LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – I learned a valuable lesson from my dad (and my mom) back in 2006. My mom, Jackie, was a Louisville football season-ticket holder. My dad, Byron, was a longtime columnist at The Courier-Journal.
The whole football season, he’d kept asking me if I had seen this young man in a wheelchair in Louisville’s marching band. My mom had seen him at games and told us both about him. I think she even called me at halftime, or after a game once, to tell me about him.
But, you know, I was busy with bigger stories. I can’t remember now what they were, but Louisville was climbing in the national polls, was in the Top 5, and I had Important Football Business to write about. I didn’t have time to write about some kid in the band.
So my dad wrote a column about Patrick Henry Hughes, who was born with a genetic disorder that left him without sight, or limbs that would straighten. His father, Patrick John Hughes, pushed him in the marching band formations.
It was a nice column. A week later, Rick Reilly, then columnist from Sports Illustrated, called to tell him so, and to ask where he might get in touch with Hughes. From there, Patrick’s story spread around the nation, Oprah Winfrey, a spot on Extreme Home Makeovers. So many places, I lost count.
The lesson: The Big Story is sometimes not what I think it is. It’s not the one that gets you out onto the front page or the one that leads the newscasts. It doesn’t necessarily earn you a ton of “clicks” or pageviews.
But these are the stories we remember, because they feed a need deeper than a win or a loss. As Christmas rolls around again, I want to quickly remember a few from the past year that might’ve slipped under the radar.
There’s the story of Taqwa Pinero. When he played basketball at Louisville, his name was Taquan Dean.
He was one of the first players to commit to Rick Pitino, and was always ready in his time here with a quick smile and, usually, a good quote.
But inside, he was hurting. We didn’t know the darkness he played through. The deep need that drove him in basketball and in life. He saw his mother take her own life. A grandmother he moved in with killed herself. His father was in prison.
It's a lot to carry around. He carries those scars still. But he also shares them with players today, wherever he finds them, spreading a message of hope, and of the importance of tending to your mental health.
There was Nadia Nadim of Racing Louisville, one of the most inspiring athletes in the world. Her story should be well known to fans around here, even though she has moved on from the team. Her father murdered by the Taliban, her mother smuggled her and her sisters out of the country. They wind up at a refugee camp in Denmark, next to a soccer field. She fell in love with the game, and rose to play for some of the world’s top teams, and was captain of the Denmark national team. She also earned a medical degree and became a licensed physician.
She suffered a knee injury last season that required a long rehabilitation. During that period away, she did TV commentary for the World Cup, and during that time, while doing a broadcast, she learned that her hero of a mother had been killed when she was struck by a car crossing the street.
From all that, Nadim came back. On a warm night in July she sprinted onto the Lynn Family Stadium pitch to a great ovation.
Here's the inspiring part. (What? Her return wasn’t inspiring enough? Finishing medical school not quite do it?)
Nadim hadn’t been back on the pitch for more than 20 minutes when a teammate took a shot to the head. In the interval before trainers arrived, with her teammate on the ground, Nadim quickly went from player to physician, speaking calmly, assessing what had happened, until medical staff arrived soon after.
But that moment, with Nadim kneeling over her teammate, has stuck with me.
In this time of Christmas celebration, we celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who is hailed by Christians as the light of the world. Nadim and Pinero come from different faith traditions. But they carry that light. We recognize it when we see it.
I’m grateful for the recovery of Perris Jones, a Virginia football player who was briefly paralyzed on the field after a hit during a game against the University of Louisville. In that moment, the support staff became the stars. Trainers were sprinting to him before the play was even over. Medical staff moved quickly to immobilize him.
At U of L Health Medical Center, he underwent spine surgery. And weeks later, he walked out under his own power with his own inspiring message, not forgetting to offer hope to others going through their own rehabilitation.
You, no doubt, have your own stories to remember. The games do count. They are important.
But sometimes the big story isn’t always the big story. I wonder what the headlines would’ve been in Bethlehem that day had they had newspapers. It certainly wouldn’t have been the birth that the world pauses to celebrate today.
We would all do well to remember.
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