Author Archives: Stephen Copeland

Duck Dynasty, How It Almost Never Happened

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Phil sits in Willie’s office at the Duck Commander warehouse. He’s telling a story, like Phil usually does.

Being with him in person is kind of surreal, like you’re having coffee with a cartoon. It looks like he came straight out of your television and sat in your living room—sunglasses resting on his head, camouflage bandana and pants, as if he’s been hunting all day, and a nest of a beard you could probably turn into a winter scarf.

He’s an identical projection of the Phil you see on Duck Dynasty, A&E’s hit-program about redneck millionaires, the Robertsons, living in the backwoods of Louisiana; and yet, as he talks, you see more clearly the real Phil Robertson. There’s more to him.

Willie, his third oldest son, is there, too, reclined in his chair, feet propped and crossed on his desk, enjoying his new office. He does business on his phone or strokes his beard or spits chew into his white coffee mug while Phil talks and talks and talks.

Again, this Willie, the CEO of Duck Commander and Buck Commander, looks exactly the same—worn jeans, plaid shirt, blue bandana, beard, and all—but there’s more to him, something that stretches far beyond the plots of reality television.

Miss Kay, Phil’s wife, is also there, sitting in Willie’s office, delightfully southern and cordial and giggly. She’s wearing a baggy, black, Under Armour sweatshirt with a giant, white Duck Dynasty logo plastered on the front. She’s not wearing an apron, believe it or not, and there’s no talk of fried squirrel, either. She sits quietly, listening to her husband, Phil.

Al, their oldest son, is in the office, too, occasionally offering anecdotes and background stories, but mostly just listening to Phil like the rest of them. Al is the only Robertson son who doesn’t look like a grizzly bear, and apparently his normalcy is enough to disqualify him from the show. Jase and Jep, his other two bearded younger brothers aren’t in the room but will be at church with them later. Al still seems like the ugly duckling in the vicinity of Phil and Willie, which is weird, because Al doesn’t look like he could scare children. He stands on the other side of Willie’s L-shaped, camouflage desk, handing him sheets of paper that look like lithographs to autograph while Phil talks.

The scene—the family, the interaction, the personalities—almost makes you feel like you’re on the set of Duck Dynasty. But at the same time, it’s different. The humor is the same, but their depth is more evident. There’s no censor. No storyline. They’re talking about the things they want to talk about. Also, there’s Al.

At the moment, Phil is telling a story about a time at the Super Dome in New Orleans when he was speaking to a 1,000-person crowd about duck calls and hunting. He stood beneath a sign that read “Budweiser, King of Beers” then said, “I tell you what, that concludes my duck call demonstration, folks.” He reached down and picked up his Bible. “I think while I’m here, I’m going to preach you a little sermon about the King of Kings.”

It’s been ten minutes since the reporters entered Willie’s office, and they haven’t asked a single question. Phil knew they worked for a Christian magazine, and he took it as a green light—a green light to preach. Then again, it probably wouldn’t have mattered if they worked for Sports Illustrated or Time. If you watch Duck Dynasty, you know this much: Phil is going to say what he’s going to say, even if it ruffles some feathers.

“My job is to tell them the good news about Jesus, and I’m on down the road,” Phil says, piggybacking off his own story. “Jesus died for the sins of the world, was buried and raised from the dead. Ya want in? Put your faith in Him, find ya a pond somewhere, let somebody baptize ya, and let’s go with it.”

Phil picks up more steam, his voice fluctuating.

“Love God. Love your neighbor. Ya think the U.S. would be a little better off if we tried that? Not looking too good the way we’re going now. People robbing, raping, ripping babies out of wombs—it’s just pitiful.”

He launches into another story. This one is about a time in Mississippi where he pulled up to an event, saw an endless line waiting to meet him, gathered everyone up in the parking lot, and started preaching. Like the hundreds of people he has baptized in the nearby Ouachita River—300, some say—several came to God in the parking lot that day in Mississippi.

One time, he stood on hay bales in a city square in California and started preaching. He’s preached from wagons before. He’s preached from 18-wheelers.

This is the side of the Robertsons you don’t see on the show, and, for the sake of their ratings, understandably so.

“I think it scares people more than making them mad or belligerent at me because of it,” Phil continues. “They seem more afraid, which, they oughta be. It’s not that I’m trying to put the fear of God in them, but,” he says, laughing, “I pretty well am. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Phil,” Miss Kay interrupts.

He looks over at her.

“He’s going to ask you a couple questions,” she says, pointing at a reporter, realizing they haven’t asked a single question in the 20 minutes they’ve been there.

A reporter speaks, propelling Phil into another story.

This one is about preaching to 500 people in the middle of Oklahoma. Phil, who has never owned a cell phone or started a computer, was fascinated when his brother-in-law found his Oklahoma sermon online and showed him that nearly 500,000 people viewed it. “Punched my name into that cell phone,” he tries to explain.

“He’s almost like John the Baptist,” Al says of Phil, who has been called the Billy Graham of duck hunting. “Also because of the way he looks, ya know? If only he had camel hair—”

Phil interrupts, speaking quickly, leaning forward, laughing, “Some of them look at me and say, ‘That boy look pretty rough.’ I say, ‘Hey, John the Baptist looked a lot rougher than I did, and he paved the way for Jesus, so get out of my face!’”

Dark Days

The Robertsons weren’t always qualified to be the most Christian-friendly, family focused people to star on reality television. They weren’t always sitting around the dinner table each night, praying and laughing.

Truth is, all they’ve done—Duck Commander, Buck Commander, their hunting DVD’s, their shows on the Outdoor Channel, Duck Dynasty, the baptisms, the speaking engagements—may have never happened if it weren’t for the change Phil made when he was 28, back in the 1970’s.

“There were 8-10 years when Dad was pretty much a heathen,” Al says.

“Not pretty much, full blown,” Phil stresses.

“Well, he was out looking for his freedom wherever that was,” says Miss Kay, who started dating Phil when she was 14, he was 16, then married him in college, and fought for their marriage when he was coming home drunk, and getting in fights, and kicking her and their kids out of the house.

Willie chronicled the turmoil in The Duck Commander Family: How Faith, Family, And Ducks Built a Dynasty: “One night, Phil was arguing with the bar’s owner and his wife,” Willie wrote. “He was drunk and threw the woman across the bar and beat both of them up pretty badly. When the police arrived to break up the melee, Phil slipped out the back door. Before he left, Phil told Kay she wouldn’t see him for a while. Then he stayed in the woods for several weeks while the authorities were looking for him…”

These were the Robertsons, or, Phil, at one time: operating a honky-tonk, living out of a trailer, drunken nights and bar fights. Family was the last thing on his mind. Slightly different from what you see today on Duck Dynasty.

“Never realizing,” Phil says, “A man is a slave to whatever masters him. I was a slave to sin—”

“But he thought he was looking for his freedom,” Miss Kay adds. “I told our kids, I said, ‘The devil is in your dad now. Your dad is made from God. He has a good heart and is a good man, but right now Satan is occupying him and his mind. Don’t hate your dad. You hate Satan and the forces beyond him.’”

The relational pain crushed Miss Kay.

“What kept me there?” she reflects. “What made me stay with him? It was words my grandmother said: ‘One man, one wife, for one life.’ She would say things like, ‘You’re going to have to fight for your marriage.’ But after 10 years, I wondered how long you were supposed to fight for your marriage. He drove me into the ground…When I realized that I couldn’t save my marriage myself, you lose hope, and that’s what happened. That’s when I came to Christ.”

Miss Kay forgave Phil and took him back under two conditions: He had to quit drinking, and he had to leave his friends.

“Now Kay says, ‘Phil, I’ve been poor with you and you were mean; but now you’re kind, and I’m rich with you. Now rich is a lot better,’” Phil says.

“Let me explain,” says Miss Kay. “When he was mean, and we were poor, I had to manage everything. He wasn’t very worried about whatever happened. That’s why it’s much easier being this way now. I don’t have to worry about making this work, and debt, and somebody coming after us and shutting off the lights.”

“Why do you always cause me debt?” says Willie, jokingly, while signing posters.

“What?” asks Miss Kay.

“Why do you always cause me debt?” he says again.

“Because I have my own bank,” she says, laughing. “It’s the bank of Willie!”

Love & Sex

The talk of dark days and sin leads a reporter to ask a question about fame, and the temptations that come with being in the limelight. Everyone has been in Willie’s office for an hour, and maybe three questions have been asked.

Phil, fittingly, begins preaching again, as if he has 1,000 topics in his mind to choose from at any given time.

“The resurrection of the dead pretty well trumps the momentary pleasure of sin,” he says, wisely, referring to Jesus. “The long-legged chicks that show up, you say, ‘Is it more powerful than the resurrection of the dead?’ Naw, not even a race. You just think about the resurrection of the dead stacking up with anything on this earth, all your sins removed, your dead, cold body being energized and standing back up on the earth—I think that’s going to hold me in place right here.”

Phil pauses, then points at Miss Kay.

“My little sex machine is sitting over there,” he says. Miss Kay looks up at the ceiling and laughs. “It’s like banana pudding;’ I can have it every night if I want to.”

Phil’s sex talk continues for several more minutes, and you’d think it’d be awkward and uncomfortable but it’s not. Al and Willie are used to it, and anyone who watches Duck Dynasty is used to seeing it—the sex talk, not the sex.

“If I could have muted him,” Al laughs, “I would have done it 20 years ago.”

A reporter’s face is beet red, nonetheless, from laughing so hard, and Willie is staring at his desk, shocked but not really shocked at all, perhaps slightly distraught his father just quoted Ezekiel 23:20.

It’s these moments that make you understand why Duck Dynasty’s Season Three premier trafficked 8.6 million viewers, A&E’s most-watched telecast in its history, and why it’s the most popular reality show on cable television. Put four of them in a room, and you can be entertained for hours. Throw Si or Jase or “Mountain Man” in there, and you have a circus.

At the same time, the scene stands in stark contrast to the Robertsons of the 1970s—a marriage that was on the rocks and a family that was falling apart. Here were Phil and Miss Kay, 40 years later, talking as if they had just gotten back from their honeymoon. In a sense, there’s something beautiful and admirable, and not so taboo, about Phil’s adoration for his bride, even after all these years.

“And I usually tell em,’” Phil continues his sex talk, “’When you get my age, you’re just trying to get it over with without getting hurt, without straining a muscle or something.”

Phil pauses, the room flooding with laughter all over again, then looks at a reporter.

“Put that in your magazine.”

Deal.

Duck Days

Just as the Robertson family wasn’t always thriving, neither was their business.

Phil, the original Duck Commander, laid the foundation for their family’s success. He received a patent for the duck call he created in the early 1970’s and the Duck Commander Company was born. After the success of the calls, Phil began a series of duck-hunting videos that developed a worldwide following.

By the time Willie turned 30, business had become stagnant, and he took over the company. “He was black-marketing gum and candy in elementary school and shutting down the concession booths,” says Phil, who laughs, thinking of Willie’s business roots, “going to Wal-Mart, buying them in bulk…I said, ‘He’s the next CEO!’”

If there’s one thing that gets Willie talking like Phil, it’s business.

