October 14, 2006

• Found at another blog, Desert Periscope, is this story of a man and his son; if it doesn’t make you snuffle, you’re a heartless beast, and if the video doesn’t cause you to puddle up, you died last Wednesday and forgot to fall down, that’s all:

  [From Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly]

  I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay
  for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared
  with Dick Hoyt, I suck. Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son,
  Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him
  26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy
  while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars –
  all in the same day (doing the Ironman Triathlon). Dick’s also pulled
  him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and
  once hauled him across the U.S.on a bike. Makes taking your son
  bowling look a little lame, right?

  And what has Rick done for his father? Not much — except save his life.

  This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when
  Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him
  brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs. “He’ll be a vegetable
  the rest of his life,” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy,
  when Rick was nine months old, “Put him in an institution.” But the
  Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them
  around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering
  department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help
  the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “there’s nothing
  going on in his brain.” “Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did.
  Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. They rigged up
  with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor. By touching a
  switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate.
  First words? “Go Bruins!”

  And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident
  and The school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad,
  I want to do that.” Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described
  “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his
  son five miles? Still, he tried. “then it was me who was handicapped,”
  Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.” That day changed Rick’s life.
  “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled
  anymore!” And
  that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick
  that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape
  that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

  “No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t
  quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor.
  For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran
  anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983
  they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for
  Boston the following year. Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a
  triathlon?” How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a
  bike since
  he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still,
  Dick tried. Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling
  15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzz kill to be a 25-year-old
  stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t
  you think?

  Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he
  says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick
  with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together. This year,
  at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon,
  in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two
  hours, 40 minutes in 1992 — only 35 minutes off the world record,
  which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held
  by
  a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

  “No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of
  the Century.” And Dick got something else out of all this too . Two
  years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that
  one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great
  shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”
  So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s lives.

  Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works
  in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland,
  Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the
  country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including
  this Father’s Day. That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the
  thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. “The
  thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that just once my dad sit in the
  chair and I push him.”

  Here’s the video:

  
  
  

  • 9:26 am
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