Kid Athletes

by David Stabler

  After that taste of victory, Danica drove faster with each race. Soon she was breaking records across the Midwest. She went two years without a single accident. Then she had a big one. Danica was leading a race with one lap to go when two other drivers passed her. Danica sped to catch up as the three drivers approached the final turn. They formed a “V” heading for the finish line. It was anybody’s race.

  Danica pressed hard on the throttle to pass, but she ended up running over the rear tire of another driver’s kart. Her kart flipped over and landed on top of his.

  Danica wasn’t hurt, but she lost the race. That didn’t stop her, though. She strapped on her helmet and got ready for the next competition.

  Being fearless gave Danica an advantage over other drivers. But it sometimes prodded her into taking some unnecessary risks. Once, an adult driver cut her off during a practice run. Danica confronted him. She wagged her finger in his face, shouting, “Didn’t you see me coming? Look where you’re going next time!” That was fearless, but it was also foolish—and rude.

  Danica also developed a fierce rivalry with another driver, a boy named Brian. During a race, as they approached the final turn, Danica deliberately crashed into him and knocked his kart off the track.

  Her irresponsible behavior upset her father, who made Danica apologize to Brian after the race.

  In time, with the help of her dad, Danica learned to control her temper and be fearless without being foolish. In 1994, when she was twelve, Danica won her first Grand National Championship. She won again in 1996, finishing first in 38 out of 49 races.

  When Danica turned sixteen, she was invited to join a road-racing team in England. Instead of go-karts, she would drive real race cars. Though it meant moving far from home, Danica knew this was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.

  In England, Danica continued to face her fears. She was homesick and often felt like an outsider. She was one of the only girls on the English racing circuit, and few other drivers would talk to her. Some mechanics refused to work on her car because they thought she couldn’t win against the boys.

  In her first racing season in England, Danica finished in ninth place. But fear of failure couldn’t keep her down. She worked hard and improved her standing year after year. By her third season, she was named the top up-and-coming road-race driver in the world.

  Danica’s determination attracted the attention of Bobby Rahal, an American racing team leader. When Danica was nineteen, Rahal signed her to his Formula One racing team. She returned to America ready to take on the “big boys” on the Indy car circuit. In 2005, Danica stunned the world by finishing fourth at the Indianapolis 500—the best finish ever by a female driver.

  When asked why he signed Danica, Rahal cited her courage in the face of stiff competition: “That she was willing to compete there and endure all of the challenges of racing under those circumstances showed me that Danica was very certain about what she wanted and would stop at nothing to achieve it.”

  Danica put it this way: “I enjoy a challenge. I enjoy setting a goal and achieving it. It’s just a matter of how long it’s gonna take.”

  In wintertime, the temperature in Ontario sometimes drops to forty degrees below zero. Ice on the Seguin River can measure three feet deep.

  A Canadian town about 150 miles north of Toronto, Parry Sound in the 1950s was home to about 6,000 people—nearly all of them fans of ice hockey. When the river froze, kids like Bobby Orr would play the sport using sticks made from freshly cut saplings.

  As a boy, Bobby developed a reputation as one of the quickest, toughest, and most talented hockey players in town. But he didn’t start out that way. When his father first strapped a pair of ice skates onto his son’s feet, four-year-old Bobby promptly fell onto the ice.

  Bobby’s new skates were a set of hand-me-downs from his older brother. They were several sizes too big, or his feet may have been several sizes too small. Either way, Bobby stuffed the skates with paper so they’d fit snugly. It wasn’t until he was fourteen that he finally got a new pair of his very own.

  But the size of the skates didn’t matter. From the moment he first took to the ice, Bobby was crazy about hockey. When it wasn’t safe to skate on the Seguin River, Bobby spent his free time firing pucks against the granite wall in his family’s garage. In the summertime, he played street hockey with his friends.

