Companions in Courage Read online

  He was around, and he was there to give back to his family and others. Today he leads a foundation that mentors inner-city youth in Chicago.

  “Positive things have resulted from this, but the most positive thing I can think of right now is my son Derek and the way he has arrived with the opportunity to be an NFL football player.”

  And arrived he has. Derek, now twenty-eight, made it on his own. He did not play college football but took off on a career in baseball. He played in the Philadelphia Phillies organization for three seasons and saw nothing but a dead end ahead. “I didn’t see my career going anywhere. I knew I wanted to try something different,” he says.

  Despite his lack of experience, Derek earned a spot on the roster of the Albany Firebirds of the Arena Football League. His talent served him well. In 1998 he was a candidate for Defensive Player of the Year. Hard work paid off. Derek showed good stuff to coach Bill Parcells in a tryout session, and the New York Jets signed him to their practice squad in 1999. His stint with the Jets didn’t last long, but Derek continues an impressive career with the Firebirds.

  We read about courage. We can only imagine the anger and bitterness Darryl had to overcome to watch his own son on the battlefield that ended his career and put him in a wheelchair for life. He faced that test in 1999 when Derek was injured in an arena game.

  “I got a phone call from one of Derek’s teammates. He told me he’d been injured but they didn’t know to what extent. I was just stunned. I didn’t know what to think. I was just hoping that lightning hadn’t struck twice,” Darryl says.

  It turned out to be a minor concussion.

  Fear disappears in the face of courage. Darryl and Derek both know that. Still, when he encouraged Derek to pursue football, Darryl spoke words few of us in his situation might have uttered: “You go out and play. Don’t think about me. Just play the game like it’s supposed to be played. That’s what I tried to do.”

  That’s advice any father could give. I just think it means more coming from Darryl Stingley.

  SECTION 4

  Pride and

  Prejudice

  15

  Notah Begay III

  Just drop me off here, Dad. It’s okay. I can walk.”

  Notah Begay pleaded with his father every morning as they neared the prestigious, private Albuquerque Academy in New Mexico.

  Notah was the only Native American in the sixth grade at this fine school, and certainly the only one being driven there in an old Chevy truck that the family referred to as “Old Blue.” He couldn’t help but feel as out of place as that worn truck amid the BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes, couldn’t hide that bite of shame when Old Blue let out its familiar backfire.

  So he begged to be dropped a few blocks from the school, away from the stares of his classmates and the obvious influence of affluence.

  His father wouldn’t hear of it.

  “No,” he’d say, driving right into the parking lot amid the shiny and expensive foreign cars. “This is us.”

  Notah’s mother, Laura Ansera-Roybal, who serves as the juvenile justice coordinator for Native Americans for the state of New Mexico, and his father, Notah II, who is a specialist for the Indian Health Service, found scholarships and took out loans so Notah could attend the academy. They worked hard to balance the elite environment of the school with their values and social conscience. The discomfort Notah felt when he stepped from the truck, his father knew, wouldn’t be fatal. But not being true to who you are? Nothing could be more dangerous. The lesson stuck with Notah as he wrestled with the contrasts of his two worlds.

  Growing up in a small adobe house on the Isleta Pueblo Reservation outside of Albuquerque left him a little short of creature comforts. “For a while we had to boil hot water on a stove to take a bath,” he says. In contrast, at the academy he lived amid materialism and plenty.

  His athletic abilities helped buy him acceptance. He learned that being able to run, jump, and shoot could, in many people’s eyes, excuse a backfiring pickup. From the sixth grade to graduation he excelled in sports and lettered in basketball, soccer, and golf.

  Notah’s golf beginnings were as basic and simple as his lifestyle. He was six years old when he and his brother, Clint, walked with his dad in the Twilight League at Ladera Golf Club in Albuquerque. The bug bit him big time.

  “At age six I fell in love with golf,” he says. “I would save money to buy practice balls. But soon my urge to practice exceeded my piggy bank. One evening I waited in the parking lot at the local public course to talk to the pro.”