He’s the marketer, risk-taker and entrepreneur behind the company. Phil perfected duck calls; he’s the engineer. Willie made it explode. He did more with their sponsors—shot gun companies, shell companies, camouflage manufacturers. He got other movers and shakers on board—guys like Washington Nationals first baseman Adam LaRoche, and country stars Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan. Willie  started Buck Commander.

Under Willie, TV opportunities arose, and he became the executive producer of their two shows on the Outdoor Channel, “Duck Commander” and “Buck Commander.”

“I pretty much immersed myself in figuring out how that worked,” says Willie, telling the story of the company. “How you made money. If you made money. If you build your brand…I think that was very important because God was setting us up for what was to come, and having that experience really helped us.”

Phil stands up.

“You heading out?” Willie asks.

“Gotta take a leak. I’ll be back.” Phil replies.

Willie laughs, then continues.

“When the opportunity came for Duck Dynasty, it just came from a producer out of Hollywood who was from Louisiana—cold email to the information box at our company. It said, ‘I think you guys actually have the gifts to go big.’”

They filmed two pilots, A&E picked it up, and the rest is history.

Phil returns two minutes later and sits back down.

“They probably had their fingers crossed, hoping it wouldn’t be a functioning family,” Willie laughs. “They probably hoped it would be a train wreck.”

“It’s morphed into a comedy,” Phil says.

“Yeah, they didn’t see it ever being a comedy,” Willie agrees.

“One day,” Phil explains, beginning a story about his brother, Si, “The producers said, ‘Who is that?’ I said, ‘That’s Old Si.’”

“They said, ‘Oh, gosh, he’s dumb enough to be on television.’”

Duck  Dynasty

Willie was the one who convinced Phil to do the show.

“Every day,” Miss Kay says, “Phil would say, ‘Why would anybody watch this show?’” Phil scratches his head and strokes his beard, as if he’s still confused why anyone would watch it.

The Robertsons have butted heads with Hollywood a little, but not much.

Early on, for example, the editors in Los Angeles inserted “bleeps” to make it appear like the Robertsons were cursing, when they weren’t. That didn’t go well with Phil. Another time, they cut out “in Jesus’s name” in their end-of-the-episode, sitting-around-the-dinner table prayer. That didn’t go well with Phil, either.

“I said, ‘Why would you cut out ‘in Jesus’ name’? They said, ‘Well, those editors are probably just doing that, and they don’t want to offend some of the Muslims or something.’ I said, ‘Let’s see now, what year is it?’ They said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well, what year is it?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s 2012.’ I said, ‘2012, A.D. Anno Domini. Year. Of. Our. Lord. I said, ‘You Hollywood cats are counting time by Jesus just like I am. I don’t think it would hurt to throw his name in there time to time. Your calendar is based on it.’”

At the end of the day, however, the show has only expanded their platform. They understand they’re still dealing with Hollywood. “It’s not the Pat Robertson show,” Phil says.

Another story comes to Phil’s mind.

“The other day, some guy got in touch with us,” he says. “He was an atheist. This atheist was watching Duck Dynasty and said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but these people do.’ He said, ‘I don’t have that. I don’t have a family like that. My family, we all hate each other.’ Friction. Drugs. Fighting. He said, ‘I wish I could be like that.’ He got in touch with somebody, they preached the gospel, he got converted, and he sent a letter down.’”

And to think: All of this may have never happened—if Phil hadn’t walked away from football, if Miss Kay hadn’t forgiven Phil, if they hadn’t surrendered to God and gotten their lives back on track. Now, Phil and Willie are invited to hundreds of churches every year. Many have even traveled to West Monroe just to be baptized by the Robertsons—they trickle in each week, Phil says—because they were impacted by the show.

“Obviously, athletically, Dad had the talent and ability to be on a stage like a lot of athletes do,” Al says. “But what’s ironic is that, instead of that, it’s like God had a whole other plan, because this is something totally unique and different. This other door was down the road that we wouldn’t even know, and now, we’re just going through that door—”

“Ohhh, this is the big door, right here,” Phil says, excitedly. “This is our chance to—”

“Preach to millions.”

By Stephen Copeland

Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum magazine.

Invisible No More

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If you could have stood in the locker room before the fight, you would have thought an army was about to charge into battle. The energy gave you chills. The noise made your head throb.

As Robert Guerrero’s team, family and friends gathered around him, howling and chanting, Bob Santos stood quietly, questioning their naivety, nervously wondering if this would go down as the biggest mistake of Robert Guerrero’s career.

It’s not that Santos didn’t believe in Guerrero. He had managed the 29-year-old Mexican American from Gilroy, Calif., since he was 17—no one believed in him more—but what they were about to do was unheard of.

After all, Guerrero had been out of boxing for 15 months because of a busted shoulder; and he had moved up two weight classes, from a 135-pound lightweight to a 147-pound welterweight, a division loaded with boxing’s best fighters.

The only boxer in recent history to make a jump as radical as Guerrero, according to Santos, was “Sugar” Shane Mosley back in 2003 when he fought Oscar De La Hoya; but it was later revealed Mosley took performance-enhancing drugs to do so. Even when Manny Pacquiao climbed to the welterweight division, he didn’t fight full welterweights; he fought guys who also climbed from smaller weight classes; he eased into it. Henry Armstrong is known for his multi-weight class dominance, but heck, his prime was in the 1930s.

Yet here was Guerrero, fighting a full welterweight in prized Turkish fighter Selcuk Aydin—with no glove specifications as Floyd Mayweather Jr. forces upon his opponents, no catch-weight specifications, and no tune-up fight.

The boxing world—the people who really understood boxing—grasped the severity of Guerrero’s fight with Aydin. Even boxing legend and 10-time world champion De La Hoya approached Guerrero before the fight and asked, “Man, don’t you think you need a tune up?” to which Guerrero confidently replied, his Spanish accent prevalent, “I don’t need tune ups.”

Guerrero’s nickname is “The Ghost,” but on that evening, Santos looked like one. “That was the most nervous I was his entire career,” says Santos, a boxing encyclopedia who speaks with passion reminiscent of Mickey Goldmill from the Rocky film series. “I was nervous from the simple standpoint that I had been in the sport long enough to know it is not normal to jump up two weight classes, let alone after a year and a half layoff, let alone with no tune up. I was very concerned, and I didn’t know if he could take a punch at his weight.”

A lopsided defeat, Santos believed, would make them look like “the biggest idiots the sport had ever known.” But the coming battle was inevitable; they had signed the fight; there was no turning back; and Guerrero stood in the middle of a raucous locker room scene—pre-fight pandemonium.

“It’s Guerrero time!” someone cried. “It’s Guerrero time!”

Others joined in, the cry growing louder and louder, intensifying with the seconds of the approaching brawl. “It’s Guerrero time! It’s Guerrero time! It’s Guerrero time!”

“No,” Guerrero said sternly, the shrill of his tone piercing the commotion.

The locker room fell silent.

“It’s Jesus Christ time,” he said, his voice loud enough to trump gunshots, sharp enough to bring a child to tears. “It’s God’s time.”

Santos says there was a fire in Guerrero’s eyes.

“At that point,” Santos says, “I said to myself, ‘He is not getting beat tonight. He is NOT getting beat tonight.’”

And thus began Guerrero’s journey to Mayweather.

Guerrero walked through the tunnel…to the ring…leaving a silent locker room behind him.

_____________________________________________________ 

Robert Guerrero is the antithesis of Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Mayweather loves talking about money, his nickname is “Money,” and his group of close friends and associates are called “The Money Team;” Guerrero loves talking about Jesus (it’s why Santos believes HBO has only given Guerrero the microphone once after a victory), he has “Acts 2:38” on his trunks, and he has a team consisting of Christians. Mayweather is the highest-paid athlete in the world, but Guerrero says he would rather “be blessed with a dollar than cursed with a million.” Mayweather is known for carrying around a small, leather duffel bag at all times containing cash and gambling slips; Guerrero lives his life by a leather Bible, which, by the way, reads: “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

Mayweather will do anything for money; he has appeared on WWE and Dancing with the Stars, and once had one of his disciples purchase 20,000 Mega Millions lottery tickets for a chance at a $656 million prize. Guerrero, on the other hand, once declined Corona’s offer to put his picture on every beer bottle around the country. He didn’t even ask for the details of the offer. His answer was “no.”

Mayweather is far from the devil, and Guerrero is far from Jesus, but the dissonance in their behavior may indicate otherwise. Mayweather, whose criminal record is as jaw-dropping as his boxing record (43-0, 26 KO’s, who has won eight world titles in five divisions), has a history of anger control problems, violent actions, and abusing women; Guerrero (31-1-1, 18 KO’s, who holds six world titles in four divisions), in comparison, could pass as Mother Teresa. Mayweather’s egregious treatment of women most recently resulted in a 90-day jail sentence in 2011 for domestic violence, admitting that he hit his ex-girlfriend and twisted her arm while two of their children, ages 9 and 10, witnessed the attack; Guerrero, on the other hand, vacated his junior lightweight world title in 2010 to be with his cancer-stricken wife, sleeping by her side each night on the hospital floor.

“The guy who assaulted his wife, that’s the guy who is in the headlines,” Santos says. “The guy who is getting the DUI charges, that’s the guy who is in the headlines, for whatever reason…That’s another thing I like about Robert. He says, ‘Well, if they don’t want to hear about what I have to say as a Christian, that’s fine, they don’t have to get an interview with me—no problem—because God is going to get our story out one way or the other.”

The glaring contrasts continue. Mayweather: 4 million-plus Twitter followers. Guerrero: 96,000 as of May. Mayweather: He made $85 million in 2012, making him the highest paid athlete in the world according to Forbes Magazine. Guerrero: Well, he just had his first million-dollar payday after defeating Andre Berto on Nov. 24, 2012, his most recent fight.

“David and Goliath,” Guerrero says, the first words that come to his mind when he thinks of his May 4, MGM Grand showdown with “Money.” “I’m doing everything I’ve got to do to come in and shock the world. Shock the world. Right now, everybody in the world looks at me and goes, ‘He really doesn’t have a chance.”

No one ever thought he did, anyway. Guerrero and his team have been calling out Mayweather since Guerrero was two weight classes shy of even being in the running for a potential Mayweather opponent. They were laughed at for it, ridiculed, painted as imbeciles by the media.

“The promoter at that point—it was laughable to him!” Santos exclaims. “He laughed at him. “‘What,’” Santos imitates the promoter, “‘do you think he’s going to fight (Wladimir) Klitschko at heavyweight, too?!? Bahahahaha!’”

Then came 2012. After a 15-month absence, Guerrero jumped up two weight classes. He beat Aydin in unanimous decision; he beat Berto; he became a frontrunner for Fighter of the Year. Then Juan Marquez knocked out Manny Pacquiao, and, all of a sudden, Guerrero was the leading candidate to fight Mayweather.

Who’s laughing now?

“You have the highest paid athlete in the world, undefeated pound for pound, and you have this kid from Gilroy,” Santos says, talking speedily. “In terms of boxing, it’s almost like David vs. Goliath. And if you think that when I got this kid I believed he was going to reach the apex of the sport and fight the highest paid athlete in the world, one of the most recognizable athletes in the world, I would have laughed at you!”

