Jason La Canfora has an inspiring story about Washington Redskins special teams player Antonio Brown. (Washington Post registration required.)
Canfora tells how Brown’s high school coach and teacher, Tolbert Bain, made a difference in his life. While Canfora doesn’t write about it, one senses that a local church and the faith of Brown’s mother might also have played a key role. Here is the lead:
The gesture was a brash one for a player making his first appearance since re-signing with the team that had cut him 10 weeks earlier. As he returned a kickoff 91 yards for the Washington Redskins' game-winning touchdown Sunday afternoon in Tempe, Ariz., Antonio Brown never broke stride as he blew kisses to Redskins fans in the crowd.For Brown, the moment was a celebration of his survival over a childhood filled with pain and sorrow in the housing projects of Miami's Liberty City, and a message to those who remain there that dreams can come true. He had promised his family that, when he scored his first NFL touchdown, he would acknowledge them. And so he was blowing kisses for his teenage brother, Carlos Demitrius, whose murdered body he discovered mere steps from their apartment eight years ago, and for his sister Dushun, who was robbed and killed five months after that, leaving five children whom Brown supports.
High school football coach Tolbert Bain heard about Brown and set out to help him.
…
"When I first met him, he didn't trust anyone," Bain said. "He'd never really had any positive male role models in his life, but the boys in the neighborhood told him I was all right, and he could trust me, and he started to do that.
"Tolbert saved me, man," Brown said. "That's my main man. He went and got me off the streets. He literally went and got me off the streets and would wake me up and take me to MacArthur to meet with the principal to see what I had to do to get back in school."
Here is a teacher who made a difference. He was practicing what author Gregory Pierce calls the Spirtuality of Work. While Canfora does not report Bain’s motivation for working with Brown, it fits the definition:
The spirituality of work is a disciplined attempt to align ourselves and our environment with God and to incarnate God’s spirit in the world through all the effort (paid and unpaid) we exert to make the world a better place, a little closer to the way God would have things.
Brown’s coaches and mentors encouraged him to perform in the classroom as well as on the field. Brown went to University of West Virginia. His coach Don Nehlen recalls:
"When we signed him, we knew we would have a little bit of a project on our hands, but it turned out to be a very easy project because he wanted to do it," Nehlen said. "He was just amazing to me. The tutors all told me he was the best kid they ever had. He never missed a tutoring session, never missed his classes. He really wanted an education coming from where he came from, and he was just infectious to be around. He was an exciting little guy and he smiled all the time and we all loved to be around him."
As the husband and father of teachers, I’m always glad to see a story that gives the right answer to the question “What does a teacher make?” Teachers make a difference.
There is another aspect to this story: the role of faith and church in Brown’s life. Canfora doesn’t mention it but I sense that it is there. In the words of the GetReligion blog;
Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news. They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there. One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission. A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
While there is no way of knowing, there must have been some sort of spiritual inspiration for Brown, his teachers and his coaches. Is this one more of GetReligion’s ghosts? I think it is.
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