Companions in Courage (23 page)

Hank began to live with the same abandon he would use to drive the ball over three hundred yards. Even though he was able
to matriculate at Oklahoma State in 1994, Hank continued to abuse alcohol and live on the edge. Trip’s recollection: “He was
a complete monster.”

Disaster caught up with Hank when, under the influence, he ran a stop sign and smashed into another car. Luckily, the only
damage to life and limb was broken ribs in his own body and a broken leg in a passenger in the other car. Trip couldn’t take
any more. “I told him, ‘Hank, I love you but you have to get better. Go take care of yourself.’”

Tough love can work.

“When I saw what my behavior was doing to me, my brother, and other people, I didn’t want to live like that anymore,” Hank
says.

He checked in to Hazelden, a substance-abuse treatment center in Minnesota. He committed the next three and a half months
to putting his passion into facing his alcoholism. With his family behind him, Hank was able to move out of his private hell,
take ownership of his disease, and day by day, sometimes hour by hour, face the reality of a problem that had haunted him
too long.

“It was so tough and he did it on his own,” Kelli says. “Before he did it, he’s lucky he didn’t kill himself or someone else.”

The support of the family that loved him came through. Kelli says, “He’s awesome, he’s a stud. He’s worked himself out of
his problems brilliantly. We’ve always been a big support for each other.”

His victory at the 1998 U.S. Amateur capped a long and difficult road back.

“This is the second greatest victory of my life,” he says. “Sobriety is definitely number one, and no matter what I do for
the rest of my golfing career, nothing can change that.”

Senses and
Sensitivity

E
ver notice how we associate sounds with sports? We all know the groans and grunts of football, the fierce
whoosh
of hockey skates chewing up the ice, a basketball sailing through the net.

Golf has its own unique set of sounds. The sweet thunk of a solid drive. That distinctive plink when the ball drops into the
cup after a perfect putt.

Kevin Hall can make those sounds pretty well, enough to be named the 1999 Junior Golfer of the Year by the Minority Golf Foundation.
He can make those sounds but he cannot hear them. Kevin Hall is eighteen; he lost his hearing at the age of two.

Neither Kevin nor his parents, Percy and Jackie, ever let his deafness come between him and achievement. Kevin was first academically
in his class at St. Rita in Evendale, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, and earned a scholarship (part academic, part athletic)
to Ohio State University.

“You have to find the positive in what happens and that’s what Kevin has done,” says his mother, who works for Ryder Transportation
Services. “He has not let the loss of hearing dampen his spirits or kill his love of life.”

Kevin welcomes the platform his unusual combination of skills and traits affords him. He likes the idea of inspiring others
to fight the good fight against whatever it might be that could hold them back.

“I see many African-Americans with no hope and no goals,” he says. “I feel if they see a person of their race succeed, they
will feel they can do it too.”

Kevin’s struggle began when he was an infant. He spent a month in the hospital, burning up with a 103-degree temperature for
two weeks after contracting H-flu meningitis. Once the fever broke, his parents quickly noticed a change in their only child.

“We’d pop a balloon behind him or call his name and he wasn’t responding,” Jackie says. “We knew almost immediately he’d lost
his hearing.”

Percy was the first to learn sign language, and he and Jackie quickly read up on deafness and its consequences. They labeled
all the objects in the house to help Kevin learn that these things had names and tried to reach him through finger spelling.
By the time he was three he knew his phone number and his address.

“The more we taught him, the more he wanted to know,” Jackie says. “He took off and never looked back.”

Kevin began playing golf when he was nine and captained the golf team at Winton Woods High in Forest Park, Ohio (St. Rita’s
had no golf team, so Kevin was allowed to play elsewhere). As a senior, he won the individual section and division championships
and finished fourth in the Division I state tournament.

One thing Kevin knows he must deal with is media pressure. When he played in the U.S. Junior Amateur in 1999, he drew crowds
of reporters. He told his mother he wished he wouldn’t get so much attention and that he just wanted to be “normal.” Here’s
what Jackie told him: “How many black kids do you see playing golf at the level you are? How many deaf black kids? Let’s make
a decision. Do you want to quit or play?”

Kevin wants to play, no question. He met Tiger Woods at a clinic and got some tips on putting and adding more length to his
drives. He says his goal is to one day defeat Tiger in a match.

Imagine that happening, and a crowd cheering, and Kevin taking all of it in. Not hearing anything, of course, but reveling
in it anyway, soaking it in with his other senses.

“I don’t need to be able to hear those sounds to fully enjoy golf,” he says. “I use my eyes like hearing people use their
ears. That’s enough for me. Feeling the club hit the ball and feeling the ground after the ball falls in the cup is wonderful
and satisfying.”

S
he’s going to be mad at me. She hates for this story to be told this way. She can’t stand it when people get the idea that
she exceeded the perceived limits placed on her rather than fulfilled her potential.

“If I break a national record,” she says, “maybe they will stop writing about my eyes. It’s a matter of commitment. Some people
have a bad attitude, and that’s their disability.”

Marla Runyan is thirty-one and legally blind. Yet in 1999, running the 1500 meters, she won gold at the Pan Am Games, finished
fourth at the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships, and tenth at the World Championships in Seville, Spain.

Sorry, Marla, but here we go with another list of all the things you can’t do: see the finish line, read a stopwatch, watch
a tape of your races without sitting with your face practically against the TV screen.

And she is right to be angry that the focus always seems to be on the things she can’t do, when she has done so much.

Her medical condition is called Stargardt’s disease. It’s a progressive degeneration of the retina that has left her with
a gaping hole in the middle of her visual field. She has 20-300 vision in one eye, 20-400 in the other. But in 2000 she won
the USA Track & Field Indoor Championships at 3000 meters, leading wire to wire to win in 9:01.29.

