He is the longshot that kept coming in, the walk-on who became team captain, the student with bad test scores who made his university proud, the grunt who fetched Chardonnay now running his own department.
There are bigger comeback stories than Martin Jarmond, if only because he's been considered a bit undersized going back to his days as a scrappy point guard.
He has sprouted into one of the nation's fastest-rising athletic directors, his unlikely journey that started in a drab North Carolina town having brought him to the glitz of UCLA only a few months after he turned 40.
"A lot of people say, 'Can you believe it, from Fayetteville to Westwood?' " said Jerry Wainwright, Jarmond's coach at North Carolina Wilmington. "Yeah, I absolutely believe it. I honestly thought at some point if it wasn't athletics, he would be a relevant politician. He just had that way of bringing people together."
On the hardwood he was the player everybody gravitated toward, the one who always had the answers, whether it was a teammate seeking assurance or a coach wanting to gauge practice fatigue.
Hey, M.J., are we tired now? What do you think? Should we keep going?
It didn't matter that Jarmond wasn't always the best player because he was always the best at knowing what to do and how to make it happen.
People followed him everywhere. One third-grade friend received permission from the school to ride the bus home with him to shoot baskets and hang out. In college he was known as the Mayor because it seemed as if everybody in town knew him.
His charisma gave him outsized value once he went into fundraising for college athletic departments. He could build relationships and the trust needed to raise vast amounts of money.
It was never as easy as Jarmond made it appear. He worked tirelessly, remembering his mother driving an hour to work each way and bringing in the week's worth of groceries in one trip from the car no matter how many plastic bags she had to clutch in each hand.
The other day he went running and wanted to go four miles. About 1{ miles in, already dragging, he thought about walking the rest of the way. He pushed on, even as the thought came back again and again.
"I just said, you know what, I'm going to see this through," Jarmond said. "I started this, I'm going to finish this, and I finished and I was so proud."
A sense of resolve has carried him back to the starting line as perhaps the most improbable new athletic director in UCLA history and the first without any ties to the university. Sometimes even Jarmond has trouble believing his own story arc.
"I've been in situations and afforded opportunities that don't make sense and I don't understand," Jarmond said, "so I feel like it's a higher purpose and a higher calling for me."
