Kid Athletes

by David Stabler

  Jackie agreed to help out. And that one decision ended up changing his life forever. Instead of taking out his anger on local shopkeepers and passing motorists, Jackie channeled all his energy into making a positive difference in his community. He not only helped build the youth center, he also volunteered as a Sunday school teacher at Reverend Downs’s church. During the week, he focused his attention away from gang activities and back to his studies and sports.

  With the support of Reverend Downs, Jackie was able to graduate from high school and then move on to Pasadena Junior College. While there, he broke records in four different sports: baseball, basketball, track, and football. On the same Rose Bowl field where the Pepper Street Gang used to chase rabbits, Jackie returned a kickoff 104 yards for a touchdown.

  Over the years, Jackie continued to rely on Reverend Downs for advice and inspiration. Sometimes, on Sunday mornings, after playing football on Saturday, Jackie would be tempted to sleep in. “But no matter how terrible I felt, I had to get up,” he said. “It was impossible to shirk duty when Karl Downs was involved.”

  After college, Jackie was drafted into the U.S. Army, where, once again, he encountered discrimination. On weekends, he would often visit with Reverend Downs to talk about his troubles. When Jackie left the army, Reverend Downs hired him to coach sports at the small Texas college where he was serving as president. While there, Jackie accepted an offer to play for the Kansas City Monarchs, a baseball team in the Negro Leagues. And so began his journey into the history books.

  On April 15, 1947, Jackie became the first African American to play in a Major League Baseball game. He again had to endure taunts and bullying—this time from white players who resented having to share the field with a black player. But he persevered and ended up being named rookie of the year. That fall, Reverend Downs traveled to New York to watch Jackie play in his first World Series.

  Jackie Robinson would play five more times in the World Series over his ten-year major league career. In 1962, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Historians have praised him for refusing to fight back in the face of racial discrimination. But Jackie did fight back, in his own way, by being the best person he could be, instead of following the bad example of his enemies. That was a lesson he had learned from his days as the tiny terror of the Pepper Street Gang.

  Even as a kid growing up in Long Beach, California, Billie Jean Moffitt knew she was going places.

  On the wall of her elementary school classroom hung a big map. During free periods, Billie Jean would walk over, pick a city, and point to it.

  Back then, those destinations seemed far out of reach. Billie Jean’s parents could not afford to take her to the cities she longed to visit. Her family did not have much extra money and was rarely able to travel beyond their hometown.

  No one would have guessed that Billie Jean would become one of the greatest tennis players in the world, or that she would indeed visit many of the places she’d marked on the map.

  When she was a kid, Billie Jean used to visit her father, a firefighter, and play at the firehouse.

  Fighting fires was an important job, but it didn’t pay a lot. Billie Jean’s dad wore the same two pairs of shoes for eight years so he could afford to buy things for her and her brother Randy. Her mother hosted Tupperware parties and worked as an “Avon lady” selling beauty products to bring in extra money. But no matter how hard her parents tried, they still had trouble making ends meet and paying all their bills.

  To make matters worse, the kids in Billie Jean’s elementary school all seemed to come from wealthy families. Many of her classmates owned horses, or they spent weekends golfing at country clubs. Some of the kids looked down on Billie Jean and her family. Billie Jean grew shy and withdrew from her classmates.

  One way Billie Jean learned to overcome her shyness was by playing sports. On the baseball diamond or the football field, it didn’t matter how much money you had. Everyone started out equal.

  Billie Jean’s parents encouraged her to play sports as much as possible. Every night after supper her father invited all the neighborhood kids over for a sixty-yard dash in front of their house. Although he couldn’t buy Billie Jean her own baseball bat, he carved one for her out of a piece of wood.

  Before long, Billie Jean was one of the best players on her block in football and basketball, too. One morning as the family was eating breakfast, Billie Jean asked her father what sport she should try next.

  “How about golf?” her father replied.

  Billie Jean shook her head. No way. Golf was too boring.

  “What about swimming?”

  Nope, Billie Jean decided. She wanted to do something she could be great at.

  “I know,” her father said. “Tennis!”

  Tennis. Hmmmm. Billie Jean had seen some of her classmates heading off to play tennis after school, but she didn’t know very much about the game.

  “You run a lot and you hit a ball,” her father said. “I think you’d like it.”

  Billie Jean agreed to give tennis a try. First, she signed up for free lessons at her neighborhood park. Next, she had to find a way to buy a racket. Even the cheapest ones cost more than she could afford. And you couldn’t just carve one out of an old tree branch like a baseball bat.

  Billie Jean started working odd jobs around the neighborhood to raise money for a racket. Eventually she saved up enough change—eight dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes collected in an old mason jar—and took it down to the sporting-goods store. There she found the racket of her dreams: a lavender-colored wooden model with matching nylon strings. It was love at first sight.

  And so was the game of tennis. After her very first lesson, when her mom came to pick her up, Billie Jean told her: “I’m going to be the number one tennis player in the whole world!”

  But first, Billie Jean would have to impress the most powerful man in youth tennis: Perry T. Jones, president of the Southern California Tennis Association.

