by Lisa Fenn
We arrived at the Richmond Super 8 Motel just after one o’clock in the morning, ahead of the rest of the team. A young man walking through the lobby looked quizzically at Deion, struggling to be certain before he approached. “Are you Deion Sanders?” the man asked. “I am a huge fan!”
“Man, you crazy!” Deion exclaimed. “Tell me, what would Deion Sanders be doing in a place like this?”
The man froze in terrible embarrassment. “Wow, you’re right,” he said. “I wasn’t sure . . . you kinda looked like him . . . but yeah, you’re right.” The man backpedaled. “Sorry, sir. Have a good night.” Sanders, who was known as Prime Time, couldn’t have the word getting out that he stayed in two-star motels.
I spent a memorable weekend with pitcher Barry Zito watching his father compose classical music for the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra. His ability to create beauty out of nothing both intoxicated and intimidated me. Though a classical pianist myself, I could not even imagine where to begin with such a task.
“Ahh, but you could,” the elder Zito told me. “If you conceive and then believe, you will achieve.” These were the same words he imparted to his young son as they tossed a ball in the backyard. Barry meditated himself all the way to the Cy Young Award in 2002.
When I learned that St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Steve Kline had never washed his cap out of superstition—and that the team equipment manager packed it in a container separate from the rest of the team’s hats—I traced Kline’s roots to a pig farm in western Pennsylvania. The townspeople were dumbfounded that we considered this newsworthy. “Steve smelled like dung his whole life,” they said matter-of-factly. “The hat hasn’t changed anything.”
After the 2002 baseball season, ESPN created a unit dedicated to developing long-form, more emotional feature stories on amateur athletes with meaningful accomplishments. I was asked to join a handful of other producers in spearheading this initiative. My first assignment was on a high school basketball player in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, named Chris Paul. Little known at the time, Chris grew up in a close-knit Bible-believing family where his grandfather, Nathaniel Jones, ran a local service station. Nathaniel was the rock of the family and never missed one of Chris’s games, until the day he would miss them all. Five teenagers bludgeoned Nathaniel to death in broad daylight in his own driveway, after his empty wallet. Though few expected Chris to attend his next basketball game, just days later, he decided to play as a tribute to his grandfather. And despite his previous game high of 43 points, Chris told his aunt that he was going to score one point for every year of his grandfather’s life. All sixty-one of them. Chris went out playing like he was the only boy in that gym. Staying within the flow of the game—and without his parents knowing what he had planned—Chris scored 24 points in the second quarter alone.
“The whole game I was just thinking about my granddad, watching me from heaven. He’s watching this game,” Chris said. “This was one of those times that I just felt like there’s no way, I don’t care what kind of defense you play, who you put in front of me, there’s no way you’re gonna stop me from getting to that goal. And as the course of the game went on, I said, ‘I can do this.’”
With less than two minutes to go in the fourth quarter, Chris had scored 59 points. Then he drove to the hoop, took a hard foul, and the shot dropped. He had his 61 points. Chris fell to the floor, cheered on by every soul in the gym as they honored the one who wasn’t. “I just felt like I coulda died and went to heaven right there,” he said. “It felt like my purpose for being here was fulfilled.”
Chris’s total left him just six points away from the state record for most points in a game. But as he stood at the foul line, the record didn’t matter. Sixty-one did. Chris walked to the free throw line, received the ball, and intentionally shot an air ball right out of bounds. As he took himself out of the game and collapsed in the arms of his waiting coach, his total stood at 61.
ESPN reporter Chris Connelly and I interviewed Chris Paul and his family less than a week after this remarkable event. They were lovely people, and when our crew wrapped for the day, I hung back, drawn to this family’s ability to handle tragedy with such dignity. They shared pictures of Chris’s childhood and stories of their beloved Nathaniel, who was known for handing out spare dollar bills and station pumping jobs to those in need.
