[nabs-l] Charlie Wilks- blind football player. (as featured onESPN360)

[David Dunphy]

Some may think I'm being unfair or negative here, but whether it's just what 
I read or how the wrriter portrayed it, quite frankly, I'm not impressed. 
Doesn't seem like he's playing football as much as he's just throwing 
himself into people in the hope that he gets lucky enough to break up the 
play. Anyone can do that, blindness is not a factor in a person's ability to 
do that. Hell, I ran  into people in the middle of their games on the 
playground purely unintentionally til I learned that I needed to use a cane. 
I think running into the tree several times also made a good case for cane 
use too, but I digress.
He's even thrown his own team mates down by accident. The article seemed to 
try to make it appear that we had a blind football player. It came across 
more like he was someone who would run into people wrecklessly when given 
the cue to run. Between crowd noise and rain and all that, I doubt he'd do 
very well in real nfl games or even high school or junior high school games. 
Is it cool he's trying to play a sport? Absolutely. And from what it said, 
sounds like he'd be great on tv or radio. But this attempt to make him out 
to be an inspiration cause he runs into people blindly for lack of a better 
term just didn't do it for me. He may be good, but the article didn't do a 
very good job in trying to get that across. They should have focused more on 
his abilities as a reporter/tv person perhaps. I would have been interested 
to hear about how we might have dealt with being on tv and making sure that 
he could know when the camera was on him, for I think that would have been a 
more interesting way to inform people on how he handles what some might 
perceive as a difficult situation for a blind person. But the writer fumbled 
the ball with his attempt at creating his idea of a potential blind football 
player. Not saying it couldn't happen or hasn't, but I wasn't left with the 
feeling that a blind person could play and compete.
>From David 


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