  A demanding man, Jones required all players to live by his rules of neatness and proper behavior. In Jones’s world, boys wore shorts, girl wore dresses. He favored boys over girls and preferred rich kids most of all. If your family donated money to his tennis club, he would send you to play in the important tournaments.

  One day, as Billie Jean was getting ready to pose for a group photo with the other players, Jones pulled her aside and said:

  Billie Jean’s mother had sewn her daughter’s outfit by hand. When she found out that Billie Jean was out of the picture, she was furious.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom,” Billie Jean said with confidence. “Someday, he’ll be sorry.”

  Billie Jean continued to work hard and practice. By the time she was fourteen, she had won enough matches to qualify for the Girls’ Fifteen-and-Under Championship tournament in Ohio. It was her big chance to travel and see some of the places she had always dreamed of visiting. But first she needed to ask permission from Perry T. Jones.

  Jones insisted that Billie Jean win one more match before agreeing to let her go. She would have to defeat Kathy Chabot, a girl she had never beaten before.

  Billie Jean got up at 5:30 every morning, and she practiced harder than she had ever practiced before.

  On the day of the big match, Billie Jean was ready. She won the match.

  Her next obstacle was to pay for the trip. She asked Jones for help but he refused. Billie Jean then turned to a group of local tennis fans, the Long Beach Tennis Patrons, who raised $350 to cover her travel expenses. Surely now Perry T. Jones would let her go. But Jones wouldn’t bend so easily.

  It wouldn’t be “ladylike” for a girl to travel alone, he said, so Billie Jean’s mom would have to chaperone. The $350 wasn’t enough to buy two plane tickets, so she and her mom rode the train instead. The trip from Southern California to Ohio took three days. When she arrived at the tournament—either tired from traveling or just overwhelmed by her surroundings—Billie Jean didn’t play her best. She lost in the
quarterfinals.

  When the tournament was over, all the other girls headed off for Philadelphia to compete in yet another championship. But Billie Jean couldn’t go. It had taken everything she had just to get this far.

  Billie Jean had tears in her eyes as the car full of excited tennis players drove away to the airport. In her heart, she knew that a lot of the players were not as good as she was. When the girls had all gone, she turned to her mother with a look of determination.

  “This is never going to happen to me again,” she vowed. “I’m going next year even if I have to hitchhike.”

  Billie Jean made good on her pledge. She worked even harder and became so good that sponsors were willing to pay to send her to tournaments around the country.

  The very next year, Billie Jean made it to Philadelphia, competing in the Middle States Grass Court Championships. The year after that, she returned and won her first adult tournament title. In 1961, when she was just seventeen, the Long Beach Tennis Patrons helped raise money to send her to London to play in the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament: Wimbledon. Billie Jean won the women’s doubles title, the first of 39 Grand Slam championships that she would win during her 24-year career.

  If ever anyone was born to play professional football, it was Peyton Manning. His father, Archie Manning, was the starting quarterback for their hometown team, the New Orleans Saints. His older brother, Cooper, was a natural athlete who would grow up to be the star wide receiver on their high school team.

  Peyton dreamed of following in the footsteps of his father and big brother. Being an NFL quarterback was his goal. Football was his passion—he didn’t seem to care about much else. One time, when he was three, Peyton refused to play with a boy who didn’t share his love for the game.

  “He plays with trucks,” Peyton said disapprovingly. “I play football.”

  On Saturday afternoons in autumn, Archie Manning would take his sons with him to the Saints’ football practices. The boys hung out in the locker room with the players and took hot baths in the team whirlpool.

  On Sundays after the Saints’ game, the boys would invade the opposing team’s locker room to meet the players and ask about offensive strategy. Sometimes they’d pick up discarded athletic tape from the locker room floor and use it to make their own football. They’d go out on the Louisiana Superdome field and throw passes until their dad called them to go home.

  As much as Peyton loved the game, football didn’t always come easy. His brother Cooper seemed as if he was built to run and catch passes; Peyton was awkward by comparison. He was also terribly accident prone. One time, while riding in the car with his mom, he fell out the door and cut his head on the road. Another time, while lifting weights with his dad, he tripped and fell face first into a rack of barbells.

  But no matter what mishap befell him, and no matter how hurt he was, Peyton picked himself up and kept going. Courage was a trait that would help him throughout his NFL career, where tough decisions and bone-crushing tackles are part of the game.

  Another important quality a quarterback must have is the ability to handle pressure. Peyton didn’t learn that quality only on the football field. He learned it on stage in front of an audience of family, friends, and neighbors. He learned it beneath the hot spotlights, under the spell of the South American dance known as the tango.

  When Peyton started eighth grade, he had the choice of taking a computer class or a musical theater class. Determined to save most of his free time—and brainpower—for football, he chose the theater class. After all, he thought, how hard could it be?

  A week into the semester, he found out.

  “You have to be in the school play,” his teacher informed him. “It’s a requirement for the class.”

