A few years after my midday lesson in philosophy at the hands of my two sons, my daughter Rose and her high school friends started their own Special Olympics Unified Bowling program. They were social entrepreneurs before the term was popular and created their own weekend team, with more than thirty athletes and partners. It was inspiring to see someone so young create something so powerful. Clearly she understood the fun that lasts and wanted more of it. And she and her siblings and friends were also the target for the next surprise: a call from the film producers Peter and Bobby Farrelly.
The Farrellys wanted to know if Special Olympics would collaborate in the making of a film about the athletes. They were friends of my brother Anthony and involved in many fund-raising events for his wonderful program, Best Buddies, so I knew they were good people. But at the same time, I was wary, since their brand of filmmaking was what one might kindly call “adolescent humor.” They’d made such hit films as There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber, films soaked in bathroom humor and the occasional joke at the expense of a character with intellectual disability. They were great at making teenagers roar with laughter (and making me roar, too), but I couldn’t see how any film they might make would be appropriate for a movement like ours.
But after months of discussion, Peter Farrelly managed to convince us that his vision was sincere and serious: “I want to make a movie that is funny, but I also want to make a film that shows the human side of Special Olympics athletes. I know there are a lot of movies that tug at people’s heartstrings and tell emotion-drenched stories about people with intellectual challenges, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture of what goes on at Special Olympics.” The film was called The Ringer (2005), and in it, a lifelong loser, played by Johnny Knoxville, sneaks into a Special Olympics dorm, feigns an intellectual disability, and tries to win a race and a bet. I visited the set in Austin a number of times, and during one of the lunch breaks, I walked a few blocks with Bill Chott, a skilled improv actor who was playing a Special Olympics athlete. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Tim,” Bill said, “but working on this film, I feel like I’m getting back so much more than I’m giving.”
There it is again, I thought, giving and receiving. Needless to say, I pressed Bill. “What do you mean?”
“This is just the best set I’ve ever been on—it’s as simple as that. We’ve got about fifty Special Olympics athletes around us all the time and they just make the set the best I’ve ever been on. They’re always having a good time and enjoying everything.”
“I hear you. But that’s what they’re doing. You said you were getting back a lot more than you gave.” I know I sound like a broken record. “What about you? What makes this set so different for you?”
Although Bill and I had just met, I could see he was already frustrated with me. In my head, I was preparing for the three-part discussion and looking forward to what Bill might tell me once I’d broken down the routine responses. But instead of the usual pattern, Bill went silent and just kept walking.
“Bill. Did you hear me? I was asking, what makes this so special for you?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for me to say, man. I don’t know what else I can tell you. But let me tell you this. On this set, I get twenty hugs a day. I’ve never been anyplace like this. That’s about the best I can explain it. Twenty hugs a day. And I like it.”
* * *
You need to be fearless to hug people—and you need to be recklessly fearless to hug people twenty times a day. In the Unified world where you play as you are and you try with all the energy God gives you, and you hug people you’re happy to be with, you can feel safe and seen and light and fun. That’s an energy worth celebrating.
By the way, Waterbury did beat my team, New Haven, in the State tournament that second year. King Davis was right. They kicked our butts. And I’m not embarrassed to say, it was a blast.
THIRTEEN
I Am So Proud
It would be a huge mistake to assume that the Special Olympics school of the heart curriculum ends with love and fun and trust and hugs. Life requires more than that, and we all know it. It requires grit. One day, a colleague sent me a short essay that started me wondering what we really mean when we talk about “grit.” It was written by a Special Olympics parent who was also the chaplain of the United States Army Base at Fort Leonard Wood, Kansas. He was writing about watching his daughter, Elizabeth Carlson, race for the first time. I read his piece to myself:
I remember the day perhaps too well. It was the first time for my daughter Elizabeth to attend a “Special Olympics.” She was very excited. She didn’t know my love of athletics and competition, but she did know the excitement of the crowds and the feeling of importance of being in the 50 yard dash.
Even saying dash forces me to deviate from the normal paradigm of speed, sleek runner, world-class times; and understand running from the world of a child who never crawled, a child who caught herself with her head when the teetering which became walking was painfully, yet perseveringly practiced … I don’t want to reminisce too much but that day … it is still etched indelibly in my memory. I knew the world of “special” children. I knew and know the world of expectation, of hope for new performance plateaus, the predisposition of “boxes” which we tend to need to classify human beings as we strive to define them in reference to “normal” …
Yet this day was different. I recall her lining up with five or six other athletes. There was anticipation in the air. There were officials and whistles and flags and tapes to break at the finish line. And then the race began. My daughter who never crawled, who never walked as my other five children walked so strongly and so perfectly … was running.
Today I put on hold the fear that running always leads to falling. Running never was “right” for her and I watched and watched as she ran and ran. She won. Elizabeth won the race. I rushed to her and embraced her. I could feel her entire being surge with feeling as we shared her moment of athletic victory … the memory of that day, of my precious, special daughter running will last forever!