“He was one of those people who tried to change the world one little life at a time,” Chris’s mother said. Before I left, we prayed together for healthy grieving and justice in court, and we promised to keep in touch.
I returned home exhilarated by my tender connection with the Paul family. My years covering baseball, though thrilling, had been void of such depth. Shortly after we aired Chris’s story in December 2002, the Paul family phoned to tell me that thanks in part to the media coverage generated by my story, the judge had granted their wish to prosecute the killers as adults. “We cherished my father’s life, and they took something very special away from us,” Chris’s mother said. “Thank you for giving us something special to remember him by.”
A few months later, I won my first Emmy Award as producer of Chris’s story. My first call from the ceremony’s lobby was to Chris himself, who sounded just as excited as me. Together we felt we had achieved something special for Nathaniel. Chris went on to star at Wake Forest University, become the fourth pick in the 2005 NBA draft, and win Olympic gold. Yet whenever I saw him around, I would say, “Hey there, little Chris Paul,” to which he would say, “Hope you’re still praying for me, Miss Lisa.”
Then there was feisty Katie Morris, whom I met through ESPN’s partnership with the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Each summer ESPN selected five critically ill children with sports-related wishes and blew the doors off of their requests. Katie was a ten-year-old brain cancer fighter who wished to treat the fifteen boys on her former Little League team to a Seattle Mariners game. Her best friend on the team, Bryce, had moved out of state just before Katie’s diagnosis, and I told Katie that Bryce could not attend. Then, while staging a pregame team photo in the center field of Safeco Field, the public address announcer came over the speakers and said, “Katie, we understand this is not a complete team photo and is missing one of your teammates and your very good friend. We direct your attention to the area in center field. Turn around and welcome back your friend and teammate, Bryce Aberg!”
Ten-year-old fresh-faced Bryce came sprinting out of that centerfield wall like he had run all the way from Tennessee to find his Katie, and the two precious kids wept in one another’s arms with their team and the Mariner Moose mascot gathered around. It was a love as fierce and pure as I have ever witnessed.
Katie died ten months later. Her family asked me to participate in her eulogy. “You gave Katie her last happy day,” her mother said. “We want you to help everyone remember her that way.” I flew to Oregon without hesitation, filled with love for Katie and the understanding that it would have been disingenuous to celebrate with her family one year and let them cry alone the next.
In 2005 I produced a story on Travis Roy, a hockey legend for all of the wrong reasons. Travis grew up on the ice of Yarmouth, Maine, with a stick always in his hand and a loving father always coaching by his side. In 1995, Travis was a highly touted high school hockey recruit. He committed to defending national champs Boston University under legendary coach Jack Parker. The arena was electric for the first home game and the raising of the team’s championship banner from the previous season. Travis did not start on the first line but was waved on early in the first period, alongside future Stanley Cup winner Chris Drury, his centerman. Drury took the face-off, sending the puck into the offensive zone. Travis gave chase but arrived a split second after his opponent. Travis leaned in to bodycheck, eager to send a message in his first appearance on the ice. He thought he’d angled himself just right, as he had nearly every day for the last fifteen years of his life. But instead, he deflected off the 185-pound defenseman. Momentum sent him headfirst into the boards.
Get up! Get back in the game! Travis thought to himself as he lay facedown on the ice. With the trainers hovering over him, Travis asked for his father to be summoned from the stands. Travis had fallen a thousand times before. But this one felt different.
“Come on, Trav, get up!” his father, Lee, said as he made his way to his son.
“Dad, I am in big trouble. I can’t feel anything. I can’t move anything,” Travis said. “But Dad . . . I made it.” Travis thought that this fall might be his last. And if it were indeed to be his final time on ice, he wanted his father beside him to share this dream of Division I college hockey. It was a dream that spanned just eleven seconds.
