My Story, Part 1: The “Bees” and Football

I grew up in the 50s in a small town in rural Georgia. I was different from almost all my classmates. My father was an “refugee” from Nazi Germany and my Mother was a “Yankee” from Massachusetts. They were not Southerners. I was the only boy in my elementary school class who went out for the Pee Wee football team and was not chosen to be on the team—a huge blow to my ego in a town where football was king. I wanted desperately to be liked and to be part of the in-crowd in order to make my parents proud of me. I overcame the humiliation of not being a football player by figuring out another way to achieve stardom.

One of the very helpful things my Mother did for me was teaching me to love reading books. She would save money each week and take me and my brother to a bookstore one day every month to buy us books. I loved reading about the Hardy Boys and about heroes - sports, political, entrepreneurs, doctors and scientists. Books opened up a whole new world for me. They fueled my dreams. Then she bought us a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica which I devoured. 

That set the stage for me figuring how to be perceived as a winner at school. I focused on winning the weekly spelling bee; the weekly bible bee; and being the kid who was first to answer the teacher’s questions correctly in class. I out-memorized my classmates – I became a winner and part of the “in crowd” because I was the fastest person in the class with the right answer most of the time. That meant that I excelled at interrupting people, including my teachers. I never argued with people – I just told them what was right. I excelled at “knowing”. That got me through elementary school. Onto high school. Different game. Football players were the “in crowd”.

Football was king in rural Georgia and when I went to high school, Coach Charles Grisham, who was a legend in western Georgia, reached out to me on my first day and asked me if I wanted to be a Student Athletic Trainer for the football team. I never had met him before that, and to this day I don’t know how he found me or why he made the offer he did. I said “yes” (not knowing how to be an athletic trainer). 

Then he did something that changed my life in that small town. He said. “I want you to come to my house every school day at 730 am and I will take you to school with me”.  So, I rode to school for the next five years sitting shotgun next to the best football coach in Western Georgia. You can’t imagine the positive impact that had in the community for how I and my family were treated. Coach Grisham “adopted” me and that changed my life. He helped me publish my first authored article in “Coach & Athlete” Magazine; made me his First Base Coach on the baseball team and he helped get me a scholarship as a Student Trainer to go to college.

I, to this day, thank him and Mrs. Grisham in my nightly Gratitude Meditation. He validated me and my family’s humanity to the community and he made it possible for me to go to college on an athletic scholarship being a non-athlete. Football ended up being my pathway out to the big world I had read about even though I was not a star player.