A Way Out
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 5:06 pm
I've been (re) reading America's Game, an excellent book on the evolution of the NFL. It touches and enlightens on so many aspects of the game. One of the topics I found extra interesting was the correlation between a tough childhood and NFL success. That is not to say no rich guy ever made it big in football but the correlation is strong, real, and makes sense. Many players speak of football as "a way out" of the life they were born into.
I thought of the Redskins and which player I'd call their heart and soul recently ... the guy we've been able to count on week after week. I landed on London Fletcher. I gooled London Fletcher childhood and hit this:
LINK
Excerpt~
Fletcher's Stairway to Success
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
CLEVELAND
It is late in the afternoon in the mid-1980s and a young boy is racing across Superior Avenue. In his hand he carries a basketball and he flies over the curb, down Norwood Road toward the E.J. Kovacic Recreation Center, a building he and his friends call "the Rec." The trip from his home to the Rec is not long, just a few blocks, but once you cross Superior, everything changes. Here the houses are filled with white people. The boy and his friends are black. And there is a good chance that on this day -- like almost every day -- they will be chased simply for being in the wrong place.
But the boy is not afraid. Back home, there is trouble that makes anything that happens on these streets irrelevant. In a few months his sister will be raped and beaten, left to die on the railroad tracks. His mother, the foundation of his life, won't be able to handle this pain and soon she will start slipping out to meet the handful of men who linger on the corner, desperate for the drugs they keep tucked in their pockets.
I thought of the Redskins and which player I'd call their heart and soul recently ... the guy we've been able to count on week after week. I landed on London Fletcher. I gooled London Fletcher childhood and hit this:
LINK
Excerpt~
Fletcher's Stairway to Success
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
CLEVELAND
It is late in the afternoon in the mid-1980s and a young boy is racing across Superior Avenue. In his hand he carries a basketball and he flies over the curb, down Norwood Road toward the E.J. Kovacic Recreation Center, a building he and his friends call "the Rec." The trip from his home to the Rec is not long, just a few blocks, but once you cross Superior, everything changes. Here the houses are filled with white people. The boy and his friends are black. And there is a good chance that on this day -- like almost every day -- they will be chased simply for being in the wrong place.
But the boy is not afraid. Back home, there is trouble that makes anything that happens on these streets irrelevant. In a few months his sister will be raped and beaten, left to die on the railroad tracks. His mother, the foundation of his life, won't be able to handle this pain and soon she will start slipping out to meet the handful of men who linger on the corner, desperate for the drugs they keep tucked in their pockets.