“Please,” she asks, “think of me as an athlete, not a legally blind athlete.” And what an athletic life she has had.

As a nine-year-old in Camarillo, California, her vision began to go. At fourteen she couldn’t see well enough to follow a
soccer ball, so she began to run track and compete in field events, setting a school record with a high jump of 5 feet 7 inches.

At San Diego State she broadened her focus to seven events—the heptathlon. When she lost the ability to see the hurdles, she
counted the steps from the start to the first one and then on to the next, running almost by memory.

With the help of her mother, Valerie, she also succeeded in academics. She wore a magnifying device attached to her glasses
so she could read large-print books, and her mother would help by writing out, in large type, the assigned reading material
from her classes. She graduated cum laude from San Diego State in 1991 and then earned a master’s degree in education of the
handicapped.

“The biggest thing her mother and I did was not to set up any artificial barriers for Marla,” says her father, Gary. “We let
her find her own barriers. Some she found painfully. But she also found things she could do.”

Yes, like waterskiing and scuba diving. She even got a California driver’s license. And she also made the 2000 U.S. Olympic
team, placing eighth in the 1500 meters in Sydney.

So often we set our goals based on what we see. Think about Marla Runyan. Her goals exist in a world largely unseen. She can
barely make out the shape of the other competitors on the track, and so she must continually refine the runner’s intuition
that is so critical to having a sense of where she and the others are in the race.

Don’t be too mad at me, Marla. I know you get tired of being held up as an example of how people can persevere and overcome,
and I know I’m doing it to you again. But I’m impressed that someone who cannot see the tape at the end of the race can be
dedicated enough to be the first through that unseen barrier.

Marla Runyan can barely see. But she never took her eyes off the prize.

T
he ball swished through the net but Jamel Bradley didn’t hear it.

The
thump-thump-thump
of his basketball on the hard blacktop laid down an impressive rhythm that Jamel could feel. But he couldn’t hear it.

It is no surprise to me that Jamel Bradley has such a powerful, positive influence on young hearing-impaired kids. His role
as a smooth shooting guard on the University of South Carolina basketball team plays a part, but the more critical factor
is that he too is hearing impaired.

When Jamel was eighteen months old, he lost his ability to hear well. Running a 103-degree temperature for three days did
him in. He grew up in a mostly silent world, feeling different and ashamed. Like most kids, he desperately wanted to fit in,
especially as he grew older, but his hearing loss caused him to gradually withdraw.

“It was difficult. I built a wall around myself. I felt nobody wanted to talk to me when they saw my hearing aids. I was a
loner. It took a while before I was able to reach out and touch people.”

At six foot two, 160 pounds, Jamel lacks a physically imposing presence, but his forte is not size. It’s his jump shot. Playing
sports helped Jamel begin to move out of his quiet, solitary space.

He started playing basketball on a local playground in Beckley, West Virginia. Sharon Bradley, Jamel’s mom, says that her
son’s love of basketball shifted into high gear when he was in elementary school. He’d come home, do his homework, then go
to the YMCA to play ball. He was at the Y every chance he had. He kept improving and kept working, and soon his brother and
his friends started inviting him to play in their games.

“Things started clicking. They were in junior high school and a couple years older than me. They told me to stay in the corner.
They’d pass the ball to me and I’d shoot,” Jamel says.

He practiced and played every chance he got, and when he started high school he stepped into a leadership role, helping Woodrow
Wilson High School in Beckley to back-to-back class AAA titles his final two seasons. His senior year he set the West Virginia
high school record for free throw accuracy, connecting on 95 of 100 from the line. His coach, David Barkesdale, speaks highly
of his former pupil.

“He never complained. I saw him take charges that would send a hearing aid flying one way and the other going in an opposite
direction. He never used it as a crutch. He was an inspiration to all of us.”

When Jamel got to the University of South Carolina, he was fitted with digital, programmable, omnidirectional hearing aids
that help him hear sounds from every direction. These aids have improved his hearing by 85 percent. He can hear his coach
and his teammates and a whole lot more.

He now enjoys listening to rhythm-and-blues tunes, birds chirping, and traffic signals buzzing. At a rock concert a while
back he complained the music was too loud—a nice problem for a young guy who communicated with his coach through hand signals.
Those hand signals his coach used in high school are no longer necessary. Now his coach yelling at him sounds like sweet music.

In turn, the Southeastern Conference is now “hearing” from Bradley. In his sophomore year, Jamel was an occasional starter
and led the team in scoring in four games. At one point near the end of the 1999–2000 season, he had connected on 36 of 84
three-point attempts (42.9 percent) and was 14 of 17 (82.4 percent) from the free throw line.

Today, Jamel Bradley inspires the hearing impaired— young and old. His success with the Gamecocks resonates with young kids
throughout the country, and his words encourage them to manage their handicap differently than he did when he was their age.
Jamel speaks frequently to groups of the hearing impaired in and around Columbia, South Carolina. He talks to struggling individual
kids as well. He reached out to one young person in Florence, South Carolina, who was having trouble relating to classmates
and teammates.

Jamel’s simple message: “Always wear your hearing aid.” He understands the struggle. He didn’t wear his because he desperately
wanted to fit in.

“I let them know I’m in the same shoes they are,” he says. “They don’t wear hearing aids because they think people won’t talk
to them. I tell them to keep their hearing aids and listen to what everyone says.”

Jamel Bradley earned a place on the United States Deaf Olympic Team, which competed in Rome in 1999. With his college career
moving into his junior and senior years, who knows what he will achieve on the hardwood? What I do know is that, athletic
success aside, he is already a hero to hearing-impaired kids and adults.

One of Jamel’s young friends, Christopher Thompson, put it this way: “It is great to know there is someone out there that’s
the same as you.”