The fall burst Travis’s fourth and fifth cervical vertebrate, rendering him quadriplegic. He instantly went from a strapping NHL prospect to requiring round-the-clock care. Slowly Travis rebuilt his life. He finished school with the help of aides. He began a foundation to purchase adaptive equipment for other victims of paralysis. But he never regained movement. ESPN reporter Tom Rinaldi and I were charged with looking back on Travis’s accident and where he was ten years later.
“Travis, when you dream about playing hockey, what do you see?” Tom asked to start the interview. Travis had answered hundreds of routine questions over the years, but Tom Rinaldi interviews are infamously disarming. Travis began to cry.
“No one’s ever asked me that before,” Travis started slowly, as though he was about to share a secret. “Occasionally I have those dreams, and they are amazing. They are real. Too real. I can feel that ice. I can play that puck with such ease and put it where I want. I wish those dreams came more often.”
I had never met a quadriplegic before, and I came into our interview with Travis apprehensively. After Tom’s first question, guilt replaced nerves. I felt as though we were rubbing fresh salt in old wounds. I was unsure what to do, until Travis told me: “Lisa, can you please wipe away my tears?”
Tom asked ninety more minutes of questions under hot, invasive lights. Some were factual, others intended to till hardened ground: “How have you reconciled hope against disappointment?” “When you cry, what are you crying for?” Travis revealed that when he weeps at night, tears puddle in his ears, and he is unable to wipe them dry. He shared his loneliness and how he felt like an oddity, known on the streets as “that hockey player who was in the accident.”
I stayed another week to film with Travis. I captured his daily care routine, his strolls around Boston, a meeting with his charitable foundation, and a trip to a Boston University hockey game. I asked him how his accident had affected his faith, either positively or negatively. He said religion left a sour taste in his mouth because in the months following his accident, Christians from around the world had mailed him Bibles and books by other disabled individuals of faith. “They were all very concerned with where I was going after this life but not terribly interested in sitting with me through the hard times of this one,” he said.
I told Travis that I knew I was late on the scene, but if he was still taking applications for friends, I would like to be considered. So once the cameras stopped filming, I made the two-hour trip to Boston for lunches and movies together when our schedules allowed, and the developing friendship nourished both of our souls.
Though engaged to be married myself, I said, “Travis, you are every girl’s dream come true. All you can do is sit and listen!” He laughed and told me to start lining up prospects. “Not many people can see past Travis the circumstance to see Travis the person,” he said.
These were just three of a hundred features I produced over ten years, and just three of a hundred where I learned that feature reporting was not a job. It was a privilege. I grew comfortable with the intimacy of this work and the influence of my behind-the-scenes role. The camera forced subjects into buried emotional spaces, where they risked the vulnerability needed to share the dreams and fears that accompanied them on their extraordinary journeys. And once the camera stopped rolling and my reporter jetted out, the subjects looked for continued connection with me. Certainly they understood that their participation was ultimately intended for the world, on a broadcast months away. But in the hours and days following their interviews, their wanting eyes were on me, awaiting useful responses to their pain and courage. Their hearts expanded as they realized the healing power of putting words to emotions, of illuminating dark memories. I drew strength from these exceptional individuals, as each shaped my understanding of how we are called to live. With whom could I sit and wipe away tears? In what way could I be someone’s happiest day? How could I impact the world, one life at a time?
Shortly after meeting Travis, while sorting a stash of boxes in my flooded basement, I once again came across my old crumpled description of the perfect job. I smiled, realizing that God had woven all of my odd requirements together into an unlikely calling: knitting together stories of the heart within the drama of sports. And it was in that theater that I discovered two leading characters who entered my life . . . and never left.
CHAPTER 4
THE CALL
The phone rang early on that blustery February morning in 2009. Through the haze of sleep, I made out my father’s number on the caller ID. My parents divorced shortly after I began working at ESPN, and my father frequently called in the late afternoons for cooking instructions and laundry tips. Those calls were endearing. But these early-morning ones only meant one thing.
