Wakeup Call
By Kenny Eller
10/2/05
Every now and then you read something or see something that makes your feet freeze and sends ice up your legs. Stops you cold. Today that happened to me. After reading about 17 year old Bobby Martin, a senior football player at Colonel White High in Dayton, Ohio, I felt chills rush up my legs that resulted in tears welling up in my eyes.
I attempted to read the article written by Sports Illustrated’s, Rick Reilly, aloud to my girlfriend but was forced to pause several times as my vocal chords were choked out with emotion. Bobby is a young man who plays high school football like kids do everywhere in America. The big difference is that Bobby has no legs.
Bobby Martin was born legless.
He wasn’t born without a heart or without a mind. So Bobby does what every other person does. He lives. He competes. He does what many think is the impossible, not so much because he is some great warrior, but more so because it is all he knows. Bobby didn’t lose his legs, he never had them.
The struggle with loss for the most part, is that it is just that…loss. Bobby doesn’t have that struggle and thus he doesn’t let the barrier of being legless, which many would view as being lifeless, hold him back in anything he does. He does things that the ordinary see as being extraordinary. Yet to Bobby it is his ordinary. He has no other choice. He lives. He competes.
Hours after I had read the small article in the back of the big magazine, I began flipping through the pages and looking at the pictures. In full color, in the first few pages, is a picture of Bobby. The old saying stands so true. The story is told without one word. Robed in a dark green uniform with the number 99 stitched across his jersey, Bobby looks as though he and the field are one.
The chills turned to icebergs. The tears ran for freedom.
His story is one that should shake everyone like a man who just can’t get enough salt on his beans. While the impression I got from the article wasn’t one of the unfortunate, it still presses one to push on. If a young man, dealt an extremely tough card in life, has risen above to do what a regular boy takes for granted, then what is possible for the rest of us?
He could have easily taken life off. Who would blame him? He could have laid in bed and bathed in his tears and asked the man upstairs why, over and over again until his voice had no sound. He could have let special have a whole different meaning in his life. He didn’t though. The kid benches 215 pounds and has picked up a whole town and now with the article, perhaps a whole nation with only half the body that most of us have. He lives. He competes.
We as a people walk around and the majority of us spend a lifetime talking about what we wish we could do. What we would do if things were only a little different. Such a mind boggling shame really.
What would Bobby Martin do with our lives?
Every life has such a great purpose. Perhaps Bobby Martin’s purpose is being revealed right now as he graces us with just a portion of the story his life will be. I know the next time I feel fear of embarrassment or failure creep up on me and say hello, I will think of young Bobby Martin running around the field on his hands making no excuses in life. Just living. Just competing.
The ice melts. The tears dry.
It’s time to wakeup.
(All photos courtesy of Sports Illustrated)