“Liz,” “Lizzy,” “Elizabeth Christine Carlson,” I love you, I’m proud of you, you’re special. God gave you to us to cherish forever. Thanks for the courage you have given to all of us, the strength, and the desire to try, to never give up and yes … to run.
When you read something like this, you know it’s trying to communicate with your heart, not just your head. And when that same reading leads to tears, you know it is trying to free some part of your heart that is yearning for its message. Chaplain Carlson wasn’t just writing about an event. He was writing about a relationship between himself and his daughter where the strength and the love between them had given one of them, Lizzy, the strength and the grit to be unafraid to try something monumental: running. More than anything else, he was writing about a moment in which he’d learned that she wasn’t afraid to fail, that no matter how difficult it was for her to walk or run and no matter how likely she was to fall and get hurt, she was tough enough to try. He must have known that his belief in her was what made it possible: he’d found a way to tell her through words and through love that he saw something in her that no one else saw and maybe something that she didn’t see, either. That’s what made her able to risk it all in the race. She knew she had her dad with her. And as a result, she had grit.
The dictionary definition of “grit” is full of words that describe Lizzy Carlson: “courage, spirit, resolution, determination, nerve, guts, doggedness.” As I read her father’s account, I could almost feel her willpower rising. I could sense that she’d found a courage she might not have known she had. I wondered if she’d prepared for that moment or anticipated it. I wondered if she’d had to force herself to make the effort or if the guts had come naturally to her. Who was this Lizzy Carlson who had climbed this enormous mountain of a challenge and run this race and won?
A hundred years ago, the great psychologist William James puzzled over the rarit
y of the person who does what Lizzy did:
Men the world over possess amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use … Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
James’s question of whether or not most of us ever push ourselves to the extremes of our capability the way Lizzy Carlson did at Fort Leonard Wood has been taken up today by teams of researchers who are trying to understand grit and what role it plays in our lives. The University of Pennsylvania researcher Angela Lee Duckworth, building on the work of other positive psychologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, has been studying the lives of people who achieve at the high end of their respective professions to see what psychological trait most fully contributes to their success. Duckworth and her colleagues have studied a lot of traits that we commonly associate with success: intelligence, for instance. Most people assume that the more intelligent you are, the more likely to succeed you are. To some extent, that’s true. Cleverness can take you far in the world.
But Duckworth and her colleagues have found that in the long run, grit influences success more than IQ or any other single personality factor. The research defines “grit” as having two parts—one is perseverance and the other is passion for long-term goals. Interestingly, grit is not the same as self-control, nor is it the same as the need for achievement as validated by others. People with grit often pursue their goals against the grain of others’ expectations, often do so with persistence despite risk, and yet have a strong capacity for human connection and collaboration. When Duckworth evaluated groups of high-achieving people such as Ivy League students, West Point cadets, and National Spelling Bee finalists, she found that grit was a better predictor of success than anything else. And in a finding that is of special importance to the world of Special Olympics, grit is not correlated with intelligence. You can have a really high IQ and not have much grit. And similarly, you can score poorly on an IQ test and be a star when it comes to grit. Grit requires both the capacity to see the goal and the capacity to not see the frustrations associated with trying to reach it, but it does not require school smarts.
Lizzy and her father clearly have faced their share of disappointment, but then again, who hasn’t? The difference between Lizzy Carlson and most of us is that disappointment usually leads us to fear trying again. And what’s the effect of that fear? A discouraged person or, worse, a defeated one. Why believe in the audacity of a dream when disappointment looms? Better, it seems, to stay away from risky situations and reduce the chances of failure; better to live within the range of what is reasonable, what is safe. If running leads to falling, stay home.
But as we all know, that’s not the pathway to a fulfilled heart. We know there’s something beautiful and special within each of us—something we know is good and we want to believe we can share with the world. The Lizzy Carlsons of the world remind us to take another chance and try again. And we need to remember that her gritty effort came with her father’s love and within a community of support. If we’re going to pursue our dreams, if we’re going to muster the grit and optimism necessary to bring those dreams to life, we need to silence the voices in our heads, and around us, that tell us not to try.
When I first read Lizzy’s father’s account of her race, I took the text to a meeting of the international board of directors of Special Olympics—a group composed of Olympic champions such as Bart Conner and Nadia Comaneci, corporate leaders such as Muhtar Kent and Jay Emmett, entertainers such as Vanessa Williams and Jon Bon Jovi, disability rights leaders such as Deng Pufang and William P. Alford, and Special Olympics revolutionaries such as Stacey Johnston and Florence Nabayinda. At the opening of the meeting, I told the board that I was actively in search of a deeper understanding of the source of Special Olympics’ power to change lives, and I read the whole of his essay. When I finished, I looked up to see a room of thirty global leaders stunned into silence. Then one of our most powerful corporate champions, Mark Booth, at that time the CEO of the media giant BSkyB of Europe, spoke up. “I spend my whole life in meetings with tough businesspeople, and I spend my whole life never showing my emotions to anyone. Then I come to Special Olympics and I cry. I don’t know whether I’m embarrassed or overjoyed but I know I’m a better man here. And I know it makes me want to have the kind of guts that Lizzy Carlson shows us all.”