“Listen, I’m sorry to wake you,” my dad said, “but there’s something in the Plain Dealer you might be interested in.”
Since I had moved away, my father and grandfather started their mornings together, reading the sports section over fried eggs and crusty Italian bread with butter patted an inch thick. If soaring cholesterol from that breakfast didn’t ultimately do them in, high blood pressure related to Cleveland’s cursed sports teams likely would. For years my father and grandfather had pitched me story ideas on why the Indians couldn’t field a competitive team, how the Browns couldn’t play worse blindfolded, and did I ever notice how great teams in other cities were made up of players who started in Cleveland under owners too cheap to keep them? Even with the Cavs at the top of the league in 2009, their discussions revolved largely around how the front office would screw this one up too. They served as my own personal Statler and Waldorf, the two curmudgeonly Muppets in the balcony who are happiest when complaining.
“There’s two handicapped wrestlers from Lincoln-West High School on the front page of the sports section,” my father continued. “You remember Lincoln, it’s like ten minutes from here—real bad area off West Twenty-Fifth. Anyway, looks like it might be in your wheelhouse, so see if you can punch it up.” My dad had been using computers for nearly a decade, but still said things like “Punch it up” and “Do a double click—one, two—and you’re good to go.”
With a slow yawn, I pulled my laptop up from under my bed and went to the newspaper’s website. There they were: a legless teenage boy perched on the back of another kid, walking through a high school gym. Both were black, with defined, muscular upper bodies. “Willing and Able,” read the headline. I scanned the accompanying article, picking out that the boy on top, Leroy Sutton, had lost his legs in a childhood train accident, and the teammate carrying him, Dartanyon Crockett, was legally blind. Still, as interesting as those details were, I could not divert my eyes from the photograph for more than a few seconds.
“I can go scout them out for you,” my father offered. “They’re wrestling at Midpark High School this afternoon. Just up the road.”
They were seniors, so at that afternoon’s Greater Cleveland sectional meet they would possibly wrestle the final matches of their high school careers. “I think I might like to see them myself,” I said. “I’ll call you back in a few hours.”
This photo did what photos are designed to do: reveal. And in this case, the image revealed the need for further revelation. Leroy Sutton and Dartanyon Crockett. However did life join these individuals together? Why did
Leroy’s knowing grin cause me to smile back so warmly, without even realizing I was doing it? Where were they going? How much were they carrying? What could we learn? And what in the world kind of name is Dartanyon Crockett?
I dressed quickly and packed an overnight bag in the slim chance that Victor Vitarelli, coordinating producer of the ESPN features unit, let me hop a plane to find these boys. I arrived at my desk just after 8:30 a.m., about two hours earlier than any other morning. Fridays are typically busy days for the features department, preparing for a slew of weekend edits. Victor was already convening with fellow coordinating producer Valerie Gordon and manager Tom McCollum on scripts. I poked my head into the office.
“Hello, Lisa,” Victor said. “How are you this morning?” No matter who you were or why you’d come, Victor was always genuinely pleased to see you.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But there’s a story in the Cleveland newspaper today about two disabled high school wrestlers.” Tom pulled it up on his computer as I dove into the backstory.
“The blind one carries the one with no legs around between their matches,” I explained. “Today is their sectional meet, so if we’re going to do this story, we have to shoot it today in case they don’t advance to districts.”
Victor leaned over for a better look. “In . . . ter . . . est . . . ing,” he said, which is Victor’s way of saying “not . . . so . . . fast.” At that time, ESPN was producing a surplus of feature stories on athletes with disabilities. A young runner with cystic fibrosis gasping for the finish line as his school cheered him on. A teen with Down syndrome finding his father’s acceptance through golf. An autistic high school basketball player who managed equipment before emerging from the shadows as a shooting savant. These kids possessed a unique brand of courage that made it easy to inspire viewers. But recently our features had grown similar and saccharine, and we were quietly mandated to pitch fewer stories on people with disabilities.