And here’s the crazy thing: 2012 is the boring part of the story. There were times people thought his career was over. There were times people thought the closest thing to him—his wife—would be taken away.

Last year only scratches the surface.

“Mi vida loca,” Guerrero laughs. “My crazy life.”

_____________________________________________________ 

 

It didn’t matter that Guerrero was the heavy favorite and lost, that he was unable to defend his featherweight title, that the media called his performance against Orlando Salido in 2006 an embarrassment and a disgrace. He knelt anyway. He gave glory to God anyway, as he fell to one knee in the dressing room after the fight.

He stood up and addressed his team, a team that was in outright shock from the loss. They had all witnessed Guerrero get destroyed. “Hey,” he said assuredly to everyone. “It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright.”

If there are two words that describe Guerrero, it’s positive and confident. It’s bizarre, really. But it’s who he is.

Three days later, Santos got a call informing him that Salido had tested positive for steroids. Their fight would be ruled a no contest.

Enter: Albanian boxer Spend Abazi. No one wanted Guerrero to take the Abazi fight. Even Freddie Roach, one of the most well-known trainers in boxing and five-time Trainer of the Year, urged Guerrero not to take it.

Why? Well, it was in Abazi’s backyard—Copenhagen, Denmark—meaning the only likely way Guerrero would win (because of the judges) would be by knockout. Not to mention it was merely months after a juiced up fraud had beat the tar out of Guerrero in Las Vegas.

But the thing about Guerrero is that his positive attitude and confidence usually lands him in the gray area between ambitious and insane.

“No one travels to take on a fight with a guy in his own backyard,” says Guerrero’s publicist, Mario Serrano. “But Robert said, ‘I’m going to take it anyway; if you don’t believe in me, I believe in myself.’” Guerrero won by ninth-round technical knockout, handing Abazi his first defeat.

“Against all odds, with his back against the wall, he travels halfway around the world into this guy’s backyard, and he stops him. He stops him,” Serrano continues. “Not everybody does that.”

But that’s just Guerrero. Ever since Santos walked into a Gilroy, Calif., gym 12 years ago and met a 17-year-old, 122-pound kid, Guerrero’s positive attitude and confidence has knocked Santos off his feet, sending him proverbially stumbling into the ropes.

“Bob, I want you to manage me,” Guerrero told him a dozen years ago. “You line ‘em up and I’ll beat ‘em.”

The crazy thing is that Santos had never managed a boxer before. It’s why Santos was hesitant. It’s also why, Santos believes, Guerrero’s road to stardom has been exceptionally long and tumultuous. Santos didn’t have the leverage—the  connections—that other managers had. Unfortunately, that’s boxing. That’s politics.

“We’re mapping this course, and it’s like us against the world in this thing,” Santos reflects.

It didn’t matter to Guerrero. “God is our promoter,” he’d say.

Somehow, their partnership made sense. Santos lost his father in a car wreck before he was born, and he lost his mother and grandparents in a plane crash when he was two and a half. If anyone had tasted pain, it was Santos; and if anyone could deal with pain, it was Guerrero, which is good, because it was coming.

In Guerrero’s first pro fight, Santos reflects, he shattered his hand. Santos swore his career was over. His eighth pro fight, he busted his shoulder and had to sit out a year. His tenth fight, he suffered an elbow injury.

“When he broke the right hand, it forced him to start to develop a jab, which he didn’t have,” Santos says of the southpaw. “When he hurt the elbow, it forced him to start really working on that right hook, which he didn’t have. All of those setbacks are what has enabled him to become one of the best fighters in the world.”

“He never said, ‘Why is this happening?’” Santos continues. “It was always, ‘God has something bigger for us, Bob. God has something bigger for us.’”

Even when he had his heart ripped out.

_____________________________________________________ 

It looked like Casey Guerrero had cockroaches all over her face. She had dropped to below 100 pounds and had scabs marring her cheeks and forehead.

Robert Guerrero’s wife, his childhood sweetheart he married in 2005, was dying from leukemia. Dying.

Santos remembers walking out of Stanford Hospital one day, talking to Serrano on the phone. “She ain’t goin’ to make it,” he told Serrano. “She’s done, man. I don’t want to let him know, man—only God knows, only God knows—but man, it’s over.”

Guerrero walked in, just as Santos was walking out. “Hey Bob!” he said cheerfully. “How’s the wife doing?”

“Good,” Santos replied, thinking of Guerrero’s dying wife.

“How are the kids?” Guerrero asked genuinely.

“Good,” Santos replied, thinking of Guerrero’s two kids whom Guerrero had been mothering—making their meals, dropping them off at school, taking care of them, sleeping on the hospital floor, all the while trying to train.

“Never did I ever see him waver in his stance that his wife was going to make it,” Santos explains, quieter than usual. “And that’s what amazes me about him.”

Life was exciting for the Guerreros in 2007. They had a year and a half old daughter, Savannah, and an infant son, Robert Jr. But one evening, Casey starting puking incessantly. Her eyes were bloodshot, and Robert rushed her to the emergency room. There, she found out she had leukemia.

“I froze up,” Casey says. “When you are 23 years old, you never have that thought cross your mind…ever.”

Casey was diagnosed with leukemia merely days before Robert was scheduled to defend his featherweight title against Martin Honorio. Robert didn’t want to leave his wife and fight Honorio, but she convinced him to go. “He didn’t want to fight,” Casey says. “I told him, ‘I’ll be fine. Just go ahead and go.’”

So Robert flew to Tucson, Ariz., and—almost straight out of a movie—Robert landed a right jab followed by a straight left hand to Honorio’s temple, knocking him out 56 seconds into the first round, then flew back the next morning.

He slept on the hospital floor the coming weeks as Casey underwent chemotherapy. “People think I’m the fighter in the family,” Robert says. “Naw, she’s the real fighter.”

Things got worse. She relapsed three times between 2007 and 2009, and the chemo never worked. It would take a bone-marrow transplant, and if they couldn’t find a donor, she would die. In the unlikely situation they did find a donor, it’d still be a 50/50 procedure. “At that point, you’re thinking, ‘Man, my God,’” Santos says. “I told my wife, ‘What more does this kid have to go through?’”

Robert and his team shut everything down, vacating his world title before a fight that would have resulted in the biggest payday of his career. “I think he knew that if he left her side, even for a second, she wouldn’t make it,” Santos says.

Two months later, miraculously, a compatible donor was found on the Be The Match Registry, a non-profit organization Guerrero and his team avidly promote.

Finding a donor, especially that quickly, is a miracle in itself. And it would take a bigger miracle for the procedure to work.

_____________________________________________________ 

Doctors prepared for the procedure and told Robert to make arrangements, just in case. He didn’t.

But really, does that surprise you? That’s just who Robert Guerrero is, as you’ve seen. He’s confident. He’s positive. Where his confidence comes—well, that’s a different story. It’s worth noting that, if his confidence came from his own plan, his own abilities, his own power, it would probably be gone by now. No one wants to face a guy like Salido on steroids, then travel half way around the globe, just to keep your title. No one wants to sleep on the hospital floor next to your dying wife, dependent on a donor to conquer cancer, dependent on doctors to survive. Look into Robert’s uncontrollable past and ask the question: Did he want any of that?

“Whatever He (God) puts you through, He’s grooming you to be a king,” Robert says.

There’s a minor prophet in the Old Testament named Habakkuk, who questions God’s plan, the suffering it sometimes entails, and he journeys deep into the characteristics of God, eventually concluding: Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. 

When Robert fought Aydin in 2012—the start of this story and the beginning of his wild journey to Mayweather as a welterweight—Casey was in the stands.

Cancer free.

Sitting next to her was a 22-year-old German woman named Katharina Zech, her donor, the woman who saved her life.

“She’s an only child, so now she has a sister,” Casey smiles.

And before he entered the ring, Robert silenced the locker room.

“It’s Jesus Christ time,” he said. “It’s God’s time.”

See, if you want to know where Guerrero’s confidence comes from, that’s where. Robert Guerrero is positive and confident because it’s never about him. Ever.

“I am going to be able to stand in the middle of a 20 by 20 ring with the most anticipated, highest-paid athlete in the world,” Guerrero says. “And to be able to step in the ring and be blessed with the opportunity to shock the world and be able to give all the glory to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, it’s incredible to think about the position God has put me in. God has a plan, and He is the master planner.”

Which would make the mighty Floyd Mayweather Jr., a drop in the ocean.

“When I think of God’s plan that He has for me, I think this is just scratching the surface. Boxing is just scratching the surface. Beating Floyd Mayweather is just scratching the surface. That’s what I think of God’s plan.”

By Stephen Copeland

Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum magazine.

The Heart Of A Man

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On Tuesday, Ben Crane and the “Golf Boys” released their second single, “2.Oh,” as they continue to revolutionize the image of the PGA Tour. Our feature on Crane, “The Heart Of A Man,” was published in the Summer 2012 issue of Sports Spectrum.

Ben Crane was walking off the green after a birdie on the par-5 15th in the final round of the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, NC.

People lined shoulder-to-shoulder on the ropes, reaching and scrambling to give Crane a high-five. They applauded. They screamed his name. The sound of fans’ feet shuffling in the Carolina pine straw could be heard as spectators bustled about in every direction, some toward the ropes to see Crane, some toward the 16th tee, and some toward the 15th green to find a favorable seat for Stewart Cink, Rickie Fowler, Rory McIlroy, or Webb Simpson, who were yet to come through.

Crane, 36 and handsomely bald, walked between the ropes toward the tee box. Once recognized for his slow play, Crane is now a crowd favorite because of his goofy YouTube videos.

“Nice birdie, Ben!” screamed a man holding up his Michelob Ultra.

“Oo-da-la-li-la-li!” cried someone else, alluding to Crane’s “Golf Boys” video with Bubba Watson, Rickie Fowler and Hunter Mahan, where Crane wears a ridiculous motorcycle helmet, goggles, and red spandex.

“Finish strong, Ben!”

“Good putt, Ben!”

“The Golf Boys rock, Ben!”

It was the most electric Crane’s gallery had been all day.

“Good job, Ben,” his wife Heather said quietly from the middle of the gallery, nowhere near the ropes, nowhere near him, standing in the shade beneath a nearby pine tree.

Crane somehow heard the voice, turned his head toward her, and smiled.

“Thanks, baby,” he said.

————

Heather and Ben Crane sat in a circle at the PGA Tour Bible study.

He had his arm around her. Every once in a while, he would lean over and kiss her on the head.

After more than a decade of marriage, three children, and a helter-skelter lifestyle of traveling on Tour, the couple remains (as iconic commentator David Feherty says of Bubba and Angie Watson) “hopelessly in love.”

Heather, who was a cheerleader at the University of Oregon, is Crane’s primary cheerleader, traveling to 90 percent of his tournaments a year.

The two of them met in college, initially, through Ben’s roommate and current caddie, Joel Stock, and again, at a fraternity party three months later.

He routinely brought flowers to Heather at her sorority house and attended every game she cheered. Heather says he always surprised her in the computer lab with a drink and a pack of Starbursts.

That affection hasn’t changed. It has only grown.

————

Each round of golf, Ben Crane and his caddie, Joel Stock, do devotions together before tee-off. Stock says there are three ways you grow: scripture, prayer and fellowship. It’s their calling.