  Begay bartered hard work in exchange for access to the course after work. His basketball coach, Mike Brown, remembers, “Notah would get out of school around 3 P.M. and practice his chipping before the gym opened at 4:40 for basketball.”

  As an eighth-grader, Notah was in his first state tournament in Roswell. Undaunted by the country-club atmosphere, and true to his culture, Notah drew red lines under his eyes with red clay, an Indian symbol of preparing for a challenge. He opened his corn pollen bundle and asked for blessings. His coach, Bob Verardo, remembers the other players yelling, “Woo-woo-woo! Hey, Chief, what’s with the war paint?” He also remembers, “They stopped as soon as he hit the ball.”

  As his skills improved, Notah grew from a young kid carrying his clubs around on a bus and playing municipal courses to a mature young man with a huge golf dream. He even knew the obstacles. “I got the message,” he says. “Indians aren’t supposed to do this. Indians aren’t supposed to do that. You can’t be lawyers. You can’t be doctors. And God forbid you’d be a professional golfer.” He adds, “I didn’t listen to it because I had this connection to the game of golf. Golf kind of grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘This is going to be something that’s going to do a lot of things for you.’”

  At seventeen he was the top-ranked junior in the nation. As history would have it, another young phenom was breaking his own barriers. Number 2 was Tiger Woods. They were soon to be teammates at Stanford, where Notah earned a golf scholarship.

  Once again, Notah’s choice of school and major reflected his desire to be a role model for others. He knew that American Indians are the poorest minority in the United States and have the lowest rates of college attendance. He also knew that he already had the attention of young kids.

  “I saw that I had a positive influence on them, and they kind of listened to what I had to say just based on what little amount of success I had had in golf,” he says. “I realized then that I needed to get my college degree. I felt it would be hypocritical of me to give talks to Indian kids about the need for an education, staying in school and getting good grades, if I myself didn’t do it. I chose a difficult school so I could go back and tell them, ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’”

  He graduated with a degree in economics and a list of accomplishments that not only exemplified his commitment to excellence but underscored what he told kids: “Work harder to prove wrong those who have stereotypes and low expectations.”

  He was a member of Stanford’s 1994 NCAA Championship team, a three-time All-America selection, holder of fifteen major junior and amateur titles. That 1994 Stanford team is a story in itself, breaking culture barriers all over the place: Tiger Woods, Will Yanagisawa, Casey Martin, Steve Burdick, and Begay.

  Notah Begay III is the first full-blooded Native American to play and win on the Professional Golfers’ Association Tour. “My life has changed, but I have not,” he says. “This is who I am. I am an Indian.”

  He may have stopped coloring his cheeks but he still draws on the Keresan culture of San Felipe Pueblo. “There is great power there,” he says. “I reach into my spirit and my soul and the teachings that my mom imparted onto me—believe in yourself, allow your spirit to fly free, and trust yourself.”

  Now he is able to fulfill his dream to be a role model for young American Indians. The week of the Kemper Open at the Tournament Players Club at Avenel, fifteen miles from Washington, D.C., Notah went to Capito
l Hill to testify before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. His words contributed to increasing awareness of the high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, disease, suicide, and school dropouts that prevail on the reservations. He spoke eloquently to the leaders of our country, and he spoke personally to the young people his life now touches.

  “I came from playing in vacant fields and overcoming odds,” he says. “I’m here to tell you, I’m no different from you. I see your faces, and I see part of me in you. You all have the potential to go out and pursue what you want to do.”

  He makes no claims of perfection, however. He is human and can stumble—as he did in January 2000, when he was arrested and convicted on a charge of drunk driving. Did he make excuses, whine about circumstances, and try to dodge the law? No. In fact, he informed the judge about a prior out-of-state offense, guaranteeing himself a seven-day jail sentence.

