The Day I Met John David Crow

I'm no hero. I want to say that first.

I was young. Early in my football years, playing fullback for my high school team in Ladue, Missouri. I'd torn my hamstring badly enough that there was internal bleeding. Badly enough that they put me on blood thinners. I couldn't play.

Somehow — and I still don't entirely understand how — my coaches arranged for me to be treated at the St. Louis Cardinals training facility. The NFL's St. Louis Cardinals. One of twelve professional football clubs in the entire country. A teenager, being worked on by their staff. I don't know what favors were called in, what connections were used. But it happened.

I was on crutches. Barely dressed. Moving down a long corridor inside that facility, headed toward a massage or a treatment — I'm not entirely sure which. What I remember is the corridor itself. Long and institutional, lit by overhead lamps spaced apart, each one dropping a circle of light onto the concrete floor, with stretches of darkness in between. It smelled of liniment and damp. A place where large men came to be repaired.

He was coming the other way.

In a jockstrap. Nothing else. Moving easily, the way a man moves when he belongs somewhere completely. And as he passed through those pools of light — bright, then shadow, then bright again — his face unsettled me in a way I couldn't name. Something about it. Each lamp made it stranger. I kept moving on my crutches because there was nothing else to do. But something in me wanted to stop.

What I didn't know yet — what someone told me only later — was that he was smiling at me.

He'd been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The struggle to free him had damaged the nerves on the left side of his face. He'd carried that his entire life. Through everything. It was simply his face. And in that corridor, in that uneven light, what was meant as a kindness to a young kid on crutches — I couldn't read it as that. Not then. Not there.

I don't know if I made a fool of myself. I felt that I did. And then felt ashamed for feeling that way.

It was just the two of us in that long hallway. Him moving easily through the light. Me on crutches, barely dressed, trying to hold myself together.

Later there was the whirlpool. That intimacy — two people injured, recovering, the noise of the water filling the silence between words. He was kind. Unhurried. Genuinely present with a young running back who had no business being in the same facility as him. He offered encouragement. Guidance I can't quote precisely now, but that landed somewhere in me and stayed.

We were both running backs. We were both healing. That was enough for him to treat me like I mattered.

His name was John David Crow. Heisman Trophy winner, 1957. Four Pro Bowls. One of the finest all-purpose backs of his era. Most people reading this won't know him. That's all right.

I know him. I know what his face looked like coming toward me through that corridor, in and out of the light, trying its best to offer a greeting to a frightened boy on crutches.

The hamstring never fully healed. It's calcified now. Still present, sixty some years later, in the deep core of my body. A low grade reminder that never entirely goes away.

It was there this morning, on my walk, when the memory came back. The lamps. The darkness between them. That face.

I'm no hero. I was just a boy who got hurt, and was lucky enough, for a little while, to be in the presence of someone who was genuinely good.