And it’s one calling and a series of calls that pretty much describes Stock and Crane’s relationship.

Crane called Stock after his freshman year at Baylor, hoping to return home to Portland and play at the University of Oregon, where Stock played. Stock called the coach. The coach called Crane. The rest is history.

In 2005, after five years on Tour, Crane’s former caddie, Brett Waldman, started caddying for Camilo Villegas. That’s when Crane’s old college roommate and teammate’s name entered the picture. It was something he had never thought about before.

Crane called Stock. Again.

He wanted him to be his caddie.

Stock was still in Oregon, helping run a family business at a lumber mill. He had gone through some tough times and was in a low state. He needed out. He needed adventure.

“My entire life changed when he called me,” Stock says. “It changed everything. It came at a perfect time.”

A year ago, Stock was the one that gave Crane a call.

He asked him to be the best man at his wedding.

————

Acorns were scattered at their feet. Trees draped over the path.

Crane, on a nature walk with two of his children, CeeCee, 5, and Brady, 3, (Saylor turns 1 in October), opened his Bible and started reading from Genesis, chapter one.

He told them about the order God made everything, pointing to the trees above and the seeds below.

“My five-year-old girl was just amazed (that God made everything),” Ben said, smiling. “She was just lighting up.”

————

Rickie Fowler knocked in a four-foot birdie on No. 18 at Quail Hollow to earn his first PGA Tournament victory.

Crane was there, waiting to congratulate him.

He was there when Bubba Watson won the Masters, too, giving the teary-eyed Watson a supportive hug since his family couldn’t be there.

And these are his competitors, remember.

But that’s what Crane has become amongst some of his peers—much more than just another competitor—he’s become a mentor and a leader.

“This is my 11th year on tour, so now I’m starting to spend time with guys who are younger who haven’t been out here for as many years and stuff,” Crane says. “Just trying to engage with guys.”

Their fraternity of Christian brothers on Tour have started renting houses together at different tournament sites and also have a Bible study every Wednesday night. Crane is trying to memorize 60 Scripture passages in a year and says he has some bets on the line. “Someone will have to pay up,” Crane jokes, “because I’m memorizing those babies.”

Crane tries to encourage players and fans by writing devotionals for his website (bencranegolf.com), and recently started mentoring Webb Simpson because Simpson asked him to at the beginning of the 2012 season.

“There is definitely a movement here on Tour,” Crane says. “There are also a bunch of players who would say, ‘The guys at the Bible study are just a bunch of hypocrites.’ We always say, ‘Well, there’s always room for one more.’ Yeah, we are (hypocrites). That’s why we need Jesus.”

————

The thing about Ben Crane is that he just doesn’t love those who are close to him—his wife, his caddie, his children, and his peers—it seems like he loves everyone.

It’s not uncommon to see him talking to the gallery or joking with the crowd. After his practice round on Tuesday at Quail Hollow, he talked to two men who had been following him for 20-some minutes—showing them one of his favorite putting drills, talking about author Donald Miller (who is also from Portland), and addressing deep spiritual subjects you typically wouldn’t talk about with two random strangers.

Every year, the Cranes invite 100 men’s college golfers over to their house through College Golf Fellowship for golf during the day and a Bible study at night. The golfers ask the couple questions about dating, marriage, God, and the Bible.

And if you couldn’t tell Crane was fun-loving from his hysterical videos, just watch him on the golf course.

At The Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial, Ben dunked his approach during his second round on No. 9, then ran over to the gallery and hugged his pastor.

At the Waste Management Open at TPC Scottsdale, Ben took his “Golf Boys” helmet and goggles out of his golf bag, and joined Bubba Watson on the 16th tee in front of 30,000 fans, known as the loudest hole in golf, with a microphone—where they sang their golf world hit “Oh Oh Oh.” The crowd, which was already wild (and drunk), went even wilder.

“It’s amazing what you can get at Goodwill for $5,” Crane said of the helmet.

————

Crane was struggling at the 2012 Zurich Classic of New Orleans. He was getting bad break after bad break, on his way to carding a 77, and nothing was going his way. He felt trapped and oppressed.

His caddie, Joel Stock, looked at Crane.

“Run your recovery strategy,” Stock told him.

Crane’s “recovery strategy” is to concentrate on scripture for at least 10 seconds, which allows him to take his mind off his golf round.

“It’s so easy to think that what you shot today is who you are,” Crane says.

He thought about the current verses he was trying to memorize, which was Lamentations 3:22-23…then he thought about 1 Corinthians 3:16…then he realized that, though he wasn’t in a “good” mood still, he was at peace.

“It’s amazing just how applicable that is when you put God’s Word in your heart, and you get into rough situations, and you don’t have time to grab a sword, it’s in your mind,” Ben says.

If there’s one thing that stands out about Crane, it’s his heart—his zeal to be a good husband, friend, father, mentor, leader, and yes, even entertainer.

His zeal to love.

“I just read the Proverb, ‘As water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects a man,’” Ben says. “It’s all about what we are putting into our hearts, because it will directly affect what happens in our minds.”

Ben Crane keeps his heart in check.

Seeing the way he loves, that’s really no surprise.

By Stephen Copeland

Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum.

The Year That Changed Him

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Blessings tend to make life’s imperfections dissipate like a cloud of smoke. That is, if you let them, if you focus on them, if you realize you’re blessed. If not, you’ll end up like most people, trapped in the smoky thickness with bloodshot eyes, probably coughing and complaining, your vision clouded, lacking sufficient depth and perspective.

When all you see are life’s imperfections, your only desire to escape from problems that will always exist, it’s kind of ironic that you can’t escape.

You’re blinded.
_______________________________________________________________________

It’d be easy for Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry to be blinded. It’d be easy for his on-the-court woes to affect every aspect of his life, every facet of his happiness.

The No. 7 pick in the 2009 NBA Draft didn’t pan out the way Warrior fans hoped last season, when he missed 40 of 66 contests and his final 27 games because of a right ankle injury. It was by far the most frustrating season of his basketball career, high school and college included.

After only missing two games his rookie season (17.5 points per game) and eight games in 2010 (18.6 point per game), Curry was living up to the hype swarming around him out of Davidson College, where he led the Wildcats to a magical Elite Eight appearance and their first NCAA tournament victory since 1969. He was shaping up to be Golden State’s savior as well, a struggling franchise that has only been to the playoffs once in the last 17 years.

But the Warriors backslid last year, undoubtedly affected by Curry’s injury, and finished with an abysmal 23-43 record with Curry only averaging 14.7 points per game.

“You are tested when things are going south for you, but you want to be steadfast in what you believe in,” Curry told Golden State broadcaster Jim Barnett this preseason regarding his faith. “It wasn’t my time last year to be healthy and go out and do what I wanted to do, so hopefully bigger things are in store this year, and hopefully I take the lessons I learned last year to heart.”

Meanwhile, the daunting question weighs in the minds of Warrior fans: Will their star’s ankle ever be the same? He had offseason surgery after missing eight games in 2011, and had another surgery after missing 61 percent of his games in 2012, a surgery that required 3-4 months of intensive rehab.

Many argue it’s an injury that won’t go away—no matter how much rehab, no matter how many surgeries—especially after he injured it again against Portland on Oct. 19 this preseason.

He returned for the start of the regular season—an 87-85 victory over the Suns, the same day the Warriors extended his contract by four years and $44 million—but Warrior fans can’t help but wonder: How long will he last?
_______________________________________________________________________

Ayesha Curry wonders how he does it—how he comes home every day, the weight of Warrior basketball redemption on his shoulders, the frustration of ankle injury after ankle injury, surgery after surgery, rehab after rehab, and doesn’t bring any of it into the household. None.

His wife of a year and a half—who he met at the age of 15 in youth group at Central Church of God in Charlotte, N.C. (where they also married on July 30, 2011)—says it’s because he’s steady. Some think he’s emotionless—his monotone voice prevalent in interviews (unless you get him talking about golf, Charlotte, or Christian rapper Trip Lee)—but he’s really just steady.

“Stephen,” she’ll say to him. “I’ve never heard you complain about anything.” She says it’s something she tells him rather frequently.

He’s not lackadaisical; he has perspective. In his excitement, he’s no Tim Tebow (not that displaying passion is a bad thing). In his disappointments, he’s no Cam Newton (not that sulking in the media room is a bad thing, er, no comment). He is never too high; he is never too low. When he scored 33 points against Wisconsin and captivated the nation as he led 10th-seeded Davidson to an Elite Eight appearance, the most you saw out of him was a fist pump. When he missed 61 percent of the Warriors’ games last season, the most you heard out of him was that it “challenged my patience.”

“He’s had a pretty rough year and a half when it comes to his ankle injuries,” Ayesha says. “But there has never been a day that he has had a frown on his face…It’s to the point where I’m in awe and shock. How do you not bring all of that stress home with you? He comes home with a smile on his face and happy. I appreciate it.

“Nothing really ever gets him down too much. I think that a part of that is because he knows how blessed he is, and all of the wonderful things in his life outweigh the things that could be better.”

And that’s Stephen Curry. The smoke—his trials—it dissipates around him because the penetrating air—his reality—is too encouraging to cloud his vision.
_____________________________________________________________________________

The fact that Stephen Curry delivered his own child in the hospital has to say something about him: He’s going to be there. He’s going to be there no matter what.

Though on-the-court turmoil has defined his basketball career the last year and a half, off-the-court joy has defined his personal life. And it hasn’t been at all what he expected. At all.

But when God is the one writing your story, Stephen and Ayesha will tell you that He often leads you to places you can’t fathom, places that force you to grow and rely on Him. In a nutshell, this is it:

July 30, 2011: Ayesha and Stephen marry.
Soon after, 2011: They move their belongings from Charlotte to California.
November, 2011: Three months into marriage, they discover Ayesha is pregnant.
July 19, 2012: Their baby daughter, Riley, is born. Stephen becomes a father at 23. Ayesha becomes a mother at 22.

“It’s been a whirlwind,” Stephen laughs. “I had to grow up, for sure…We wanted kids, but we didn’t think it would happen in our first three months of marriage,” he continues laughing.

Ayesha says she and Stephen are still in shock they are already parents in their early 20’s. “She’s a great baby, and we just kinda tuck her in our back pocket and take her wherever we go,” she laughs. “Even to this day, we haven’t had time to process what has really happened. We are still like, ‘Oh, we get to keep her?’”

It’s in the context of his family that you grasp the depth of Stephen’s personality—his desire to be a leader and carry his family in the right direction, his passion for his faith.

“He (God) has given me a lot of responsibility,” Stephen says. “He’s encouraged me to really be the spiritual head of the house He has called all men to be. It’s easy when you’re by yourself to be selfish about it, but when you have other people you are accountable for—emotionally, spiritually, physically—it’s a different ball game. For me, being the one everyone is looking to for spiritual guidance when it comes to leading our family in the right direction, it’s a big responsibility, but I can’t thank God enough for that.”

Ayesha says that she and Stephen both have the Bible app on their phones and either read or pray together every morning. “He is doing an incredible job,” she says. “I can’t begin to tell you everything—how I wake up and see how amazing and strong he is. He really is changing the stereotype of an NBA player. A lot of that has to do with the way he was raised. It also has to do with a lot of the decisions he made in his life. There is just really no option. It’s the way we live. It’s who we are, and it’s what we represent.”

