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

[Jedi]

David,

I do think you're being unfair. The fact that he's interacting with 
sighted peers in a sport he loves to do sounds good enough for me. I 
thought the report did a decent job of not making this kid out to be 
some kind of super hero while conveying his positive attitude about his 
blindness. It sounds like he does contribute something positive and 
valuable to the team because he concentrates his efforts on breaking up 
and stealing plays while other team players focus on getting the ball 
where it needs to be. If they used a whistling ball, he may even be 
able to play with the ball, too. I should insert here that he's not the 
first blind football player to get  recognition. There was another guy 
called Charles Krintz. He was not only blind, but very light and so 
larger players would litterally throw him where they needed him to 
break up plays and take others out. They called him Cannon Ball Krintz. 
As to takling other team mates on accident, I think there are probably 
sighted people who have done that before, and sighted players have made 
greater mistakes in football than that. And he said it wasn't something 
that happened often, just once in a while. Just my two cents.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> 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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