Life is Good

A freshman basketball player at the University of California, Berkeley, asked a professor if he could take a graduate level class. The professor said no. The freshman kept asking. The professor said no five times. So the freshman went to a dean, got approved, and earned an A. His final paper was about chess. His name is Jaylen Brown. Here is the whole thing. It started at home. Brown has said his mom set the rules. "My mom, she didn't care about basketball whatsoever. I wasn't allowed to get a B. If I came home with anything less than an A, I wouldn't be able to do some of these extracurricular activities." He was one of the top high school players in the country. He could have gone almost anywhere. He picked Berkeley, for the classroom as much as the court. The class was in the education school. The professor, Derek Van Rheenen, later said he gave the freshman no special treatment. "I gave him no breaks." Brown turned in a 23 page paper, three more pages than the class required. He wrote about chess as a way of looking at the world. He had been captain of his middle school chess team. At Berkeley, he spent free Saturday afternoons at a local café, challenging the old-timers to chess. He also taught himself Spanish. Bill Walton said he was fluent within five months. Later, he started teaching himself Arabic too. He meditated. He studied philosophy. He kept a journal, and in it he wrote down things that had not happened yet, like winning a championship. The Boston Celtics took him third overall in the draft. At 22, the other players voted him a vice president of their union. He was four years younger than anyone else on the executive committee. As a second year pro, he gave a lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Education to a packed room. "Just because I escaped the barriers of society, why should I forget about the people who didn't, or haven't, or won't?" He became a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and he has spoken at tech summits at both Harvard and MIT. NASA had him speak about science education at its Goddard Space Flight Center, where he toured the control center that runs the Hubble Space Telescope. Then he started a program that brings Boston high school kids to MIT to learn artificial intelligence and robotics. When the news broke that he had signed a contract worth up to $304 million, the richest in league history at the time, he was not at a party. He was at MIT, in a robotics session with those students. "So I was able to put my phone down and just get right into class with the Bridge students." And that championship he wrote about in his journal came true. He won a title with the Celtics and was named Finals MVP. That fall, TIME put him on the cover of its list of the world's most influential rising stars. This summer, Boston traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers. Here is the honest part. Not everyone has loved it. Before the draft, there were reports that some teams were wary of his intelligence, and worried a player that curious might not stay locked in on basketball. He has always pushed back on that. "I identify as both, intellect and athlete." The professor told him no five times. He just kept asking. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform The Sports on Tap

Early in the fourth quarter on Sunday, an All-Pro linebacker made a tackle and did not get up. He stayed face down on the turf. Trainers strapped him to a backboard. His entire team and most of the coaching staff gathered around the cart before it left the field. On Wednesday, from his hospital bed, he gave an update in his own words. "I have full movement in my lower body, and I'm continuing to make progress with movement in my upper body." His name is Jack Campbell. Here is the whole thing. Campbell grew up in Cedar Falls, Iowa. In high school he led the basketball team to back to back state championships and set the school record with 338 career tackles. At the University of Iowa, he won the Butkus Award as the best linebacker in college football. He also won the William V. Campbell Trophy as the top scholar athlete in the country, the first Iowa player ever to win it. The Detroit Lions took him 18th overall. Last season he was named first team All-Pro and made the Pro Bowl. He finished with 176 tackles. This spring, the Lions signed him to a four year, $81 million extension. On Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings, he made a tackle on tight end T.J. Hockenson and stayed down. He was alert and breathing when he was taken to the hospital. The Lions held on to win 19 to 15. Nobody was thinking much about the score. His coach, Dan Campbell, kept it simple. "We're thinking about him." On Wednesday, Jack Campbell thanked the doctors and nurses at Henry Ford Hospital, the Lions medical staff and everyone who had been praying for him. "It means more to us than words can express." "I'm incredibly encouraged by the progress I've made in such a short period of time." He did not pretend it was over. "I know there's still work ahead, but I remain very optimistic. I'm taking things one day at a time, staying positive, and focusing on getting better." And he leaned on the thing that has carried him this far. "My faith in God has never been stronger. I know He has a plan for me, and I trust in that plan." Here is the honest part. He is still in the hospital, and he is still working to get full movement back in his upper body. The team has not given any timeline, and nobody should guess at one. Football can wait. But a 26 year old who was named first team All-Pro last season, lying in a hospital bed in Detroit, just told everyone exactly how he plans to handle the hardest week of his life. With patience, with his family and with his faith. "I know we'll get through this."

KC Concepcion stands in front of the cameras after every single Cleveland Browns game. He does it on purpose, and he has a stutter. Here is what he says about why. "I want to be a role model for those who are not able to speak in front of large crowds." Understand what that costs him. It started when he was small and playing quarterback. He could not get the play out of his mouth in the huddle, and the other kids would stand there and go hurry up, hurry, just say it. At school it got worse. Here is what he wrote about the way classmates talked to him. "Why can't you talk normal? Are you dumb or something?" And here is how he describes the difference. "Not with me, or even about me. At me." The school put him in speech classes. Breathing exercises, pronunciation drills. "Nothing seemed to be working." Then one year ended and the thing just left. Over a summer it was gone, completely. School started again and it came back. "It's been with me ever since." No teacher stepped in. Nobody at that school helped him with any of it, and he did not know one single person like him to look at and copy. He had his mother. She told him to keep his chin up and that there was nothing wrong with him. And he had football, where nobody cared how he talked. He was born in Rochester, New York, and the family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina when he was three. He went to Julius L. Chambers High School there. Two years at NC State. Then a year at Texas A&M, where he caught 61 passes for 919 yards and nine touchdowns and ran two punts back for scores. Cleveland took him in the first round of the draft in April, 24th overall. And at the scouting combine before that, grown adults on the internet made fun of the way he talked. Here is what he said back. "I cannot control this." He laid all of that out himself, in a letter he wrote to NFL general managers before the draft, published in The Players' Tribune. Here is the line he ended it on. "Whatever makes you different, that is not the thing holding you back." Now the part that complicates it. He is a first round pick with a guaranteed contract and a platform most people never get near, and plenty of kids who stutter will never have either. Standing at a podium is not the same as being eleven years old in a classroom. But he is the one who was eleven in that classroom. And the kid who could not find a single person like himself to look up to decided the fix for that was to go stand in the light every week, on purpose, and let everybody hear him.