From my weekly article at Worldmag.com:
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| photo credit: postaletrice via photopin cc |
Finding the sad and ugly in sports is easy these days. Such stories tend to dominate the headlines: tales of Ryan Braun’s suspension from baseball for cheating and the lies he uttered about it, the ongoing saga of Aaron Hernandez’s murder trial, and news that two different executives from the Denver Broncos were recently suspended for DUIs. We could find a least a dozen other incidents to suck all of the enjoyment out of sports, but emphasizing such stories is to miss so many other tales of good and hope.
Among the most amazing of those is the story of Dartanyon Crockett and Leroy Sutton, one a blind champion high school wrestler and the other a legless champion weight lifter. Both young men were functionally homeless in inner city Cleveland but were bound together by irrepressible hope.
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Then there is Shariff Floyd, who was one of the best defensive tackles in college football last year and was selected in the first round of the NFL Draft by the Minnesota Vikings. But Floyd’s background isn’t one of the pampered athlete jetting from elite football camp to elite football camp.
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