Dec 25 2008
Intoducing Adam
Today I was watching ESPN, which is a very rare thing for me to do, as I am not a sports person but all the men folk in my house were watching Sports Center, and what was I supposed to do? But I guess the universe wanted me to be watching Sports Center so I would notice this story. Adam Bender is this nine year old boy who was born with cancer, which I didn’t know was possible. He had his left leg amputated all the way up to the pelvis just a few days after his first birthday. As I said, now he’s nine and apparently quite athletic. He plays four sports, baseball, soccer, flag football where he’s a quarterback, and wrestling. In wrestling, the sportscasters say he might have a good future because that sport favors people with strong upper bodies.
The news crew tried, I think, unintentionally to make Adam seem like one of those Tiny Tim characters. But Adam was such a force of nature in the filming and it just didn’t work. Adam is, in my opinion, proof that you can be inspirational without being pathetic. Whatever television’s intentions might be.
