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| 2007 feel good stories; maybe we can build up some momentum here | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 3 2007, 04:43 AM (288 Views) | |
| fab4fan | Jan 3 2007, 04:43 AM Post #1 |
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As a Chicagoan one of my duties is to hate all things Detroit, in a geographical sports fan kind of way. The Detroit Red Wings retired the jersey of their former captain of the past 20 some odd years tonight. Even if you're not a sports fan I believe this story is a positive way to start out the new year. Congratulations Steve Yzerman! From a Blackhawks fan. Want to know the true Stevie Y? Just ask Braxton By Eric Adelson ESPN The Magazine The little boy held on to that Vic hockey stick even before he knew what it was. The piece of wood was too small to ever use to play, but Braxton Davis wedged it in his pudgy fist as if it were a security blanket, or his dad's pinkie. How the boy wailed when the nurses took the Vic away. Brant Davis wanted so badly to tell his only son that the stick would be waiting for him after surgery. But Braxton wouldn't understand. He wasn't even a year old. More than 10 years later, Brant Davis still looks at that stick every day. Davis can recall just about every moment of 1995. His first and only son born March 6; the way his tiny hand latched on to that Vic; the wonder at Braxton's pupils being two different sizes; the worry when the doctors ran blood and urine tests to figure out why; and the terror when the initial tests led to more tests, then a bone marrow biopsy. "He's a baby," Brant thought. "His bones aren't even hard." The diagnosis came Dec. 12. Braxton Davis had neuroblastoma, cancer of the nerves. According to WebMD, only 25 percent of babies diagnosed with the illness are cured. But that wasn't all. Braxton also had lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system. Doctors told Brant that his boy was one of only 78 humans to be diagnosed with both cancers. "Babies are the only thing a human can make," Brant remembers thinking, "and I did it wrong." On the day after Christmas '95, even before Braxton's first New Year's, nurses took the Vic away and wheeled the infant in for three hours of surgery to determine the progress of his cancer. Three hours became five, and five hours became eight. Braxton had a tumor wrapped around his spine -- three inches by two and a half. He barely survived into 1996. Brant decided that Braxton would have to live as much as possible in whatever time he had. "He wasn't going to live in a bubble," Davis said. "I was going to treat him like a normal kid." Yes, there would be plenty of chemo, plenty of pain, plenty of impossible conversations. But Braxton did get his stick back. And that brought hope. Brant noticed that Braxton took to the color red as he began to toddle. A love for the Red Wings followed. Dad avoided trying to explain that everyone in Denver hated the Red Wings (especially in the mid-1990s), but little Braxton would grow to find out himself. As soon as he was old enough to put stuff up in his room, Braxton had pictures of Steve Yzerman everywhere. Braxton made it to age 6. He ignored comments about his love of the Red Wings just as he ignored comments about his hairless head and the half of his face that would not glisten or glow red no matter how much he ran around. Just part of being Braxton. "Kids would make fun," Brant laughed, "and he would punch them. And then he would go to the principal's office." But Dad sweated out every single day. He worked at a hockey shop, and things fell apart with Braxton's mom soon after the diagnosis (they have since divorced and share custody), so Brant had no idea how he would finance annual medical charges that soared past half a million dollars. He reached an agreement with a Denver hospital and paid whatever he could, but he saved a few pennies to finance Yzerman hockey cards and posters for Braxton. Kids at school would offer a Sakic and a Roy for an Yzerman, and Braxton said no. He would get entire box sets as presents and throw out everything but the Red Wings cards. So Dad figured he would take a chance and write an e-mail to Hockeytown. Maybe when the Wings visited the Avs, somebody could leave a pair of tickets at the Pepsi Center door. Or maybe not. The phone soon rang, and the caller ID read "BLOCKED." Brant picked up anyway. "Hi, is Brant there?" The voice was quiet. Brant couldn't place it. Then: "This is Steve Yzerman." Suddenly, Brant was taking Braxton out of school for a completely different reason -- to drive him to Red Wings practice. "It was mind-blowing," he said. Braxton's eyes bulged as he saw in real life all the players he watched on television on so many nights. And then, right there in front of him, stood his hero. Yzerman did not pat him on the head or lift his eyebrows in compassion; everyone in Detroit knows The Captain doesn't do maudlin. "There are some people who know he's sick," Brant said. "They ask how he's feeling. That makes him feel different. Steve didn't do that." Yzerman told the boy to stick around and watch practice. Braxton did, and his eyes locked on the players as they whizzed by. Brendan Shanahan zipped over and handed Braxton a broken stick. Brant gasped, but Braxton hardly raised an eyebrow. "That's cool," he said. "But it's not Steve's." Brant grimaced and looked around, hoping no one heard. But behind him, then-goalie Curtis Joseph roared in laughter. The next night, Yzerman invited Braxton to the Detroit locker room. It seemed that day could last the rest of Braxton's life. "It created a drive for him," Brant said. "Before, there was nothing that motivated this kid. Then it was 'Can we get to the rink? I want to play for the Red Wings. Or their farm team.'" Not long after meeting Yzerman, Braxton started to skate. Brant took the boy to his beer league games, sat him on the bench next to him, and taught his boy to swing open the door for the players when they came in from shifts. Braxton defiantly wore red all