I have to wonder, though, if the people it was intended for (ie football fans) really appreciated it. I mean, the two- football and poetry, are hardly synonymous.
But I enjoyed it, and I'm not even a football fan! :D
I wonder who it was really intended for. Poetry has a way of occasionally turning tragedy into to triumph. The following doesn't exactly rhyme but it can sure strike some chords.
Mother of all amazing rides :cry: :happyheart:
Bears special-teamer Ayanbadejo perseveres on hard road to Miami
Published January 28, 2007 Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
There are $7,500 Super Bowl tickets that will find buyers. There are hotels in Miami that are in full gouge mode, and there are more than enough football fans happy to be gouged. There are B-list celebrities hunting and gathering A-list party invitations while America prepares to observe its holy day of obligatory excess.
But this Super Bowl story begins like a whisper, in an apartment in Nigeria with no running water and no electricity. It winds its way through the Lathrop Homes public housing complex in Chicago, through murders and criminal behavior that children shouldn't have to see, through the kinds of things that make a mother wonder how a son's insides are being affected. This story stands in welfare lines, eyes straight ahead.
It bolts for California, the place where dreams congregate, and it squirms and twists and fights. It refuses to take no for an answer.
Then, and only then, does it end up in Miami for Super Bowl XLI. Head held high.
Rita Sanford will be there to watch her son, Bears special-teams standout Brendon Ayanbadejo, play against the Colts, and she will know exactly what it took for him to get there. It took heart and hard work. She won't say it, but it took a mother too.
Sanford met her future ex-husband at Chicago State University, where both were getting master's degrees. He was a black man from Nigeria whose father had 10 wives. She was a white woman from the South Side. They had two children, Obafemi and Oladele, who would go by his middle name, Brendon.
They moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to live in an apartment building near her husband's family shortly after Brendon was born in 1976. She taught African history and English composition. She lasted a little more than two years in the country.
"It was horrible," Sanford said. "My ex-husband's family treated me very well, but I was used to having a telephone and electricity and running water. The building had a generator, but it was stolen. What we're used to is different than what a lot of other people around the world are used to. People survive any way they can there.
"There were no supermarkets. You had to go to an open-air market for staple foods. You had to be there before it would close down; otherwise there wasn't that much around to eat."
Disillusioned, she came back to the United States with Obafemi, who was 4, and Brendon, who was 2. She ostensibly came back a single mom. The only place they could afford to live was the Lathrop Homes on the North Side, one of the first housing projects in Chicago. It wasn't nearly as bad as some of the other public housing communities in the city, but you didn't have to look too hard for heartache. Mostly, it came looking for you.
"Oh, it was bad," Ayanbadejo said. "My best friend got killed next door. His mom killed him. She was on drugs. My sister's best friend got chopped up and diced into little pieces by her dad. She was 5 or 6. There were drugs and gangs. That was just normal. You don't really know anything else until you get out of there. Then you understand there's better.
"It happens. You're used to tragic stories. You're used to tragedy. It seemed normal."
Sanford, 57, tried teaching at a South Side junior high school but couldn't handle the lack of respect from students. In Nigeria, students would stand up when she came into the room, would carry her books for her. In her classrooms in Chicago, chaos overtook the curriculum.
She quit and couldn't find a job. The family had moved to a nicer apartment for a few years, but when she couldn't pay the rent, they moved back to the Lathrop Homes. They landed on welfare. Her parents had passed away several years before.
"Our family had to stand in line to receive free cheese, milk, cereal, stuff like that," Ayanbadejo said.
The violence in nearby Hamlin Park was a given, a fixture, a self-evident truth. Gunshots often could be heard at night. And Sanford, now with a daughter from another father, decided it was time to escape. The boys were reaching the age where the odds of something bad happening to them were increasing with each day. Brendon was 10. One of Sanford's college friends offered to put the family up in Santa Cruz, Calif., until Rita could get back on her feet. They stayed in the home for several years.
She took classes at a community college, then took a job there.
The boys were exposed to more people who valued education. There weren't gang or safety issues. Children of mixed heritage didn't get stares the way they did in Chicago.
And there was football. The boys took to it quickly. But as talented as Brendon was, he struggled to get noticed.
When you have been through what he had been, the only thing you know to do is fight. When no Division I school offers you a scholarship out of high school, you make up your mind. You go to a junior college and force the coaches at UCLA to notice you. And when you go undrafted as a linebacker out of college, you don't quit, because you didn't quit when life was much, much more difficult.
Three NFL teams cut you. You play for three different franchises in the Canadian Football League and for the Amsterdam team in NFL Europe. You keep getting up off the ground. Finally—finally—you make the Dolphins notice you in 2003 as a 26-year-old rookie. Your brother is a fullback on the team. He already had won a Super Bowl with the Ravens in the 2000 season. This is your chance, and it would take a crowbar to release your grip on it.
The Bears traded for Ayanbadejo in 2005. It meant he was back in the city where he was born, where he spent some of his formative years. He began going back to Hamlin Park to help coach football to 10- to 12-year-old kids. He was drawn to the place, not like someone picking at a scab but like someone holding out a hand to help others get up.
This year he's going to the Pro Bowl as a special-teams player. But first there's the Super Bowl. His brother, who plays for the Cardinals, will be there. So will their mother.
"I'm happy for my team," said Brendon, 30. "We plotted this course last year after we lost to Carolina in the playoffs. We set a plan. It's a plan that took over a year to come to fruition. Whenever you want to be the best in the world at something, how often do you actually get that chance?
"I was a fighter in life, so I can't say I'm happy for somebody else for helping me, like a coach or a teacher. I fought my way up pretty much—me, my brother and my immediate family. We did everything we could to help each other out."
When Brendon was 21, his father, Olatunde, flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles to see his sons. They hadn't seen him since they left Lagos. The brothers keep in touch with him.
But this is the story of a mother and her son. She lives in a house in Encinitas, Calif., just north of San Diego. And if the mother closes her eyes hard enough, she can almost reach out and touch Miami.
"They've done amazingly well with football," Sanford said. "But I think all the different experiences they had contributed to what they've been able to do. It wasn't easy, but it worked out. Somehow.
"It just seems miraculous. I'm glad we all made it."
rmorrissey@tribune.com http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/col...rtstop-hed