The Life of Reilly The Play of the Year By Rick Reilly Sports Illustrated Jake Porter is 17, but he can't read, can barely scrawl his first name and often mixes up the letters at that. So how come we're all learning something from him? In three years on the Northwest High football team, in McDermott, Ohio, Jake had never run with the ball. Or made a tackle. He'd barely ever stepped on the field. That's about right for a kid with chromosomal fragile X syndrome, a disorder that is a common cause of mental r****dation. But every day after school Jake, who attends special-ed classes, races to Northwest team practices: football, basketball, track. Never plays, but seldom misses one. That's why it seemed crazy when, with five seconds left in a recent game that Northwest was losing 42-0, Jake trotted out to the huddle. The plan was for him to get the handoff and take a knee. Northwest's coach and Jake's best friend, Dave Frantz, called a timeout to talk about it with the opposing coach, Waverly's Derek Dewitt. Fans could see there was a disagreement. Dewitt was shaking his head and waving his arms. After a ref stepped in, play resumed and Jake got the ball. He started to genuflect, as he'd practiced all week. Teammates stopped him and told him to run, but Jake started going in the wrong direction. The back judge rerouted him toward the line of scrimmage. Suddenly, the Waverly defense parted like peasants for the king and urged him to go on his grinning sprint to the end zone. Imagine having 21 teammates on the field. In the stands mothers cried and fathers roared. Players on both sidelines held their helmets to the sky and whooped. In the red-cheeked glee afterward, Jake's mom, Liz, a single parent and a waitress at a coffee shop, ran up to the 295-pound Dewitt to thank him. But she was so emotional, no words would come. Turns out that before the play Dewitt had called his defense over and said, "They're going to give the ball to number 45. Do not touch him! Open up a hole and let him score! Understand?" It's not the kind of thing you expect to come out of a football coach's mouth, but then Derek Dewitt is not your typical coach. Originally from the Los Angeles area, he's the first black coach in the 57-year history of a conference made up of schools along the Ohio-Kentucky border. He'd already heard the n word at two road games this season, once through the windows of a locker room. Yet he was willing to give up his first shutout for a white kid he'd met only two hours earlier. "I told Derek before the play, 'This is the young man we talked about on the phone,'" Frantz recalled. "'He's just going to get the ball and take a knee.' But Derek kept saying, 'No, I want him to score.' I couldn't talk him out of it!" "I met Jake before the game, and I was so impressed," Dewitt said. "All my players knew him from track. So, when the time came, touching the ball just didn't seem good enough." (By the way, Dewitt and his team got their shutout the next week, 7-0 against Cincinnati Mariemont.) Into every parade a few stink bombs must fall. Mark Madden of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grumbled that if the mentally challenged want to participate in sports, "let them do it at the Special Olympics. Leave high school football alone, and for heaven's sake, don't put the fix in." A few overtestosteroned Neanderthals on an Internet site complained, "That isn't football." No, it became bigger than football. Since it happened, people in the two towns just seem to be treating one another better. Kids in the two schools walk around beaming. "I have this bully in one of my [phys-ed] classes," says Dewitt. "He's a rough, out-for-himself type kid. The other day I saw him helping a couple of special-needs kids play basketball. I about fell over." Jake is no different, though. Still happy as a frog in a bog. Still signs the teachers' register in the principal's office every morning, ready to "work." Still gets sent on errands, forgets where he's going and ends up in Frantz's office. Still talks all the time, only now it's to NBC, ESPN and affiliates from CBS and Fox about his touchdown that won the game. Yeah, Jake Porter thinks his 49-yard run made for a comeback victory. He thinks he was the hero. He thinks that's why there were so many grins and streaks down people's faces. Smart kid. Issue date: November 18, 2002 ----- Rick Reilly, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, has been voted national sports writer of the year seven times. His latest book, The Life of Reilly, a best-of compilation of his SI columns and features, hit bookstores in November 2000. He has also written books with Wayne Gretzky, Charles Barkley and Brian Bosworth, and has published two novels, Missing Links and Slo-Mo: My Untrue Story. That is a great story. I have a cousin that is mentally r****ded, so this article really touched me.
ESPN showed the clip on SportsCenter. Watching the kid kneel, run forward, look back, run back, get turned around, jog to the endzone all the while the other team is just standing there looking towards the sideline will bring a tear to your eye.
