Choosing the World to See

Over the last few trying weeks, I’ve been inspired by kindness. It’s out there.

For various reasons—I’d rather not get into the details—I’ve been thinking a lot about two people these last few weeks. The first person I’ve been thinking about is George Bailey… and specifically the ending of the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I’ve seen that movie at least once a year every year since our oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was born, 23 years ago. And every time, every single time, I cry just a little.

What I’ve been thinking about is—why? The ending of that movie is not sad. I recently watched the quintessential sad movie, “Brian’s Song,” again for my upcoming book, WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL… and I certainly didn’t cry (at least, not this time). I’ve seen dozens and dozens of famous tearjerker movies or television shows that moved me, but certainly not to tears. The women in our house, who will break down in tears when a dog shows up in a commercial, will tell you I’m a pretty hard case when it comes to movie crying.

But the ending of “It’s a Wonderful Life” gets me every single time.

Why? I’ve been pondering that a lot lately, and I think it comes down to this: George Bailey gives up every one of his dreams in the movie—every single one—out of kindness. Think about what George Bailey really wants.

• He wants to go to college to see what they can teach him.

• He wants to be a millionaire (though he’d take half of that in cash).

• He wants to travel the world, to chase after the three sounds that echo in his imagination: anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.

• He wants to live in a big city, surrounded by the skyscrapers that he himself builds.

• More than anything, he wants to get out of Bedford Falls, to shake the dust of that crummy little town off his feet, to get away from that suffocating little place that makes him feel so trapped that sometimes he feels like he will burst.

Even Mr. Potter, who seeks only to ruin him, sees the truth: “A young man dying to get out on his own ever since he was born,” he says.

George gets to do none of these things. When it’s time for him to go to college, his father suddenly dies, and George is left to save his father’s life work, the Building & Loan, all so people in Bedford Falls could have a place to borrow money without having to crawl to Potter. He sends his brother Harry to college instead.

When Harry graduates, he’s supposed to take over the Building & Loan so George can finally leave and see the world. But Harry secretly got married while at college, and his father-in-law made him a good job offer in Buffalo, and George couldn’t hold him back. He stays in Bedford Falls and carefully saves his money.

When he marries Mary, they have a dream honeymoon planned—a week in New York, a week in Bermuda, the highest hotels, the oldest champagne, the richest caviar, the hottest music and the prettiest wife—but the Depression hits on the cab ride out of town, there’s a run on the bank, people panic, and he uses his own money to get them through and keep the Building and Loan alive.

When Potter offers him a dream job that would pay him a small fortune—with travel built-in—he instinctively understands that to take it would be to betray the people around him. And he does not.

And when his Uncle Billy loses $8,000 because he just HAD to go over and taunt Mr. Potter, George takes it on himself, desperately goes to Mr. Potter for help he knows will not come, considers jumping off a bridge so that his family would at least have the insurance money, and only snaps out of it when he dives off that same bridge to help Clarence the angel, who acts as if he’s drowning.

George Bailey is far from a perfect man. He has a nasty temper. He might drink too much. He too easily falls into clouds of gloom and self-pity. But, deep in his soul, he’s a profoundly kind person, someone who cannot help but care more about others than he cares about himself. And when, in the end, the town rallies behind him, and all those people he helped lift him up, and Harry races in and shouts, “A toast to my big brother, George, the richest man in town!”—waterfalls every single time.

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The other person I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is Jake Porter.

About a year after Elizabeth was born, I got an email from a stranger in Ohio. I wish I had kept that email, because, in many ways, it changed my life. I was a 32-year-old newspaper columnist in Kansas City then. This was years before I wrote my first book, years before Sports Illustrated called, years before I knew where this crazy life would take me. The stranger had a story to tell me about a high school football game played in her small town of McDermott, Ohio.