I wish Mark had been able to come with me to Arusha, Tanzania, to witness another brilliant lesson in how to develop the “kind of guts” that makes us all better human beings. Arusha is a small city located near Mt. Kilimanjaro in the high altitude plains of Tanzania. Tanzania is a country of enormous contrasts. It has some of the world’s most beautiful destinations, and is one of the world’s ten poorest nations. The Ngorongoro Crater is home to Africa’s most diverse and concentrated range of species; Lake Victoria is the world’s largest tropical lake and the source of the Nile River; the city of Dar Es Salaam is among the best deep water ports on Africa’s east coast; and off the coast, in the beautiful Indian Ocean, sits Zanzibar, one of the most exotic islands in the world. But Tanzania’s grinding poverty has gone largely unchecked despite decades of optimistic reform efforts. The father of the nation, Julius Nyerere, was among Africa’s greatest independence leaders who brought charisma and hope to the liberation of his country from European control in 1961. But his strategy for development was rooted in socialist economics that failed miserably.
When I set out for Tanzania in 1998 with my mentor, Red Verderame, and athlete leaders Loretta and Billy Quick, more than 75 percent of the population were living on less than one dollar a day. One of those people was Ramadhani Salim Chambo, a young man who met us with Tanzanian flowers and a hug at the Arusha airport when our plane from Amsterdam landed at midnight on the single, barely lit runway. He was twenty-three years old, or thereabouts: I would later find out that he was born sometime in 1975, but no one in the family could remember the exact date. Most of the passengers who had gotten off the plane with us were headed to Mount Kilimanjaro, but we were headed in the opposite direction, toward town, where Special Olympics Tanzania was scheduled to host the first-ever invitational 10K race for Special Olympics athletes from around southern Africa. Almost thirty athletes were invited to the multinational race, and a larger group of local athletes was also going to be included in competitive runs of shorter distances. Ramadhani and his coach helped us gather our bags and board a minibus bound for our hotel in Arusha. But halfway to the town, the bus driver suddenly pulled over to the side of the unlit, one-lane road. There was no sign of light or life. I assumed the van had broken down. After twenty hours of travel. Just what I needed. Great.
But no one else seemed perturbed, so I couldn’t help but ask, “What’s happening?”
“We’re dropping Ramadhani off,” said the coach.
I looked out into total darkness. I looked for a path. For a friend or parent who might be meeting Ramadhani. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing but a couple of hundred yards of open field bordered by woods. The door to the van opened up, and Ramadhani smiled at me and waved without a word, climbed out, and headed for the wall of trees in the distance.
“He lives in a village on the other side of those trees,” his coach said. “This is as close as we can get in the van. He’ll be fine.”
I asked the coach to stop him. Couldn’t I offer him a room at our hotel if he needed a place to sleep? Or couldn’t we drive him directly to his home? The people on the van regarded me as if I were some sort of cute, perplexed animal. He was fine and he was off into the darkness.
If I had followed Ramadhani to his village, I would have found what those in Tanzania considered a typical life for a young person with an intellectual challenge. Ramadhani’s mother, Khadija Shabani, worked the fields, and sold handmade goods and vegetables to earn money. On a few occasions, her husband had worked
in a repair shop in Arusha. In more than four decades of work, she had never earned as much as a single dollar for a day’s work.
When I spoke through an interpreter to his mother, Khadija, she was blunt: “I am proud,” she told me, “that Ramadhani was never tied.”
“Tied?”
“Many parents who have boys like Ramadhani tie them up in the closet or in the yard so they don’t cause any trouble to the others in the village,” she said. “Ramadhani had so many problems, you see. His birth was a difficult one. Maybe Ramadhani was sick because of how he came. Maybe I had a fever when I was carrying him. I don’t know. But he didn’t speak. His mouth was always full of saliva and it was so hard to keep him clean. And the other children would not play with him so he became naughty at times and quarreled with others. But I refused to tie him and I just tried my best to stop him from being naughty and keep him clean and tell the other children to leave him alone.”
When Ramadhani was eleven years old, a social worker visited his village and explained to his mother that a new school was opening for children like him and that she could take him to the school and they would try to help him learn some things. “I was so happy. I couldn’t read but I signed the paper the lady gave me and Ramadhani started school. By that time, he was almost always clean and when he started school, he became less naughty. Some days, he helped me with some work too. The other children left him alone and that was better for us all. I became happy with how this boy was growing.”
At around this same time, a smart young man named Frank Macha worked as a manager in the largest stadium in the former capital city of Tanzania, Dar Es Salaam. Macha was an up-and-coming professional in Tanzania’s sport community with experience managing national soccer matches and large sporting events. His dream was that world-class sporting events featuring international stars would someday come his way.
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