  Bobby was smaller than most kids in his neighborhood, and the bigger kids would always try to take advantage of him during hockey games. But what Bobby lacked in stature, he made up for in strength and speed. Soon he’d learned to wrestle his opponents and pin them to the ice using a maneuver he called the Parry Sound Flop.

  As it turns out, there are many ways to defeat an opponent. On the ice or off, the biggest kids don’t always win. Another important way to best the competition is just to work harder.

  Bobby knew plenty about hard work from his parents. Both of them worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. Arva Orr, Bobby’s mother, was a waitress in a coffee shop and worked in a grocery store. Doug Orr, Bobby’s father, drove a cab, tended bar, sold beer for a brewery, and loaded crates at a dynamite factory.

  The Orrs encouraged Bobby to work, too. When he wasn’t in school or playing hockey with friends, he was doing odd jobs. For a while, he worked as a salesman at a local men’s clothing store. One summer, he baled hay for a local farmer, but quickly realized that farm life was not for him.

  For another job, Bobby crawled through mud to catch dew worms, which he then sold to fishermen to use as bait.

  One of Bobby’s most promising jobs was helping in his uncle’s butcher shop. His uncle paid him in cash and all the steak he could eat. Bobby loved working there until one day, while he was slicing bacon, he almost cut off the knuckle of his left thumb. That was the end of his career as a butcher.

  Bobby even found a job where being short was an advantage. The janitor at his elementary school hired him to help clean classrooms during holiday breaks. And so every day, Bobby scrubbed, swept, and polished the floors. When the furnace needed cleaning, Bobby volunteered to crawl inside and sweep it out. He was the only person small enough to do the job.

  But other times, Bobby’s size wasn’t such an asset. One summer, he worked as a bellhop at a fancy hotel called the Belvedere. Unfortunately, the guests didn’t think he was strong enough to carry their bags up to their rooms. But that was his job! When the hotel manager, Mr. Peoples, saw Bobby escorting guests through the lobby empty-handed, he yelled at him.

  Bobby didn’t want to get fired, so after the incident with his boss he refused to take no for an answer. He had to beg the customers to let him haul their luggage into the hotel. More than once, he was forced to yank suitcases out of a reluctant guest’s hands so that he could bring it up to the room.

  As he got older, Bobby’s passion for hockey grew while his patience for working odd jobs began to wane. He began spending more time on the ice, polishing his game, and less time inside polishing floors. Luckily for him and his family, all his practice and hard work were about to pay off—and in a big way.

  The payoff came when he was only fourteen years old. At that young age, Bobby signed a contract with the Boston Bruins, a national hockey team in the United States. The team’s managers paid him $2,800 and arranged for him to begin playing for their junior league hockey team in Oshawa, Ontario. He would earn $10 a week.

  At first, Bobby’s parents did not like the idea of their son moving away from home—he was barely just a teenager. But they couldn’t deny him a chance to make it to the National Hockey League.

  Bobby’s mother agreed to let him play if he agreed to commute to Oshawa for the first year. And so, every Friday after school, friends picked Bobby up and drove him two and a half hours each way so he could play in games on the weekends before returning home for school on Monday morning.

  It was a grueling schedule, and it took a toll on the young student. Most people need at least eight hours of sleep every night, and
Bobby wasn’t getting enough rest. So he slept whenever and wherever he had the chance.

  On the professional team, Bobby once again found himself the smallest player on the ice. He weighed just 127 pounds and was competing against older players who weighed as much as eighty pounds more than he did.

  Yet somehow Bobby found a way to outplay, outthink, and outfox them all. In his first year in Oshawa, he made the all-league second team. The next year, he was unanimously voted to the all-league first team. At the age of sixteen, Bobby was featured on the cover of Maclean’s, the national magazine of Canada.

  By the time he turned eighteen, Bobby was ready to move up to the big leagues. And though he would never be the biggest player in the NHL, he did have the biggest contract. In 1966, Bobby signed with the Bruins for $50,000 for two years, plus a $25,000 bonus.