  “You do something wrong, you pay the price,” he says. Begay himself has more to do on the positive side of the ledger. His first name, translated from the Navajo, means “almost there.” He likes to add, “But not quite.”

  16

  Willie O’Ree

  When I think of Harlem, hockey isn’t what usually pops into my mind. Race surely does.

  I question the origins of bigotry. I wonder why the color of a person’s skin matters so much. I struggle with hatred. I admire those in the front lines of the war against it.

  At P.S. 113 in Harlem, Willie O’Ree stood in front of seventy-five neighborhood kids in the cafeteria, teaching them the fundamentals of skating, hockey, and life. A new program, Ice Hockey In Harlem, invited Willie to come to inspire young African-American kids to consider hockey as their sport. Why Willie O’Ree?

  Willie was the first African-American to lace up his skates in the National Hockey League. He is to hockey what Jackie Robinson is to baseball—a pioneer, one who changed the landscape and smashed the barriers holding others back.

  Willie was the youngest of twelve children, so holding his own in a crowded house was good training for learning to survive on an ice surface crowded with racial taunts and high sticks. Willie first put on skates when he was three, a typical Canadian kid who loved to skate to school. As he got older, he hung out with his older brother and his friends, who played in an instructional league in Fredricton, New Brunswick.

  Willie distinguished himself at every level of competition. However, playing hockey in Canada, where racism is somewhat muted, didn’t prepare Willie for what he had to face when he broke into the professional ranks with the American Hockey League. The night he took the ice against Tidewater, reality cross-checked him when a black cat and cotton balls greeted him during his first shift. He played through the taunts and the disdain, through cold and malicious stares.

  When Willie was called up to the Boston Bruins in 1960, he was ecstatic. The Bruins organization and his new team-mates welcomed him warmly. He was greeted differently by opposing teams, as you can imagine. In a game between the Bruins and the Chicago Blackhawks the racial tension peaked. One Blackhawk butt-ended O’Ree, first with vicious racial taunts and later with the end of his stick, knocking out his front teeth. Willie responded instinctively, breaking his stick over his assailant’s head. A brawl broke out when both benches emptied.

  After order was restored, Willie needed a police escort to leave Chicago Stadium.

  “Racist remarks from fans were much worse in the U.S. cities than in Toronto and Montreal. I particularly remember a few incidents in Chicago. The fans would yell, ‘Go back to the South’ and ‘How come you’re not picking cotton?’ Things like that. It didn’t bother me. Hell, I’d been called names most of my life. I just wanted to be a hockey player, and if they couldn’t accept that fact, that was their problem, not mine.”

  Willie O’Ree completed that season, but it was his last full one in the NHL. An earlier injury, which had blinded him in his right eye, as well as the wear and tear of professional hockey, had ground down his skills. “I could deal with the racism,” he said, “but not the blindness.”

  Even minus an eye, Willie played minor-league hockey with the San Diego Hawks in the Pacific Coast League until the 1979–80 season.

  Now in his early sixties, Willie works as a security manager at a San Diego hotel and travels the country as director of the NHL’s Diversity Task Force. He introduces minority children to hockey and to what it takes to overcome whatever obstacles may block their personal path.

  When Willie O’Ree was honored at the 1998 All-Star Game in Vancouver, British Columbia, he was not saluted for his statistics (four goals and ten assists in forty-five NHL games) but for his courage, for standing up to racial bigotry, and for opening the door for minorities in the NHL.

  Sometimes it’s not about scoring goals. It’s about setting and achieving them.

  17

  Esteban Toledo

  Esteban Toledo, known as the “Grinder King” on the PGA Tour, grew up playing in a foursome with poverty, heartache, and prejudice as his associates. This is a man acquainted with adversity, who knows what it takes to persevere and succeed.

  Unlike many of his fellow golfers, he didn’t come of age in the plush confines of a country club. Toledo, the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters, grew up in Mexico. He began his climb to the Tour in a dirt-floor farmhouse that didn’t have electricity or running water. Before Esteban was in first grade he knew how to tend livestock, pick cotton, and deal with heartbreak.