Stephen embraces leadership both on-the-court and off-the-court. He feels a calling to, not only lead his family, but also go against the grain in the NBA, where players can potentially carouse and sleep with whomever. They are the most recognizable athletes on the planet, and they can do whatever they want, for the most part. The world is at their fingertips.

“I’m in a different demographic than most of the players and most of my teammates,” Stephen says. “Totally different situation. Different priorities. Different interests. Me, personally, battling being a part of the team and not being the odd ball out—that’s the hardest thing to balance. My priority is to be a man and child of God and not get sucked into the temptations a lot of guys don’t have a problem getting into. Family definitely helps me in that regard because if my faith carries them and they’re happy, I know I’m doing the right thing.

“It’s very humbling to know I’m able to be on the stage that I am, and I think God has put me in this situation to change this perspective on what it is to be a man of God and a player in the NBA. I want to use the gifts God gave me on the basketball court to uplift His name. That’s at the forefront of why I play the game.

“Being a father and a husband, I’m hopefully able to speak to a lot more people who are going through the same thing. It’s nice to talk to them. It’s pretty powerful how many people God has put in my family’s path in the year and a half we have been out here on the west coast. It’s amazing, that if you’re open to it, ask God to keep your eyes open, and He’ll put you in situations to witness and make people stronger.”
_______________________________________________________________________

A week or two ago, Ayesha sent Stephen a text while he was on the road. It was Ephesians 3:20: Always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And somehow, that sums up the last 18 months perfectly.

By Stephen Copeland

Stephen Copeland is a staff writer at Sports Spectrum magazine. This story was published in the All-Basketball, October 2012 DigiMag.

Another Angle — Life is a hard drive

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Cigarette smoke sunk into my skin like cologne.

I was in a random man’s garage—I think his name was Bob—and I had just met him. Bob had wrinkles in his face like he had been tanning and smoking for decades and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed his skinny, almost sickly, chest and stature. I’ve never met a mass-murderer, but if I ever do, I imagine him looking like Bob.

Part of me wondered if I was right, if Bob was going to kill me, if I had naively wandered into his trap. Bob supposedly ran a data recovery business for damaged hard drives…out of his garage…in the middle of nowhere. Also, I found him on the Internet. The scene was as sketchy as a drug deal.

But I was too stressed to fear anything. Jumping out of a plane would have felt lackluster because I was so consumed in my anxiety, numb to every other feeling.

All I could think about was my crashed hard drive—all the files, projects, articles, interviews, and books, that I had lost. I felt like a part of me had died. My computer was my life. And I lost it.

Bob was my last, desperate attempt to recover the data. He could have ran his business out of a big white van, blasting ice cream music, and I still would have hopped in. I’m not saying I was smart, but Bob was all I had left.

After doing who-knows-what to my hard drive with the equipment in his garage and using computer terminology that was as foreign as ancient Greek, Bob walked toward me. He lit a cigarette. His dog eerily followed him around and stood at his feet. “Can’t do it,” he said in a raspy voice. “It’s dead.”

I hung my head and felt like Charlie Brown. “I’ve killed it,” I thought to myself. Bob went on to tell me that if I wanted to get my hard drive repaired, I’d have to potentially shell out thousands to send it to a data recovery plant. In case you’re wondering, most writers don’t have thousands of dollars lying around. They have Ramen noodles lying around or a ton of emotional issues or likely both.

I never recovered the data on my hard drive, but I learned a valuable lesson that week: Life is hard.

That week I had been reading about Paul and his persecution in the Bible, you know, like many Christians do when they face a trial of any kind and write it off as persecution—even though they aren’t getting martyred or stoned or imprisoned for their faith. But it’s not persecution—it’s far from it—it’s life. And life can be hard. That’s normal.

That was a year ago. Fast forward to last weekend, two days before I was supposed to leave for New Orleans to cover the Super Bowl for Sports Spectrum, our biggest opportunity to gather content every year.

My computer crashed. Again.

I turned it off and on, off and on, called the Apple store, pulled out my hair, took it to the Apple store, confirmed it was dead, turned it off and on, blared angry punk rock, called a tech hotline, took it to the Apple store again, called another tech hotline, turned it off and on, prayed, screamed, all the while slowly recalling crucial interviews for upcoming stories, documents, and important emails I had lost. The same feelings I felt a year before standing in Bob’s garage, wondering if he was going to kill me and not really caring if he did, started to return.

Now, I had done better with backing up my files routinely to an external hard drive, but it’s not like I back up my files every day. The last time I backed them up was probably before Christmas.

By the way, if an Apple-nut is reading this, no, I don’t use iCloud. Yes, I know I should, but there’s something frightening to me about some of my unpublished and uncensored writings and thoughts floating around somewhere for the government to potentially access. I’d probably be labeled a security threat. Remember those emotional issues I talked about earlier?

Once again, I found myself in my car driving to meet someone I found on the Internet, this time, to purchase a computer so I could do my job down in New Orleans. I suggested we meet at a Panera Bread, not in a garage that very well could have been a torture chamber. There’s something comforting and safe about Panera Bread; that’s a fact.

Right when I sat down at Panera, I learned another lesson. The man opened his computer, and his desktop background read, “God is in Control.” If God doesn’t have a sense of humor, neither does Chevy Chase or Will Ferrell.

I ended up buying the computer, stopping at a Best Buy on the way to New Orleans, and successfully recovering data from my old computer, which was now unusable.

But even if I wouldn’t have been able to recover my data, the truths from my two computer experiences still apply: 1) Life is hard, and 2) God is in control. Hockey star Rocco Grimaldi recently told me, “Life is life, and God is still good in the midst of it.”

At Media Day in New Orleans, I asked John Harbaugh about the crazy year he has had as the Baltimore Ravens head coach. “The biggest thing I’ve learned faith-wise is that God is in the driver’s seat,” he said. “That is what faith is. It’s the belief in the things that are unseen, that are uncertain, that we can’t be sure about.”

Driving, I think, is synonymous with life. It’s rarely perfect. There’s weather, traffic, potholes, tragedy, and inconveniences. Also, Kesha is on the radio.

Faith is about having God in the driver’s seat, as Harbaugh said, on this sometimes hard and sometimes joyful road of life. Life is life, and God is still good in the midst of it. He’s still in control.

Sometimes it takes a desktop background to remind you.

By Stephen Copeland

This column appeared in the February 2013 Sports Spectrum DigiMag. Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum magazine. His column tackles sports and faith from another angle, whether it’s humorous, personal or controversial. Follow him on Twitter-@steve_copeland or email him at stephen.copeland@sportsspectrum.com.

Another Angle — Underwater

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about fish. 

I wonder if they fantasize about leaving the water and living on land. Like, does a bluegill dream of one day working on Wall Street? Does he fantasize about walking down the streets of New York City with a briefcase and his morning coffee, answering emails and checking scores on his iPhone?

Outside a Pixar film idea, it’s kind of a strange thought. Why? Because fish are content and free in the water and have no desire to wear a suit or dabble in the stock market.

But there have been times in my life when I’ve felt like that fish. Religion, at times I have thought, is like water; it’s restricting. The high life, on the other hand, is land. 

Then I hear a story like Joel Parker’s… 

Joel Parker was on his way back from the slopes. He pounded another beer and chucked the bottle out the sunroof of his Subaru station wagon.

He pressed his foot on the accelerator, his friends laughing in the backseat, anxiously peering out the rear-window to see if the bottle struck a brand new car in the dealership parking lot.

A fun day of snowboarding was never enough for he and his friends in high school. Drinking underage was never enough. Drinking underage while driving was never enough. Drinking underage while driving and vandalizing a Benz? Ah, there it is. That was enough. For the day, at least.

“If we went to school the next day and didn’t have a story about something radical, insane, or bad we were doing, we weren’t living life,” Parker reflects. “That’s where we found adrenaline, excitement, and life…If I wasn’t going 100 mph with my hair on fire, I wasn’t happy.”

Parker never wore Nike. He wore Vans or Volcom. In eighth grade, he punched his teacher. In high school, he and his friends once stole a $500 snowboarding rack from a broken-down car on the way up to the mountain. He would sometimes get his “old, piece-of-junk” Subaru up to 110 miles per hour.

Snowboarding, as a sport, had no rules, and the lifestyle was no different. It lured him in. He had nothing to do with religion because religion had nothing to do with him. Religion had rules and he had none.

“I had been around Christians,” says Parker, who went to a Christian middle school and high school. “I just kind of assumed that religion was trying to make you better. I had more fun being bad than being good. I thought Christianity was all about being good and acting and behaving a certain way…I saw bondage.”

One day, Parker suffered a third-degree back sprain off a jump while snowboarding backcountry.

“I kept pushing it and pushing it,” Parker says. “I kept going as big as I could possibly go, and at some point, your body can’t take a landing from x amount of feet high.”

All around, his “no rules” mentality started betraying him. He was cooped up for a year without snowboarding; one of his friends impregnated a girl; two of his friends wound up paralyzed.

“For me, the thrills started running out,” Parker says. “How much faster can you drive a car? I didn’t want to go from pot to heroine. I didn’t want to do crack.”

At 18 years old, with snowboarding stripped from his life, Parker found freedom in the very thing he had been running from.

“I used to see Christianity as conformity,” Parker says. “I wanted to be adventurous. I wanted to live life to its full. And, come to find out—John 10:10—Jesus is the one who does that.”

Now, at 35, Parker is the founder of Nations Foundation, a snowboarding ministry that tells stories through film and impacts thousands of snowboarders worldwide. Parker is going after the culture that nearly destroyed him.

“I know that culture is in bondage, and I know how enslaving the lifestyle becomes after a while,” Parker says. “I stand before you now 18 years later, and I’m free today. I have complete freedom in Jesus. I’m content as a person. Not trying to impress anybody. Not even trying to impress God. I’m just a guy who, every day, I’m trying to receive His grace even more and try to understand it even more. I really found life in Christ to be the most adventurous, freeing, transforming thing I’ve ever partaken in.”

If you’re at the crossroads of freedom or adventure, you should think about fish. Theologian Timothy Keller mentions in “The Reason for God” that fish are restricted to water, and yet, they thrive in the water. 

We’re very comparable to fish, I think. We’re created by God and wired by God. God is our water. And, you can look at water as a restriction, but there’s nothing freeing, nor enjoyable about dying on land. 

Ever find it weird that 95 percent of the underwater world remains unexplored? It makes me wish I could explore it. It makes me jealous of fish. The Christian life, I’ve found, is a lot like the ocean. It’s infinitely deep. It’s to be discovered.

Joel Parker challenges all of us to either start swimming or venture deeper.

By Stephen Copeland

This column appeared in the January 2013 Sports Spectrum DigiMag. Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum magazine. His column tackles sports and faith from another angle, whether it’s humorous, personal or controversial. Follow him on Twitter-@steve_copeland or email him at stephen.copeland@sportsspectrum.com.

Beauty Unseen

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The drive from Lake Tahoe to Seattle is about 13 hours.

The road, like a river, winds its way through an array of landscapes—mountains, valleys, forests, desert, and high plains—as if God is showcasing His most beautiful paintings.