  Over the next few weeks, Peyton tried so hard to wriggle out of the production. But as the saying goes: the show must go on. In Peyton’s case, the show was called “The Boyfriend.” He was assigned the part of Miguel, a headstrong bullfighter who performs a show-stopping tango with Lola, played by his classmate Sabra Barnett. Not only would he have to dance, he would also have to dress like a Spanish bullfighter.

  Peyton’s costume consisted of a red ruffled tuxedo shirt, tight black pants with a yellow cummerbund tied around his waist, and high-top patent leather shoes. He was mortified.

  Even worse than his outfit, Peyton learned that the musical would be performed twice—once on Friday night, for the students, and again on Saturday night, for the families of the cast. Peyton would be forced to dance in front of his parents, his older brother Cooper, and his younger brother Eli. And there was nothing on earth that frightened him more than being on stage in front of his brothers!

  Peyton faced a difficult decision. He could try to get out of the play—maybe pretend to be sick or fake a sprained ankle on the day of the show. Or he could huddle up with his theater teacher, study the dance moves, and learn how to tango. Peyton knew the choice he had to make.

  On the night of the first performance, Peyton took the stage to raucous applause—and a little laughter—and proceeded to delight the crowd with a spirited performance as Miguel. He stomped, he snorted, he wiggled his fingers above his head like a bull’s horns. “I went full-speed on that tango,” he later said.

  The next night, he was back at it all over again, this time for his whole family. “If they’d had an eighth-grade highlight film,” said his mom, “Peyton’s tango would have made it.” In fact, someone in the audience did make a video recording of the show for posterity.

  But it was many years before Peyton would allow anyone outside his family to watch the video of his performance. “Don’t look for it,” he warned anyone hoping to see him dancing as Miguel the bullfighter. “It’s deep in the Manning vault, I can assure you.”

  And there it remained until one day the footage popped up on YouTube. No one is quite sure how it got there. Maybe one of Peyton’s brothers decided to have a little fun at his expense.

  By that time, he had already become an All-Pro NFL quarterback, famous for coming through in the clutch—at critical moments—as huge crowds screamed and cheered from the stands. A silly little video wasn’t going to bother him.

  At a press conference before his first Super Bowl in 2007, Peyton was asked if the upcoming game was the most pressure he had ever faced. Not even close, was his reply. Dancing the tango in front of family and friends was much tougher. “Now that’s pressure,” he said.

  The next day, Peyton went out and led his team, the Indianapolis Colts, to a victory over the Chicago Bears to win the world championship. “It was a wonderful team game,” he said afterward. “Everyone did their job.”

  He may have been talking about the Super Bowl, but Peyton could have said the same thing about his middle school musical.

  Today she’s known for her fearlessness on the racetrack, but there was a time when Danica Patrick was afraid of almost everything.

  She was afraid of bugs.

  She was afraid of the ocean.

  She was afraid of the dark.

  Like a lot of people, Danica was also scared of heights. She managed to conquer that fear with help from her younger sister Brooke. Together they used to climb into the high ceiling that overlooked the factory their parents owned. From there they would gaze down at their mom and dad working below. When they grew bored, the girls would retreat into their parents’ office and pretend to be secretaries.

  For a while, Danica thought that’s what she wanted to be when she grew up: a secretary. But then one day she found her real calling—and that job was maybe the scariest one of all.

  It happened when Danica was nine. She and Brooke were playing outside and saw one of her sister’s friends drive by in a go-kart—an open-wheel vehicle with a small engine built out of lawnmower parts.

  “Maybe that’s something I could do,” Danica thought as she watched Brooke’s friend motor away.

  Around that time, Danica’s parents were looking for a way for the family t
o spend time together. Danica and Brooke had a great idea: buy go-karts!

  That idea was fine with Danica’s parents—both T.J. and Beverly Patrick were racers. T.J. used to race snowmobiles for a living, and Beverly had worked as a snowmobile mechanic. Their first date had even been at a snowmobile race.

  When the Patricks found out their daughter also had the “need for speed,” they were thrilled. Danica’s dad arranged some bottles and cans in a circle to form a makeshift track in the parking lot of their factory. On her first lap around, Danica lost control of her brakes and spun out.

  Her kart flipped over and her jacket caught on fire after coming into contact with the hot muffler. Luckily, her dad was able to pull her clear of the wreck. Danica was bruised but otherwise unharmed. Most amazing of all—she wasn’t scared! In fact, her first thought was, “Can we fix the go-kart so I can do it again?”

  After that, Danica was hooked on racing. She loved steering around tight corners and barreling down straightaways. When she was eleven, she joined the World Karting Association, which sponsors races for young go-kart drivers. Danica’s father began taking her to races, which she often won against the all-boy competition.

  Being the only girl driver was not easy for Danica. A lot of the boys didn’t want to race against her because they were afraid of losing to a girl. Sometimes they’d tease Danica to get her riled up.

  But few of these comments bothered Danica. If anything, the taunts just made her more determined to beat the boys at their own game.

  Shortly after she started racing competitively, Danica earned her first win. She was lagging behind two other drivers when they crashed into each other and spun off the course. With quick thinking, Danica steered around the collision and zoomed her way to the finish line in first place.