  One afternoon the incessant barking of a dog got his attention. As any curious kid would, he went to see what the commotion was all about. He found the body of his murdered brother.

  It’s fair to say that the one tragedy spawned another. For shortly after his brother’s death, Esteban’s father died of a heart attack. Esteban and his mother, who never recovered from her grief, were left to tend the farm. Esteban, who did not celebrate holidays such as his birthday or Christmas, shouldered the heavy responsibility of caring for his mother and the farm at the ripe old age of eight.

  In order to make more money to support his mother and the farm, Esteban began swimming across the river that separated his family farm from the Mexicali Country Club to scavenge for lost balls and sell them back to the members. As time went by and the membership of Mexicali got used to his presence, Esteban was allowed to work in the locker room and to caddy. His interest in golf took shape on blistering afternoons when the membership waited for the heat to subside.

  He would make sure no suspecting eyes were following him and then he’d go out on the course and practice hitting balls. An abandoned seven-iron that he had found and kept hidden in the woods was the only club he had. Because Esteban had learned to be alert, he also became a keen observer and picked up the basics of golf’s mechanics by watching members.

  On those hot afternoons, he grooved the swing that he still uses today. In the evening, when he would swim back to the farm to do the chores that waited for him, he began to dream of having a complete set of clubs and playing a full round of golf.

  Eventually Esteban Toledo became the proud owner of a full set of clubs—castoffs he carried in an old bag held together with wire. The daily swim, the work as a caddie, the solitary practice on the back edge of Mexicali, the farm work, and his family’s grief became the heart and soul of his work ethic. At seventeen, Esteban won his first tournament with his set of orphaned clubs.

  That victory brought him joy and a face-to-face confrontation with prejudice. Brown skin was not the color of choice among the members of Mexicali Country Club. He learned quickly that when it came to representing the club, white and rich was as important as golf skill. Mexicali refused to let him identify himself with it, a requirement to defend his first championship. But by this time Esteban was not going to let the racial biases of the Mexicali membership deter him. Though after being denied the opportunity to defend his title he hadn’t considered playing professional golf, a wealthy American businessman discovered him hitting balls on the Mexicali
range and became his sponsor and eventually his surrogate father. At eighteen, Esteban moved to the United States.

  Armed with less than ten English words, self-taught golf skills, and a determination honed in the challenges of his life, he began the long journey to the PGA Tour. The Asian Tour, mini-tours in the U.S. and abroad, the Nike Tour, and numerous Q schools from 1986 brought him to the fully exempt status that he enjoys now. Mexico has now adopted Esteban as one of its favorite sons, easing some of the hurt from the time when he couldn’t defend a title because of his skin.

  The fans on the Tour love Esteban—he has time for everyone. Recently when he was speaking to a group of Hispanic youth, Esteban shared his secret: “I had a dream and I worked hard to make it come true. You can do that too, if you work hard and believe in yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you different. When you make it, you don’t have to change. I am still the same inside.”

  18

  Ted Nolan

  Growing up in northern Ontario, Canada, shaped Ted Nolan into a man. The struggles he endured provided the foundation of a philosophy of coaching that wins on the ice and in the lives of his players. Ted Nolan personifies courage, determination, and compassion, qualities that make him special.

  When I reflect on what it takes to become an elite coach in professional sports, I think of videotapes, manuals, seminars on team management, hours spent behind the bench as an assistant, and time invested in understanding the psychological makeup of the modern athlete. While these ingredients are part of Nolan’s background, they are not what set him apart as a coach.

  Nolan was born into the Ojibway tribe on the Garden River Indian Reservation in Sault Sainte Marie, Canada. He is the third youngest of Stan and Rose Nolan’s twelve children. He grew up during a time when the Canadian government believed that it could help integrate Native North Americans into society by anglicizing them—cleansing them of their language, culture, and tribal rituals.