Nick Visconti is on the road, the river. He doesn’t second-guess his direction, just as water doesn’t question its current.

There’s something as mysterious, unexplainable, and true as gravity that’s pushing him. Like the flow of a river, he can feel its direction. He cannot see it. But he can feel it—the thrill of adventure as he looks ahead, hand on the wheel, toward an open road of endless opportunity, yet a reality as poignant as lost love, as he sees everything in his rear-view mirror vanish quickly behind him.

His comfort zone and contentment.

His family and friends.

Everything he once knew.

Lost in the miles.

Visconti is wearing a snowcap, aviators, flannel, and tight Sessions jeans, the same pants he snowboards in. He has his windows down and is blasting 90’s grunge rock. He looks hip, like he could play guitar in coffee shops, but also hard-core, like a Johnny-Knoxville-sort-of-crazy, like he snowboards down mountains and leaps off cliffs…which, he does.

If you saw him on the street, you may think he painted graffiti on a library, but if you heard him speak, you may think he’s read every book in the library. He’s extreme like a skydiver and reckless like a cowboy, but he has the vernacular of a poet and the gentleness of a counselor.

When ESPN asked him about his past “record” in snowboarding competitions, he replied, “I don’t keep records because I don’t spin vinyl.” When they asked if there was anything else he’d like to talk about, he said, “This morning I danced with the sunrise to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack.” Visconti, the 2012 Winter X Games bronze medalist in the snowboarding street contest, is his own man.

“The drive to Seattle was vivid imagery, almost foreshadowing what I was about to experience—really, what we will experience in all of life because of the different landscapes and terrains,” Visconti says softly and elegantly, almost as if he’s reading. “There were different weather patterns. There was blue sky, where all you could see was the expansion of the sky meeting the horizon in dark, vivid, blue and beautiful colors. At the same time, I would go over areas of the northwest, and it was dreary, doom, gloom and torrential downpours. Everything metaphorically spoke to not only how I was feeling but foreshadowed life as a whole…You can clop all those words together and create a picture. But at the end of the day, I was feeling.”

Leaving northern California for Seattle made about as much sense as the 6-foot, 155-pound Visconti dropping snowboarding to be a linebacker. It was where he had spent his entire life, where his family lived, where his closest friends lived, where the girl he loved lived. It was where his snowboarding career began and where it blossomed. Northern California claimed him as its own. It was where he was loved.

Visconti’s life, on the outside, had never looked better. After eight years of balancing snowboarding and his college education, taking one semester of school each year, he had finally attained his bachelor’s degree in Speech Communications from the University of Nevada. One of his lifelong academic goals, after nearly a decade of dedication, was finally complete.

But it didn’t stop there.

After receiving his degree that December, Visconti took bronze in the street contest of the 2012 Winter X Games in January, thus earning him an automatic invite to the 2013 Winter X Games on Jan. 24-27. In a year, he had gone from aspiring snowboarder and student to bronze medalist and graduate. He had achieved two of the most important things he sought after in life: academic and athletic success.

“Those were very grand things,” Visconti says. “Although I want them to continue evolving, when I kind of came to climactic endpoints of both of those accomplishments, I was kind of questioning, ‘Well, what’s next?’ It was somewhat mediocre and felt somewhat empty…Aesthetically, things looked great. Internally, I felt a lack of direction. I felt hollowness, but more than anything, an insurmountable desire to make a change. Seattle was that change.”

In April, Visconti left everything he knew. He wanted more than academic and athletic accolades. He craved meaning.

Why Seattle, he doesn’t exactly know. He just says it was a “faith-based” move. And that’s the thing about a river’s water; it doesn’t have to explain its direction. It simply flows. There’s something pushing it.

“That life was something that, at that point, was lackluster,” he says of northern California. “It was dim-lit, and I was ready to shine.”

≈≈≈

Someone handed Laura Lawson a soda, and she didn’t even know it was there.

“Your peripheral vision is terrible,” her friend told her, holding the soda.

Over the next few weeks Lawson realized she couldn’t see things, even if they were placed right next to her face. At first she didn’t think it was a big deal. But just in case, she decided to get her eyes checked out.

Lawson, who was studying fine arts at Laguna College of Art & Design at the time, was referred to an ophthalmologist. Then another. And another.

Nothing.

In March of 2010, she found herself sitting in a San Francisco doctor’s office with one of the top eye specialists and researchers in the nation, and listening to the bitter truth that she had a rare eye disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa, something only 1 in every 4,000 people have. And Lawson was one of them.

Because her digression was so slow, she hadn’t noticed that she had lost 70-75 percent of her peripheral vision over the course of her lifetime. She was told she would lose the rest of it. Not just her peripheral vision. But all of it.

One day she would have a cane, and she would be dependent on others. She was an artist going blind.

“Depression definitely set in where I asked, ‘God, why am I pursuing a career when I need my eyesight? Someday, I’m going to be blind,’” Lawson says transparently.

She could no longer drive a car. She noticed herself tripping over things in class. And she eventually left art school. She hit rock bottom. As for painting, she was done. She was giving up.

“I left school completely devastated, and my heart was in a very vulnerable place,” Lawson says. “No one told me, ‘Hey, it’s okay to grieve. It’s okay to cry about this. It’s okay to grieve the loss of something so incredibly precious.’”

Instead of painting, she began writing. Her words inspired people, and she developed a large, online following in low-vision communities. And, while encouraging others was fulfilling, she couldn’t hide what she was feeling privately. She was wrestling with reality and blinded by depression. Hope and peace, she couldn’t see—and understandably so. The disease was getting the best of her.

“It really was a very interesting journey for me where I immediately thought I was okay,” Lawson says. “I thought, ‘Okay I’m a Christian, you trust God through hard times. That’s what you do. So I’m fine.’ But all the while, I was actually really suffering. I was really hurting. There was this huge pressure I put on myself to be okay and trust God. I felt like, as a good Christian, I shouldn’t be questioning this. I shouldn’t be questioning, ‘Why me?’ and I shouldn’t be feeling so sad. I should be able to trust God.

“However, the thing is, I felt like God was grieving right along with me.”

≈≈≈

Nick Visconti got a call one day from Laura Lawson, the girl he had wanted and pursued ever since they met three years before in a northern California wine bar through a mutual friend.

“I’m going to Seattle,” she told him over the phone, the first time he had heard her voice in two months.

“Well, very interesting thing you say that,” he said. “I’m moving to Seattle next week.”

Visconti and Lawson have an interesting past, something Visconti calls a “romantic entanglement.” For three years, Visconti wanted to date her, but their paths never aligned. Visconti was traveling continually, immersed in his snowboarding career and earning a degree. She had art school and was wrestling internally with her disease. He lived in Lake Tahoe. She lived three hours away in the Bay Area.

“Whenever he was in town, we would hang out,” Lawson says. “We always had this spark, but my heart was not in it. I saw someone who had his life on a very exposed platform. Nick is an amazing person, but he is a very intense person and I felt like I wasn’t ready for that kind of relationship.”

Everything changed in Seattle. The two of them began dating and Lawson decided she had finally found her match, that his extremity was exactly what she needed.

“In Seattle, I told him that this is the reality of what I have,” Lawson says. “But the thing with Nick is that he is just adventurous and a daredevil and does not let anything get in his way, and he pursues life to the fullest more than anyone else I’ve ever known, so for God to put him in my life, for me, is like a necessity.

“When Nick and I met (three years ago), I was living very cautiously and letting my disease get the best of me. It’s been largely through dating him that I’ve realized that I need to not let this define me and go out and live life and be adventurous and make the most of my time now…There are times when it gets the best of me, and there are still hard days. It’s an emotional thing. It’s difficult. But he’s just a great example to me of someone who takes risks. What he does for a living is certainly risky in itself, and he really does pull me in a good direction and I think the people who have known me for a long time see that influence.”

Not only did their relationship click in Seattle, but so did their personal lives. Visconti, who is unofficially the first snowboarder to land a “Christ Air” and is “one of the most progressive snowboarders riding today” according to ESPN’s Matt Vanatta, saw his snowboarding platform and ministry grow exponentially. Nations Foundation, a snowboarding ministry that creates stories through film to reach out to the action games culture, contacted Visconti to do a 45-minute year-in-the-life production about him titled “Anthropology,” a project that led to his involvement with World Vision and a snowboarding/mission trip to Africa.

As for Lawson, she started painting again and signed a book deal with Slim Books for her upcoming memoir “Believing is Seeing,” which is about her return to art and her move to Seattle, a project she completed this January.

“When you start trusting God in the small things—He does fulfill his promises and is true to his Word—it’s easier to trust Him in the big things,” Visconti says. “You see that He is not only authoring but perfecting your life according to His will as Scripture promises.

“Once you start to realize that all of this is God’s story, and we’re merely characters in that, being guided by the Holy Spirit, you can let go and give God control and see that He is doing something crazier and more beautiful than you can ever imagine or even write yourself.”

Two days before Christmas, eight months after Lawson and Visconti separately moved to Seattle and began dating, the two of them stood outside on the snow-covered ground at an alpine lake in northern California. Snow slowly fell from the sky, and the sun was shining brightly. It was so still they could hear one another breathe. Visconti got down on one knee, and everything felt right.

≈≈≈

They say seeing is believing, but it’s kind of a lie.

It’s true if taken literally, but false in what it fundamentally implies. It places all belief on what’s known, what you can see. It places no belief in what’s unknown, what takes faith.

You can live your life by the idiom, like much of society, but don’t be surprised when your life lacks risk and adventure, faith and beauty. Don’t be surprised when, like Thomas, your cynicism and doubt betray you, as your hands touch the wounds of Jesus and the Savior responds, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

It’s impossible to flow with the current if all you do is question its direction; to drive to Seattle if all you desire is comfort; to start painting if you’re blinded by the future; to take a risk without belief. The most beautiful things, often times, are the things you can’t see.

“The faith-based life, living according to God’s will, is a mighty and extreme calling, but it’s also a radical calling,” Visconti says, talking gently and quietly. “I still have uncertainties. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not thankful for what God has done, that I don’t see how He has orchestrated beautifully my life, but there are still things I just don’t understand, a future I’m uncertain of. There’s still the daily grind that has its difficulties and struggles, but,” he says, making a long pause and speaking even quieter, “I do know that I am confident in the fact that He’s got me. That’s what the faith-based life is, not that everything is easy, but that you have hope.”

By Stephen Copeland 

Stephen Copeland is a staff writer at Sports Spectrum magazine.

Another Angle — The cry of resolutions

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New Year’s resolutions fascinate me.

Not so much the resolutions themselves, but more so the means to their existence.

It hit me one January when I made the mistake of going to the gym. Because of all the fitness-related New Year’s resolutions, the gym was packed and many people didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

I was hoping to run on the treadmill, but the wait was like the line to a women’s bathroom. I tried lifting weights, but the dumbbells were out of order like they’d been organized by a chimpanzee. Plus, the big-boned guy on the elliptical sounded like a chain-smoker running the Boston Marathon, and my fallen nature was telling me to go all Cain and Abel on him.