I guess I’ve been thinking about Jake and that story lately, because it’s one of the most meaningful chapters to me in WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL, and a couple weeks ago I narrated the story out loud for the audiobook. Jake was a 17-year-old student at McDermott High School. He had an inherited disorder called Fragile X Syndrome, which, in his case, made it very difficult for him to learn things. He would spend much of his time at school practicing writing his name; the principal would motivate him by saying that he needed to keep practicing because people would want his autograph.

Jake played on all the sports teams. His teammates looked after him, helped him tie his shoes and put on his uniform. He helped them, too, surprised them with his insights. When he saw an opposing basketball team cutting down the nets after a championship, he wondered why his team didn’t do that when they won. He was told that some games are more important than others. He didn’t believe it.

For his last football game, the McDermott coach, Dave Frantz, wanted to let Jake in the game for one play. The game was a blowout loss as everyone expected—the team they were playing, Waverly High, was having its best season in years—and Dave’s idea was to give Jake the ball and let him kneel.

But the Waverly coach, Derek Dewitt, who had brought a tough winner’s attitude with him from his upbringing in Los Angeles, refused. There was a scene in the middle of the field before the play, and everybody could see the coaches talking and Frantz furiously shaking his head.

Then, play resumed and Jake did, indeed, come into the game. He was handed the ball and he curtsied… but the whistle didn’t blow. He then looked up and saw that the players on both teams had lined up, like it was a wedding procession. And then pointed to the end zone and cheered him on and shouted for him to run.

So he ran all the way to the end zone for a touchdown.

Coach Dewitt had told Coach Frantz he didn’t want Jake to just get the ball. “He’s a wonderful kid,” Derek said. “We want him to score.”

My last paragraph of that column, which still gets quoted back to me from time to time, was this: “To this day, Jake Porter is sure he scored the winning touchdown in that game against Waverly. And you know what? He did.”

That story went national in a huge way… and, as I say, on a personal level, it changed the trajectory of my life. That year, largely because of that story, I suspect, I was named national sports columnist of the year for the first time, and crazy new opportunities arose, and my life has been a wild ride since.

But for me, there was something else about that story—it made clear to me, in a bigger way than before, exactly what kind of writer I want to be and, to a larger extent, what kind of person I want to be. I want to believe in kindness. I want to believe that people are inherently good. I want to believe that it feels better to inspire than it does to tear down, that most people would rather help than harm, that hope stirs more strongly inside us than fear.

I want to believe these things even in a world that relentlessly throws mud on all of those aspirations. The older we get, the more plainly we have to face some of life’s harshest realities, and the easier it is to grow cynical and cold and distant, the easier it is to bury that naive faith in the world.

“Everybody cheats,” Dave tells his father in the wonderful movie, “Breaking Away.” “I just didn’t know.”

“Well,” his father says, more than a bit sadly, “now you know.”

Now you know. The question, I guess, is what are you going to do once you know? How are you going to live after you’ve been knocked down, after you’ve daily seen wanton cruelty in big and small ways, after you’ve faced life’s harsher realities? Do you let your heart harden? Or do you default to kindness? Do you treat every game like it’s important enough for a net-cutting celebration?

“How do you keep your faith in people?” I asked Buck O’Neil at the end of a lifetime of being denied—denied the chance to go to Sarasota High School, denied the chance to even try and play in the American or National League, denied the chance to coach on the field for the Chicago Cubs, denied basic dignities when he would go into white stores, denied something as simple as a courtesy interview for MLB manager, denied for many years the chance to tell his story and, in his final days, even denied the Baseball Hall of Fame when just about everyone understood that he belonged there.

“How do you keep your faith in people?” I asked him.

“It’s easy,” he said. “People are good. I see it everywhere I go.”

That’s the world Buck O’Neil chose to see. That’s the world I’m trying to see, too. And you know what? That world is out there. Kindness is out there. Hope is out there. It might seem hidden behind trolls and rage and selfishness and fear and all the rest. But it’s out there. I know it.