When Reilly doesn't put himself in the story, he can be brilliant. There are brilliant stories out there, stories that need documenting and little else. Rick's problem is that he involves himself in the column too many damn times. I miss the days when SI had a great columnist (with a ton to say) every week at the end of the magazine. Reilly, starting in 1997 or so, has gotten too full of himself. Handed a weekly column, hell, I can't blame him. That doesn't excuse him from sucking every other week or so.
I have to disagree only because my all time favorite Reilly article is the one that i think was entitled "Why are we here"...it was when he and his son were lying in Central Park talking about reasons why they were 'here'. It was from a couple of years ago and its the only article I have ever cut out and saved (not that I'm an expert on great journalism but you get the picture) Also, last week's issue was one where he and his son were watching NFL football and playing NFL 2K3 and its actually a pretty good piece...and makes a lot of sense.
"Why are we here?" (by: Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated) So we were lying on our backs on the grass in the park next to our hamburger wrappers, my 14-year-old son and I, watching the clouds loiter overhead, when he asked me, "Dad, why are we here?" And this is what I said. "I've thought a lot about it, son, and I don't think it's all that complicated. I think maybe we're here just to teach a kid how to bunt, turn two and eat sunflower seeds without using his hands. "We're here to pound the steering wheel and scream as we listen to the game on the radio, 20 minutes after we pulled into the garage. "We're here to look all over, give up and then find the ball in the hole. "We're here to watch, at least once, as the pocket collapses around John Elway, and it's fourth-and-never. Or as the count goes to 3 and 1 on Mark McGuire with bases loaded, and the pitcher begins wishing he'd gone on to med school. Or as a little hole you couldn't get a skateboard through suddenly opens in front of Jeff Gordon with a lap to go. "We're here to wear our favorite sweat-soaked Boston Red Sox cap, torn Slippery Rock sweatshirt and the Converses we lettered in, on a Saturday morning with nowhere we have to go and no one special we have to be. "We're here to rake on a jack-high nothin' hand and have nobody know it but us. Or get in at least one really good brawl, get a nice shiner and end up throwing an arm around the guy who gave it to us. "We're here to tie the perfect fly, make the perfect cast, catch absolutely nothing and still call it a perfect morning. "We're here to nail a yield sign with an apple core from half a block away. "We're here to make our dog bite on the same lame fake throw for the gazillionth time. "We're here to win the stuffed bear or go broke trying. "I don't think the meaning of life is gnashing our bicuspids over what comes after death but tasting all the tiny moments that come before it. "We're here to be the coach when Wendell, the one whose glasses always fog up, finally makes the only perfect backdoor pass all season. "We're here to be there when our kid has three goals and an assist. And especially when he doesn't. "We're here to see the Great One setting up behind the net, tying some poor goaltender's neck into a Windsor knot. "We're here to watch the Rocket peer in for the sign, two out, bases loaded, bottom of the career. We're here to witness Tiger's lining up the 22-foot double breaker to win and not need his autograph afterward to prove it. "We're here to be able to do a one-and-a-half for our grandkids. Or to stand at the top of our favorite double-black on a double-blue morning and overhear those five wonderful words: 'Highway's closed. Too much snow. "We're here to get the Frisbee to do things that would have caused medieval clergymen to burn us at the stake. "We're here to sprint the last 100 yards and soak our shirts and be so tired we have to sit down to pee. "I don't think we're here to make SportsCenter. The really good stuff never does. Like leaving Wrigley at 4:15 on a perfect summer afternoon and walking straight into Murphy's with half of section 503. Or finding ourselves with a free afternoon, a little red 327 fuel-injected 1962 Corvette convertible and an unopened map of Vermont's backroads. "We're here to get the triple-Dagwood sandwich made, the perfectly frosted malted-beverage mug filled, and the football kicked off at the very second your sister begins tying up the phone until Tuesday. "None of us are going to find ourselves on our deathbeds saying, 'Dang, I wish I'd spent more time on the Hibbings account.' We're going to say, 'That scar? I got that scar stealing a home run from Consolidated Plumbers.' "See, grown-ups spend so much time doggedly slaving toward the better car, the perfect house, the big day that will finally make them happy when happy just walked by wearing a bicycle helmet two sizes too big for him. We're not here to find a way to heaven. The way is heaven. Does that answer your question, son?" And he said, "Not really, Dad." And I said, "No?" And he said, "No, what I meant is, why are we here when Mom said to pick her up 40 minutes ago?"
This line keeps cracking me up every time I read it... "We're here to make our dog bite on the same lame fake throw for the gazillionth time."