So I decided against the treadmill and dumbbells and shot hoops instead. I listened to the “Hoosiers” soundtrack on my iPod, acted like I was Jimmy Chitwood, and imagined Gene Hackman walking through the gymnasium doors and begging me to play—like I was the best basketball player ever, like I hadn’t had two serious knee surgeries and wasn’t a thumb shooter or a golfer.

While I chased my airballs, I also occasionally glanced into the see-through walls of the weight room and thought about how weird people were. The weight room was bustling like a Wal-Mart on Black Friday, and a month before it had been as quiet as a library.

I then thought about my own resolution that year: to read the Bible more. A month before, I could have scribbled my name with my finger in the dust on the cover; but that morning, I had a pen, highlighter, and concordance handy when I read like I was Martin Luther.

Why? I wondered.

Why does New Years give people the hope of a fresh start? 

Why does New Years trigger a desire to change?

Why does New Years make people want to be better?

It’s not the resolutions that fascinate me—work out every day, lose weight, quit smoking, stay sober, read the Bible, whatever—it’s the means to their existence.

Why do we want a fresh start, for example, if nothing we do is wrong? Why would we have a desire to change if there was nothing to change from? Why would we want to be better if every decision we made was right?

Behind most genuine New Years resolutions, I see a burning desire wound into the fabric of our human nature to be made new and change. But why? If you want to be made new, what’s wrong with the past? If you want to change, what are you changing from? If there is a right way and a wrong way to live, then Who is the author of morality?

The unfortunate thing is that we think it’s the New Year that gives us a fresh start and the ability to be made new. We think it’s the New Year that will help us turn over a new leaf and change. But it’s not. I can only do so much. Ultimately, something else must change me and make me new.

And that’s what I love about the God of Christianity.

When I welcomed Jesus into my life, He changed me…and He continues to change me…and He will forever continue to change me…and I’ll forever be new.

I’m not a big “resolutions” guy. I like goals, but resolutions seem legalistic, and I always end up failing and feeling like I’m worthless. Not that resolutions are bad (I’ve done them before), but they just aren’t for me.

This year, though, I want to change; and I want God to change me. I don’t know if that’s a resolution. I don’t know if that’s a goal. I just know it’s a central component to the Christian lifestyle that, frankly, many Christians, including myself, leave out.

If you aren’t constantly changing or constantly being changed, is it possible that you’re not even a follower of Jesus? You may call yourself a Christian, but that’s just a generic title people slap on their Facebook pages. A follower of Jesus is changed by Jesus and continually changed by Jesus.

One of my favorite interviews in 2012 was with PGA Tour player Aaron Baddeley. Whatever Aaron had, I wanted it. He gets up early—no matter what, according to his wife, Richelle—and he reads the Bible, not because it’s on a checklist, but because it changes him.

Aaron’s relationship with God was what a relationship should be: intimate. And it makes him a better person. It makes him happier. He is constantly being changed, conformed to the image of Jesus, which is the purpose to your life here on earth, and that makes him happy.

If God truly has a design, then wouldn’t following that design be fulfilling?

Behind most New Year’s resolutions, I see that design, and it reminds me to be a part of it.

By Stephen Copeland

This column appeared in the December 2012 Sports Spectrum DigiMag. Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum magazine. His column tackles sports and faith from another angle, whether it’s humorous, personal or controversial. Follow him on Twitter-@steve_copeland or email him at stephen.copeland@sportsspectrum.com.

Drowning Doubt

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There’s a mother driving her white Ford Thunderbird down a California freeway.

It’s 1994 and it’s lunch hour. It’s Orange County and it’s sunny. She’s on her way to Costco to buy groceries for her family, just a mile from her exit, when she realizes something.

But it’s too late.

A car haphazardly cuts her off, causing her to swerve and clip the end of another car. Her Thunderbird does a 180, shooting her backwards across six lanes of traffic. It slams into the guardrail and starts violently flipping, end over end, over and over, like a racecar, like it’s possessed, just missing the cement bridge support of the overpass by inches.

What she realized was that her one-year-old’s car seat hadn’t been buckled in. She has no idea why. It’s always buckled in. But somehow, she forgot.

Inside, the one-year-old boy’s frail, little body, while harnessed inside of his baby seat, bounces around like a pinball, molested by gravity. Skull meets glass. Skin meets metal.

Grab a baby by his feet, hold him upside down, and shake him barbarically—that’s what happened. Stick a baby on a rollercoaster, his neck snapping back and forth, his soft skull smashing into everything around him—that’s what happened. Throw a rag doll in a wood chipper—that’s what happened.

Or so you would think.

_______________________________________________________________________

Doubting is easier than believing. It’s almost cliché to doubt, isn’t it? It’s easier to doubt people than to believe in people. It’s easier to doubt God than to believe in Him. Doubting is natural. Believing takes faith. Doubting is easy. Believing is hard.

Believing is also beautiful.

The way hockey star Rocco Grimaldi believes is beautiful.

It’s hard to comprehend that Grimaldi—a redshirt freshman at the University of North Dakota who was drafted in 2011 by the NHL’s Florida Panthers—is only a 19-year-old college kid. He’s wise enough to mentor coaches. He quotes the Bible like most quote Anchorman or Caddyshack. Interview him and you’ll get a sermon. He told his mother in third grade that he wanted to read the entire Bible. He wants to be a pastor. He’s Tim Tebow on skates.

And yet, like Tebow, who tells the media about his “Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” more than he’s “happy to be a Jet,” there’s something very likeable about Rocco Grimaldi. Like Tebow, he’s real. He’s more than words. He’s action. He’s bold.

Some say it’s why he fell to the second round of the NHL Draft after being predicted as high as eighth in the first round. Teams were afraid of his boldness. And, though he’s bold, evidenced by his outwardly Christian tweets that have gotten him crucified by the media in the past, he’s not like some of the self-righteous, better-than-you Christians you see on CNN protesting gay parades.

“It really doesn’t surprise me, to be honest, just how this world is,” Grimaldi says about falling in the draft. “Religious Christians put the real Christians under the bus so I blame them for that. Thinking that we’re just going to be preaching and condemning people. We’re not called to condemn. That’s not our job. If Christ didn’t condemn us, why would we condemn others? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Jesus, he says, came down hard on the “religious” people. He ate with tax collectors and talked to prostitutes. He loved sinners.

“I’m trying to get to the core of that,” Grimaldi says. “I’ll go up to Christians and say, ‘Why did God give us the Bible if you don’t read it? Why do you say this and that and not live it out?’”

That’s Rocco Grimaldi, as bold as they come. His height (5 foot, 6 inches) doesn’t stop him on the ice, and his age doesn’t stop him from speaking what he believes—even after a tumultuous year he calls a “make-it-or-break-it-point” in his life.

_______________________________________________________________________

Cameras started to zoom in on Rocco Grimaldi.

Tears began building in his eyes—angry tears, sad tears, all in one. He stood up, all eyes on him, and made a beeline out of the arena before anyone could say anything to him.

Grimaldi entered the first round of the 2011 NHL Entry Draft rather confidently, with every reason to believe he’d be selected in front of his 30 family members and friends in attendance at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn.

He was a projected mid to late-first round draft pick, and he talked to several teams the week leading up to the Draft who said they’d take him, trade up for him, whatever it took. That’s what was most maddening for Grimaldi. In a sense, he felt betrayed. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, I thought I knew you,’” he says.

It’s hard to say why Grimaldi fell. Some say it’s because he’s a Jesus freak. Others say it’s because of his size. Like Tebow, he’s been doubted his entire career. Like Tebow, all they see is his unorthodoxy, not his stats.

Grimaldi’s résumé is top-notch. Before kicking off his collegiate career at the University of North Dakota (players can be drafted years before playing in the NHL), he totaled 39 goals, 34 assists, and 73 points in 58 games for the U.S. National Development Team (USNTDP), leading his team in all three categories of competition. He also helped the United States Under-18 Team earn back-to-back gold medals at the 2011 International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) World U18 Championship in Germany and the 2010 IIHF World U18 Championship in Minsk, Belarus, where he tied for the team lead in points, as an under-aged player.

Grimaldi is like a little demon on the ice: skilled, relentless, living inside the minds of his opponents and corrupting their confidence by instilling fear. His first goal with North Dakota, he gained possession on a breakaway, then made a shifty move that caused a Minnesota defender to clumsily trip over his skates and crash into the ice.

At every level, Grimaldi takes the doubts, chews them up, then spits them back in the face of his doubters.

Hockey writer and broadcaster Chris Peters said this of Grimaldi as Draft Day approached: “Having been around Grimaldi at different periods of time and interviewing him a bunch over the past two years, the kid has that ‘it factor.’ Undaunted by his height, or lack thereof, and unflinching in his belief that he will make it to the NHL one day gives me enough confidence to say he should be an early-to-mid first-rounder.”

But it wouldn’t be. And Grimaldi ate dinner with his family and friends that evening in silence, confused and drained.

Come Day 2, there was hope in the back of his mind he would be picked fifth (35th overall) by the Detroit Redwings, the kings of the NHL.

But again, it wouldn’t be. The Florida Panthers picked Grimaldi 33rd overall.

Florida was the last team he expected. He wasn’t familiar with their organization. He didn’t know their management. He says he only spoke to them one time leading up to the draft. And they certainly weren’t the Redwings, who have earned 11 Stanley Cups, the most of any franchise based in the United States. The Panthers had no Stanley Cups and hadn’t made the playoffs the last decade.

“When I got drafted, I was like, ‘This is not what I had planned,’” says Grimaldi, who believes God is in control of every stage of his life. “I’d play for this team or this team, and God gave me this team? But I hugged my family, put a smile on my face, and took the jersey.”

Walking toward the stage, Grimaldi says he heard a small, still voice in his head, challenging his doubt. Do you trust Me? it said. Do you trust Me?

Grimaldi says his attitude changed. He went upstairs and started shaking hands with management. One guy had four Stanley Cups. Another guy had six. Another guy shook his hand and said he respected Grimaldi for his faith. Then there was general manager Dave Tallon, who helped rebuild the Chicago Blackhawks from 2005-2009, the culmination of a Stanley Cup title in 2010. He was doing the same thing with Florida, leading the Panthers to their first playoff appearance in 10 years during Grimaldi’s first season at North Dakota.

“I was like, ‘Wow, God knew what he was doing,’” Grimaldi says. “God basically goes, ‘Who are you to tell Me what I am doing?’”

Perhaps, most importantly, Tallon and Panther management allow Grimaldi to be himself—his bold, outspoken self.

Four months after Grimaldi was drafted, he posted a series of in-your-face tweets asking women to dress modestly and men to stop objectifying women. The media clung to his tweets and tore Grimaldi to shreds.

That day, he got a call from Panthers management regarding the tweets. Grimaldi was scared his future career and relationship with the Panthers was on the chopping block. But when management told Tallon about the tweets, Grimaldi says that Tallon simply responded, “Oh, it’s just Rocco. Let him say whatever he wants. He’s just living out his faith.”

“He always backed me up and respected me for my faith,” Grimaldi says. “While all those other teams didn’t pick me because of my faith, Florida picked me possibly because of my faith.”

Then there was the time Grimaldi went to Panther development camp, and the head of player development asked Grimaldi to pray before a meal in front of 40-some players and 10-plus coaches.

“It’s crazy how He takes your plans, and your plans get balled up in a piece of paper and tossed in the trash,” Grimaldi says. “But His plan is better anyway.”