  All of Bobby’s hard work had finally paid off. But with his newfound riches came great responsibility. Bobby was charged with leading the Bruins to a Stanley Cup championship, which they hadn’t won in over twenty-five years.

  Bobby accomplished the goal in only his fourth season in the league, and he won the most valuable player award, too. Bobby would go on to win three MVP awards and two Stanley Cup trophies. When he retired in 1978, he was widely considered the greatest defenseman in NHL history.

  Before he took to the basketball court in his signature sneakers, Michael Jordan got into some hair-raising situations. Whether dealing with electricity or angry insects, “Air Jordan” acted more like “Err Jordan.”

  Once when he was a baby, he fell out of his crib and got stuck between the crib and the wall. At age two, he grabbed the end of an electric wire before his father could stop him. The shock knocked him backward three feet. Toddler Michael was left dazed but otherwise unharmed.

  When Michael was four, his cousin handed him an axe and offered to pay him a dollar to chop off his own toe. Michael agreed, but then thought better of the idea. To save face, he tried to whack off just the tip, but he couldn’t even do that right. The tip remained attached to his toe, and Michael hopped home crying for his mother.

  Bad luck seemed to follow Michael wherever he went. One day, he disturbed a nest of angry wasps under his grandfather’s wagon. Another time, while holding an old wooden block as a baseball bat, Michael accidentally swatted his sister in the head. He didn’t know the wood had a nail in it, but luckily his sister wasn’t hurt.

  It didn’t help that Michael liked to be a daredevil. He once piled up a huge stack of lawn chairs in his backyard, then jumped off the top of the tower to prove he could fly. He quickly learned that he really couldn’t fly and crashed to the ground. Fortunately, the only injury he suffered was a long cut in his arm.

  Being accident prone made Michael stand out among his four brothers and sisters. But not always for good reasons.

  Michael’s father, James Jordan, was embarrassed by his youngest son’s lack of mechanical prowess—especially compared to his oldest son, Larry, who loved to help out around the house. “Pops,” as Michael called his dad, could fix almost anything.

  “Give me a wrench,” Pops would say to Michael as he struggled to loosen a gasket underneath the hood of a car. Michael didn’t know what a wrench was. Or a gasket, for that matter.

  Michael needed to find a way to stand out that didn’t involve falling down or accidentally shocking himself. He needed to prove to Pops that he could be the best at something. Or at least be better than Larry.

  One day, when Michael was about thirteen years old, Pops built a basketball court in the backyard. He knew how much Larry loved the game, and deep down he hoped Michael might learn to play, too. “This is it,” Michael thought. “This is how I finally beat Larry and show Pops how good I can be.”

  The brothers dubbed their new court “The Rack” and scheduled their first game of one-on-one. For the next year and a half, they played nearly every day after school. The contests were epic—and unfortunately for Michael, the outcome was always the same.

  Larry used his superior strength to his advantage. He outmuscled Michael under the hoop—repeatedly dunking on him until his younger brother became frustrated and lost his cool. Sometimes the games would end with brother-on-brother brawls that their mother, Deloris Jordan, had to break up.

  As time went on, however, the tables began to turn. Michael grew bigger and stronger while Larry remained the same size.

  But despite his growth spurts, Michael struggled. He needed something more to truly grow. It was only after he learned to control his emotions on the court that he was able to use his height to beat Larry to the basket. Larry still won most of the games, but it became harder for him to fend off his brother’s drives to the hoop.

  One day, Michael dunked on Larry for the first time ever. Finally! Now he had something to brag about at the dinner table.

  Still, Pops continued to favor Larry. One time, after a pee-wee league game in which Michael scored the winning lay-up, Pops spent the whole ride home praising Larry for his defense. Michael felt discouraged. If winning the game wasn’t enough, what else could he do to convince his father that he was every bit as good as—if not better than—his big brother?

