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This past Wednesday, 17-year-old Indonesian kid Martunis was unveiled by Portuguese club Sporting Lisbon. Although teams signing talented teenagers as future prospects is not anything new, the story behind his signing is something truly extraordinary.
He was found as an eight-year-old boy, stranded on a beach, an entire 21 days after the coast of Aceh in Indonesia was hit by a giant tsunami in December 2004. That tsunami caused 230,000 deaths in 14 countries in and around the Indian Ocean.
The boy Martunis was in Aceh and suffered due to the tsunami, as his mother and two sisters both were killed. He himself got swept away but survived somehow, subsisting on pot noodles, which had also been swept out.
After 3 weeks, he was found and then spoke to a Sky News journalist. Apart from his incredible survival story, he also made the news because he was wearing a Portuguese No. jersey, which was Manuel Rui Costa’s number.
When he spoke to Kyodo News, Martunis said, “I was not afraid at all at that time because I still wanted to be alive to meet my family and to be a football player.”
Cristiano Ronaldo took personal interest in Martunis’ career
The entire ordeal suffered by the young Martunis appealed to a lot of people in Portugal, including then Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo then bore all the expenses for the house where Martunis grew up so that he could live in proper conditions.
The young Indonesian also met his hero Ronaldo on a couple of occasions, once with his Portuguese teammates in 2005, when he insisted that he wanted to play for the Portugal national team, and on another occasion in 2013, when the Real Madrid talisman wanted to meet him to see how he was progressing.
Martunis will now be a part of Sporting Lisbon’s U-19 team, and will be given a chance to thrive and study in a conducive environment. Interestingly, Sporting is the same team where his mentor and idol Ronaldo first broke through as a young talent.