over Denver. He would reply to taunts at the mall with quips like, "Ten Cups!" He wore a red practice jersey even when skating with his blue-white-and-yellow-wearing peewee team at the Avs' practice facility, even when Colorado's Steve Konowalchuk ribbed him about cheering for the wrong team. Yzerman said he would be in touch, but Brant didn't take that literally. The man had done his good deed. Then, when the Wings came back to Denver, the phone rang again. Steve again. Would Braxton like to see another practice? Of course, the answer was yes again. Braxton got through winter after winter, enduring eight major surgeries and countless upset stomachs, never asking to see his hero again but never straying too far from the phone. Last year, Yzerman called to invite Braxton and Brant to the playoffs in Detroit. A pal who worked for United helped with the flight, and the Red Wings put Brant and Braxton up at a downtown hotel. Yzerman let Braxton sit in the penalty box during warm-ups. Pavel Datsyuk shot pucks at him. Brant always thought athletes did charity work for the positive PR, but Yzerman always waited until all the cameras had left before greeting Braxton. "He's very private," Brant said. "He doesn't hang out. You see a lot of articles about him, but you never hear biographies." And that, maybe more than anything, will linger in the minds of those who watched Yzerman play for all these years. Some of the biggest Red Wings fans learned almost nothing about the personal life of a legend. Yzerman played in an era in which individual plotlines eclipsed team travails in all sports. Even Brett Favre, Yzerman's NFL equivalent, has become a bigger story than the iconic Green Bay Packers. The NHL itself has shifted its spotlight to the names on the back of the jersey and away from the logos on the front. Through all that, Yzerman remained true to his team and to himself, a painfully shy man with a gift he never failed to share in the quietest possible way. Braxton Davis, a little boy who wasn't even alive to see the younger Yzerman dance through Norris Division defenses, knows that better than almost anyone. Yzerman called again this summer and invited Braxton to training camp. Braxton asked, "Will you be there?" Yzerman said he wasn't sure. He didn't know what his responsibilities would be. Brant knew what that meant: Stevie was retiring. Braxton was touched by the invite to Traverse City and the offer to stay at the team hotel and eat at some team meals. But Braxton wouldn't go. No Steve, no trip. "I was kinda worried," Brant said. "Would this kill Braxton's drive?" Of all the difficult conversations -- about being different from the other kids, about the unknowable reasons why -- Brant feared this talk as much as any. How to explain to Braxton that Steve was not going to play in Denver anymore? "That's OK," Braxton said happily. "We can go into his office and he can close the door and we can just talk." Dad didn't quite know what to say to that. Yzerman invited Braxton out for the World Series, but the boy had just undergone treatment. He couldn't go. "That killed him," Brant said. As soon as Braxton found out about Tuesday's retirement ceremony, he called Steve on his cell phone. "I'm going," he told his dad after leaving a message. "I'm going." And he will be there. On New Year's Day 2007, 11 years and six days after the surgery that seemed to foretell the end of his life, Braxton Davis rode to the snow-blasted Denver International Airport on the way to see his idol say goodbye. Hard to say when Steve and Braxton will see each other again after Tuesday night. The future, as Brant knows, is never sure. But both the hero and the boy have been nothing if not loyal, and nothing if not reliable. For more years than even their loved ones expected, both made it seem that there can be magic and strength in any old hockey stick. But both have shown that the magic and the strength is not so much in the stick itself but in the person who holds on to it as long as possible, then lets it go. Eric Adelson is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. You can e-mail him at eric.adelson@espn3.com. |
| Mnisthiti mou Kurie! | |
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| Bill | Jan 3 2007, 04:45 AM Post #2 |
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:lol: :lol: Being born where you were born carries with it certain responsibilities? |
| Put a puppet on it. | |
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| fab4fan | Jan 3 2007, 04:45 AM Post #3 |
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I don't watch her show much but I hope other billionaires follow her lead! 'Their story is my story' Oprah's $40m school for South African girls Andrew Meldrum in Henley-on-Klip Wednesday January 3, 2007 Guardian Oprah Winfrey was already the planet's most watched talkshow host, one of America's most successful magazine publishers, a billionaire, an Oscar-nominated actor, the most important black philanthropist in the US and, according to several assessments, the most influential woman in the world. So from one perspective, the school that she opened for 152 poor South African girls outside Johannesburg yesterday was perhaps not all that significant. But that was not how it felt for Buhle Zulu, 12, who found herself whisked from sleeping on a floor with six family members in Soweto to her own bedroom and bathroom in the site, funded with $40m (£20m) of Winfrey's $1.5bn fortune. The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls also features computer and science laboratories, a theatre, library, gymnasium, health centre, sports fields and beauty salon. On what she called "the proudest, gravest day of my life," Winfrey pledged, at an opening ceremony attended by Nelson Mandela and a clutch of A-list celebrities that she would make the school "the best in the world", helping its pupils "change the face of the nation". Stars including the singers Tina Turner, Mariah Carey and Mary J Blige, the film-maker Spike Lee and the actor Sydney Poitier watched as the talkshow