  As it turned out, all Michael had to do was grow. In middle school, his growth spurts continued; in a single year, he shot up four inches. Meanwhile, Larry stayed the same size. Eventually, Michael, who was once considered the “runt”—the littlest member of the family—became the tallest kid in his house. He towered over Larry and no longer had to worry about beating his “big” brother on the basketball court.

  Soon, even Pops had to admit that the Jordan family had a new sports superstar. Michael was the star pitcher on his baseball team, hurling several no-hitters and bringing the club within one game of the Little League World Series. He was even better on the basketball court. In fact, he was so good that he seemed like a sure thing to make the varsity team at Emsley A. Laney High. Or so he thought.

  Fate intervened in the form of a boy named Harvest Leroy Smith, an old friend of Michael’s from grade school. Leroy, as he was known, was six feet seven inches tall, nearly a foot taller than Michael. And he, too, was competing for the last spot on the school’s varsity basketball team.

  On the day the final cuts were posted, Michael and Leroy raced each other to the school’s gym. The two boys scanned the list of kids who’d made the team. Leroy looked under “S” for Smith and found his name. Michael looked under “J” for Jordan and discovered the disappointing news: he wasn’t on the list.

  Sometimes it takes adversity to push a person to do even better. Michael realized that he would have to prove himself all over again. About losing a spot on the team to Leroy, Michael said later that it “was a lesson to me to dig within myself.”

  With his competitive fire stoked by the setback, Michael joined the junior varsity basketball team, where he averaged 30 points a game. The next year, he made the varsity team. He went on to star on the team at the University of North Carolina and then as a professional with the Chicago Bulls. He won six NBA championships and five most valuable player awards over a career that spanned fifteen seasons. He was so famous, there was even a special basketball sneaker named in his honor: the Air Jordan.

  As an NBA player, Michael was contantly measuring himself against the best players the league had to offer: legends like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Dominique Wilkins. But he never forgot the two kids who had set the example for him—his brother Larry and his friend Leroy—even though neither of them ever played a game in the NBA.

  Michael and Leroy remained good friends. Throughout his career, whenever Michael checked into a hotel, he signed in as “Leroy Smith” in tribute to his old rival.

  And Michael never gave up his rivalry with Larry, either. He often told reporters: “When you see me play, you see Larry play.”

  One time, the two brothers got together for a friendly game of one-on-one for old time’s sake. As they were about to square off, Michael looked down at Larry’s
feet and said, “Just remember whose name is on your shoes.” Then he blew past him for a dunk.

  It was just a little reminder: no matter how good you are or how big you grow, you always need someone bigger, and better, pushing you to be the best.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet Tiger Woods and his father, Earl!”

  With those words, the life of two-year-old Eldrick “Tiger” Woods changed forever. As he toddled onto the television stage, Tiger tried hard to focus on the one thing he was there to do: tap a golf ball into a hole. It was a trick he had practiced back home in the garage with his dad. Now he just had to do it in front of a nationwide TV audience. Gulp.

  The show’s host, Mike Douglas, guided Tiger to the proper spot on the stage. Earl Woods whispered words of encouragement in his son’s ear. But when it came time to sink his putt, Tiger was overcome by jitters. He struck the ball, but it sailed wide of the hole. Lucky for him, the host decided to give him a second shot.

  This time, Tiger didn’t take any chances: he bent down, picked up the ball, and moved it to the very edge of the hole, where he could easily tap it in. The audience erupted into applause. A star was born.

  Even at that young age, Tiger was really good at playing golf—so good that one day, almost the whole world would know him by his first name alone.

  Tiger’s real first name—Eldrick—was made up by his mom. The first letter was for her husband, Earl, a retired U.S. Army officer; the last letter was for her own first name, Kultida. But almost from the beginning, they called their baby boy Tiger, in honor of Tiger Phong, a South Vietnamese colonel who had saved Earl’s life on the battlefield.