The future looked promising for Rocco Grimaldi. He was drafted—by a team he had grown to love, a team that appreciated who he was—and he was entering his freshman year at the University of North Dakota with an opportunity to continue his dominance and possibly be in the NHL after a year of college.

He was close to his dream.

_______________________________________________________________________

Rocco Grimaldi was cautiously making his way down the stairs in a movie theater, the day after having surgery on his right knee. His mother was in front of him stepping backwards down the stairs to try to help steady him as he descended.

His crutch caught. He tripped down two steps. Then he broke his fall by planting on his right leg, the operative leg he couldn’t put pressure on. Pain exploded in his kneecap like a needle slowly going into your eye. He screamed.

Grimaldi got to the bottom of the stairs, exasperated, and lay on a bench inside the theater. “Buddy, God didn’t bring us this far to leave us now,” his mother told him.

He looked terrible.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said—not because she had to go to the bathroom, but because she didn’t want to cry in front of him.

She prayed in the bathroom and returned.

Grimaldi got back up, but only to stumble again and fall on the same leg. Pain exploded again. Defeated, he broke down and cried.

“Why is this happening to me?” he asked his mother.

“I don’t understand it,” his mother consoled, “but God did not bring us this far to leave you now,” she told him again.

Right when things had started to look up—after the frustration of Day 1 of the 2011 NHL Entry Draft, then the elation of realizing Florida was a perfect fit, then the excitement of beginning his college career, just one step away from attaining his dream of playing in the NHL—Grimaldi took a puck to the knee in his first practice at the University of North Dakota.

Doesn’t sound like a big deal. It’s just a puck to the knee. But it is a big deal whenever you have a bipartite patella, meaning the pieces of the kneecap have yet to fuse together. Only two percent of the population have it, and Grimaldi is one of them.

“I hate it when people say, ‘God did this to make you humble,’” Grimaldi says. “No, God did not put this on me at all. This happened because life is life and He is still good in the mix of it; and He is going to turn this into something good, and He already is.”

From mid-September through mid-November of 2011, Grimaldi tried to play through the pain while undergoing physical therapy, but his skill on the ice wasn’t the same. His doctor then had him rest the knee with no activity from mid-November through the first week of January.

“When I played it was hard for me to skate,” Grimaldi says. “It hurt so bad. It just wasn’t me. That would’ve hurt the team more than it would’ve helped.”

In January of 2012, midway through the Fighting Sioux’s season, Grimaldi decided it’d be best to get surgery and redshirt, the most difficult hockey decision he’s had to make that triggered the most trying time of his hockey career.

The thought entered his mind: “I could trust You in the past, but this is bigger than anything I have ever gone through,” he says.

“But we are supposed to overcome the devil by the blood of the Lamb, and He already shed that blood. And the other thing we are supposed to overcome the devil by is the word of our testimony. And what is our testimony? It’s God showing Himself through the trials and tests we have already been through.”

When doubt crept into his mind—like a spy trying to infiltrate enemy lines—Grimaldi warded it off by writing his testimony. He took the doubt and he drowned it.

“One reason (I started writing my testimony) is because I needed to look back at past trials I got through because of Him—just to remind myself of Him, just to remind myself of His faithfulness, and that because of His faithfulness in those times, He’ll be faithful in these as well,” Grimaldi says. “He’s always faithful.”

Right from the beginning.

_______________________________________________________________________

There’s a father who receives a phone call, one of those calls that change everything: His wife and infant son had crashed on the freeway.

Then, the father sees something, like a vision. He sees a car flipping down the freeway. He sees a baby inside. His little body is bouncing around like a pinball, like he’s not buckled in, like the vision is a split-second away from becoming a graphic bloodbath and nightmare.

Then the vision gets weirder. On the outside of the car, the father sees strong angels, like muscle-bound power lifters—mighty, celestial mysteries, pressing the car and holding it together and keeping it from collapsing. On the inside of the car, the father sees “angels like fluffy pillows,” the baby safely bouncing off them, as if in a foam pit.

Then the vision ends.

The mother, meanwhile, is sitting 50 feet from her crashed car, resting on its driver’s side. How she is sitting 50 feet away from her car, she doesn’t know. It’s spooky, like a scene straight out of a horror film. She isn’t bleeding. She doesn’t have a scratch. It’s almost as if she died and her soul has already left her body, and that’s what she is seeing—a tipped-over car in front of her with the remains of herself and her son inside. But she’s alive. Or she at least thinks she is.

She sprints toward the car. She’s a police officer and an athlete. So is her husband. The baby inside has a chance of growing up to be quite a sportsman. Before the crash, at least.

She climbs onto the car and looks into it.  She reaches inside and cuts her arm on glass.

Blood.

Life.

Susie Grimaldi sees her son, Rocco, inside. He’s still in his carrier which is resting perfectly face up on the driver’s door. His eyes are open. And he’s alive.

Unharmed.

Undaunted.

Not even crying.

He looks up at his mother with his pacifier in his mouth. He smiles.

He smiles.

It’s easier to doubt God than to believe in Him. Doubting is natural. Believing takes faith. Doubting is easy. Believing is hard. This, however, would be an exception—because if angels don’t exist, then neither does velocity and collision. If this doesn’t prove supernatural existence, then it disproves nature. Rocco Grimaldi drowns doubt with the beauty of belief.

There’s a helicopter flying above, its blades echoing the seriousness of the crash. The mother is placed on a stretcher. A fireman is holding the baby.

The baby smiles and sucks his pacifier.

And everyone wonders how.

 By Stephen Copeland

Stephen Copeland is a staff writer and columnist at Sports Spectrum magazine.

Male Athlete of the Year: R.A. Dickey

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It’s only fitting R.A. Dickey’s memoir “Wherever I Wind Up” was released this past March, because where Dickey wound up in 2012, not many could have fathomed.

Dickey, the only knuckleballer in Major League Baseball, had 20 wins for the New York Mets, threw two consecutive one-hitters, led the National League in strikeouts (230), was second in ERA (2.73), and received the most prestigious pitching award in baseball, the National League Cy Young Award, at the age of 38, becoming the third-oldest first-time award winner in MLB history.

On the field, it has certainly been a long road for Dickey.

Fourteen years ago, Dickey was drafted first overall by the Texas Rangers, but his lifelong dream was ripped away when an x-ray revealed that Dickey was missing his ulna collateral ligament in his right elbow. Five years ago, he gave up a record six home runs in three innings, and Dickey realized that his baseball career had drastically stalled.

“I understood that what I had to offer wasn’t going to allow me to be a consistent major league pitcher,” Dickey told Sports Spectrum a year ago.

At the time, Dickey was using a knuckler as one of his secondary pitches, but his pitching coach at the time, Orel Hershiser, pushed him to use it full-time.

So he did. But it wasn’t easy.

“I had to unlearn things that I had learned in my previous 20 years of throwing a baseball,” he said. “I had to unlearn in an effort to relearn the proper mechanics of throwing a knuckleball. That was a really trying time; God was helping me to endure and persevere. I had a lot of self-doubt, I made a lot of bad decisions as far as what I put my time into.”

For four years, Dickey went up and down between Class AAA and major league clubs Texas, Milwaukee, Seattle and Minnesota, trying to master the knuckleball with varied success.

But in 2010, after being called up from AAA Buffalo in May, Dickey got an opportunity with the New York Mets, and this time pitched at career-high levels, going 11-9 with a 2.84 ERA (seventh in the National League).

After the season, the Mets signed him to a two-year major league deal, solidifying a spot on a major league ball club.

At age 36, R.A. Dickey, who was born in Nashville, Tenn., and played for the University of Tennessee, had finally gotten his baseball career on track.

And in 2011, he spent his first full season without a trip to the minors, posting a staff-best 3.28 ERA and logging a team high 208.2 innings for the Mets. In 2012, after a tumultuous 14 years in the league and dabbling in the minors, he won the National League Cy Young award.

“It’s been a real journey for me and it’s coincided with my journey as a knuckleballer starting in 2005,” he said. “…over the last four years, as an adult, from ages 32-36, I feel like I’ve really matured. God’s really grown me up in a lot of ways. He’s really impressed a lot of time and energy in helping me to feel loved and worthy and that’s been a big difference maker for me as far as my professional career has gone.”

And although what Dickey did factors into Sports Spectrum’s decision to name him Male Athlete of the Year, it’s more about what came from what he did, what came from his best year on the mound, what off-the-field impact he had because of his on-field stardom, that makes him one of the year’s most influential male athletes.

Dickey’s openness in “Wherever I Wind Up” about his troubled childhood—where he was sexually abused one summer by a 13-year-old girl who was babysitting him and later abused by a teenage boy—thrust him onto the national scale, giving him a voice at a time when many needed to hear it, a year where the horrific sexual abuse scandal at Penn State shocked the sporting world and parents across nation.

“I just keep my terrible secret,” Dickey wrote in his memoir, “keep it all inside, the details of what went on, and the hurt of a little boy who is scared and ashamed and believes he has done something terribly wrong, but doesn’t know what that is.”

Dickey is more than a baseball player. He’s a beacon of hope to the hurting, speaking openly about his darkest childhood memories to national media such as ESPN and Sports Illustrated. To the victimized and voiceless, like the poor souls at Penn State, Dickey is an inspiration and an encouragement. You can talk without shame, you can live a normal life, and you can even live a successful life, like winning the Cy Young.

Dickey also addressed his infidelity, thoughts of suicide, and his anguish of spending 14 years in the minors, overall providing a raw account of the struggles of a superstar, and all-in-all, life.

“Wherever I Wind Up” is far from an image-proofed, public relations project for financial gain. And perhaps that’s the other reason why Dickey is Sports Spectrum’s Male Athlete of the Year. Dickey is as real as they come. In a culture where Christians can be mistakenly viewed as perfect and legalistic, Dickey transparently talks about his sin and how Jesus Christ has changed him. He’s human. He’s a sinner. And he’s changed.

“I hope to communicate in the book that God is not a God of second chances,” Dickey told beliefnet.com. “He is a God of third, fourth, fifth and sixth chances. Consequently, I heard the voice, a myriad of times. (There’s) a place in the book where I talk about when (former Texas Ranger GM) Doug Melvin took away my signing bonus—not just my signing bonus—it was the hope of possibly never playing in the big leagues. You know I really wanted to erupt. Whether it was curse words or having a bad temper, I really felt God say, ‘I got you. Don’t do that. I got you. Everything is going to be OK.’ So I got up and walked out trying to be obedient to that voice. That was one instance.

“Another instance was when I tried to swim across the Missouri River and almost died. I was on the banks of the Missouri and happy to be alive. I felt God saying to me that my life was going to be different. I didn’t really know what that meant. But everything seemed to have more flavor to it and I was able to live in the moment like never before with my wife, with my children—with my career. That He had showed me a different way to live.”

Whether it’s his reflective memoir, his inspiring heroism in overcoming sexual abuse, his faith, or his off-season climb of Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds to stop human trafficking in Mumbai, Dickey can be summed up in one word: impactful.

In 2012, Dickey inspired others to wind up in a better place.

By Stephen Copeland

Stephen Copeland and Aaron May are staff writers at Sports Spectrum magazine.

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