host, herself born in rural poverty and raised in deprived inner-city neighbourhoods, described how she had visited the families of many of the students, who were selected from 3,500 applicants. To qualify for a place, the girls had to show academic and leadership potential and have a household income of less than £400 a month. "I went to their homes. I know all of them by name. Their story is my story," Winfrey said. She had chosen "every brick, tile, sheet and spoon" in the academy herself, she added. "When you educate a girl you begin to change the face of a nation," Winfrey said. Attending the school would "change the trajectory of these girls' lives. They will excel and pass their excellence on to their families, their nation and our world. I wanted to give this opportunity to girls who had a light so bright that not even poverty could dim that light." Thirteen-year-old pupil Lesego Tlhabanyane told Associated Press: "I would have had a completely different life if this hadn't happened to me. Now I get a life where I get to be treated like a movie star." But Winfrey said that the school, in the town of Henley-on-Klip, south of Johannesburg, was not elitist. "If you are surrounded by beautiful things, and wonderful teachers who inspire you, that beauty brings out the beauty in you," she said. Mr Mandela, the 88-year-old former South African president, was helped to the stage by Winfrey. "The key to any country's future is in educating its youth," he told the audience. "Oprah is therefore not only investing in a few young individuals but in the future of our country. We are indebted to her for her selfless efforts. This is a lady that, despite her own disadvantaged background, has become one of the benefactors of the disadvantaged throughout the world and we should congratulate her for that." Fikile Koetle, who came to peek at the ceremonies from outside the main gate, was enthusiastic about the new school in his neighbourhood. "This is a brilliant idea and the greatest gift anyone could give to South Africa," he said. "These girls will grow to be our doctors, lawyers, cabinet ministers. Even one will become our own Oprah, on television." Winfrey said the number of pupils at the academy would increase to 450 in the next four years. She is planning another secondary school for boys and girls in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province. All the students would be tested for HIV, with their parents' consent, she said: "Girls who are educated are less likely to get HIV/Aids, and in this country which has such a pandemic, we have to begin to change the pandemic." The academy is a dramatic contrast to most South African schools, which are dilapidated and overcrowded as they struggle to overcome the neglect of apartheid. South Africa's matriculation exam pass rate has dropped for the third consecutive year, according to government figures released last week. There had been high hopes for this year's class, which started school when apartheid ended in 1994, and were called "Madiba's children" after Mr Mandela's clan name. But two-thirds of the 1.6 million who started school 12 years ago dropped out before their exams. Just 5% of the original class did well enough to be eligible to attend university. |
| Mnisthiti mou Kurie! | |
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| Queenbee | Jan 3 2007, 05:49 AM Post #4 |
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Two great stories. I Do watch Oprah, just not everyday. She is a wonderful person who has helped so many people. I love how she is helping the young girls in Africa by giving them a wonderful school to brighten their future. I hope others help do the same. They need our help. |
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PEACE and love to my friends, Judy When the Power of Love over comes the Love of Power, the world will know Peace. -Sri Chinmnoy Ghose Till me meet again ~ I Love you Mike! You were one of a kind. | |
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| Deleted User | Jan 3 2007, 05:50 AM Post #5 |
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I've always been an Yzerman fan. (Sorry, John) But now he's on a different level for me. |
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| Dorfliedot | Jan 3 2007, 05:55 AM Post #6 |
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Beatlelicious
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I bought a two loterry tickets for a dollar on new years. and I won $ 50.00 on one. and $6.00 on the other..
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| Queenbee | Jan 3 2007, 06:02 AM Post #7 |
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Alright Dorothy, your starting the new year out great! |
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PEACE and love to my friends, Judy When the Power of Love over comes the Love of Power, the world will know Peace. -Sri Chinmnoy Ghose Till me meet again ~ I Love you Mike! You were one of a kind. | |
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| Dorfliedot | Jan 3 2007, 07:28 AM Post #8 |
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Beatlelicious
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yes, Thank you..I hope it stays that way.. |
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| modgirl1964 | Jan 3 2007, 06:54 PM Post #9 |
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Yeah and every sports team in Chicago sucks too pal!
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Bridget![]() Imported from Detroit | |
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| modgirl1964 | Jan 3 2007, 06:59 PM Post #10 |
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All kidding aside, John, thank you for posting this. I grew up watching Stevie Y. His career started the after I was born and every kid who grew up in the 90's in Detroit wanted to be Steve. We all admired him and so proud that he always stayed our captian for his 23 year career. |
Bridget![]() Imported from Detroit | |
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