Sports Illustrated is putting on it Sportsman of the Year award. If you believe that Pat Tillman should be No. 1 then please click on the link and vote.
Tim Layden of SI gives a few reasons why he should be Number 1.
“Ask yourself, what is a sportsman? I submit that a sportsman is someone who plays games for the joy of playing them and nothing more. Not for fame. Not for money. He plays because in the games he finds a primal happiness. I didn’t know Pat Tillman well, but I knew him a little and I talked to people about him. By this definition, he was the ultimate sportsman for this or any other year.
As a high school football player, he once kept re-entering a blowout until the coaching staff hid his helmet so that he could play no more. He didn’t want to humiliate anybody, he just wanted to keep playing. He came to Arizona State as a far-too-small strong safety and before two-a-days were finished in his freshman year the upperclassman had nicknamed him “Hit Man” because of the way he threw his body around.
When I interviewed him at the end of the his senior season, he was loathe to talk about his athletic or academic honors because he’d feared he’d become complacent. When I asked Snyder back then if Tillman could play in the NFL, he said, “When teams ask me, I say, ‘If you don’t want him on your team, don’t draft him, because he won’t let you cut him.'”
When the St. Louis Rams offered him a huge raise, he turned it down to stay in Phoenix because it wasn’t about the money. When he felt a stirring in his soul to go fight wars, he left football because football was no longer enough. It was just a sport.
People play sports for all of the wrong reasons. Little children play because their parents foolishly imagine themselves freed from paying for college because their little boy or girl will win a scholarship. Grown children play because they foolishly imagine themselves fabulously wealthy, hosting a televised tour of the their mansion. Even those who hit the sports lottery drain the joy from the games, playing only for fringe benefits. There’s precious little joy in any of this.
Pat Tillman played football because he loved it with a child’s passion. As a kid, he used to climb slender trees in windstorms and sway on the breeze. He played football the same way and when he found something more important, he moved on. That’s a sportsman. That’s my Sportsman of the Year. And he would probably hate that, too.”
Thanks to Blackfive for bringing this up.
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