon, "and he laughed at the appropriate times. When he was serious everybody got serious. I didn't know who he was, but I thought to myself, 'He should be a quarterback,' because he was a leader through and through. You could just see it: People do what he wants them to do."

As described in Jimmy Hyams' eye-opening News-Sentinel story, Tee Martin was raised in a violent area of Mobile, Ala. He's had 11 friends killed since he arrived at UT. "It's not really gangs," he told Hyams. "It's drugs and violence. People get killed for anything. I had friends get killed over women, drugs, money, dice games, card games." He got one phone call in his hotel room the night before last season's Georgia game.

"I can't even cry anymore, you know," he told the News-Sentinel. Said his roommate, Peyton Manning: "You could see it affected him. But he's a strong person. It's hard to get him down."

"It's good to see that in America we still produce young men who are good," says Curtis Horton, Martin's coach at Williamson High School. "We're an inner-city school. But Tee never let that deter him from what he wanted to do. And although he was the most recruited athlete in the history of this school, he's still humble. He comes back and he talks to everyone, and he talks to the kids and likes to motivate them to be productive citizens."

Tee Martin's uncle, Arthur Martin, made him love books and learning at an early age. "He wouldn't let me go out and play," says Tee. "He made me do my work." Arthur is a mechanical engineer for the Army Corps in Huntsville, currently on assignment rebuilding the Washington, D.C. public schools. Tee's mother, Marie Martin, is a practical nurse who worked with the mentally handicapped and disabled for 16 years, and recently returned to Bishop State (Ala.) Community College and earned her nursing degree. Marie moved 22 times in 18 years as Tee was growing up. Tee himself moved even more, bouncing among his mother, aunt, and great-grandmother, "whichever place that was the most stable at the time—someplace where I could find a good focus. Wherever I went I had to be the man of the house."

Coach Horton says the most remarkable example of Martin's leadership in high school came in his junior year, against a larger school, Baldwin County High. Tee was held to 70 yards passing in the first half, and the team was down 20-0. "I told the offensive line, 'Just give me 2 1/2 or 3 seconds,'" Martin recalls. He threw for 200 yards in the second half, and in the last minute, down 20-14, he single-handedly engineered a 78-yard drive, scoring the winning touchdown on a 38-yard run with 30 seconds to go. "There's no way we should have won that ballgame," says Horton, "but Tee made it happen."

Martin was recruited in the same class as Tim Couch. The UT coaches told Martin that Couch was their first choice. When Tee visited Auburn, he heard they had Couch's films and he asked to see them. "He was good," says Tee. Couch was poised in the pocket and always able to find the open man. When Couch chose Kentucky, Martin chose Tennessee, because he wanted to prove himself to the UT coaches, and he wanted to learn from Manning.

"Being his roommate last year," says Martin, "it was a great opportunity, getting the chance to watch a guy go through what he went through. And I learned a lot from him—mostly about being consistent, being a good leader, doing the right things on and off the field." Peyton's parting advice, delivered with a friendly smile in the locker room after the Orange Bowl was simple: "Enjoy!"

Martin has thrown exactly 16 passes over the past two seasons, completing 8, but he's prepared for his role. "I come into the huddle knowing I have guys I can depend on," he says. A decidedly different type of quarterback than Manning, Martin is a passer-runner. "I'm not trying to be Peyton," he says. "I'm trying to play my own style. I want to step into my role and be a leader."