Not a planned post. This is actually a reddit comment I wrote that I decided, afterwards, is worth sharing.
The question was, “Who was the nicest or the worst football player you’ve ever met?” Well, I’ve only met one football player that I can recall in my life, but I think his story is worth sharing:
“This isn’t any great story, because I’ve only ever met one football player in my life: Limbo Parks. He wasn’t a greatest-of-all-time football player, but he is a very good man so I think I’ll share a little about him. Thread is old so this’ll get buried anyway, but what the hell.
Limbo was a guard for the Razerbacks back in the early ’80s. Even when I knew him in the early 2010s he was a huge, monster of a man – over six feet tall, hundreds of pounds of bulk – not fat, just sheer mass. Muscle and bone. He had an incredibly intense glare that he could use to cow any teenager with a mere glance. He earned All-American NCAA honors, but went undrafted after he graduated in 1987. By October, he was a delivery driver for Pizza Hut.
Well, in the 1987 season, the players went on strike after the 2nd game (this is what the film The Replacements was about), and Limbo got his chance. He signed with the San Francisco 49ers and for three weeks in October that year, he was a professional football player. He appeared in the three games the replacements played, all wins for the 49ers. Then the strike ended, Limbo was cut, and that was the end of his football career.
I met him 20 years later. He no longer worked for Pizza Hut, but was now my high school’s discipline specialist. I’m not sure what his exact title was, but his main job was to drive around the grounds in a golf cart and serve as the administration’s enforcer. No one acted up in detention with Limbo looming up at the front of the room. He could be seen patrolling the cafeteria regularly, or yanking miscreants out of class to come spend time with him in his little windowless office in a distant corner of the school.
As a student, I only crossed paths with him once. I was pulling into the school parking lot late on a Sunday afternoon in April, on my way to rehearsal. The lot was empty, and I was 17, so as I came up to the stop sign separating the student lot from the rear lot with the theater entrance I ignored it and blew right past. As I pulled into a spot near the theater door, the little golf cart wheeled to a stop behind me. I looked in my rearview mirror and paled, since Limbo was looking right at me, his angry eyes locked right on mine. He pointed at his eyes, pointed at me, then, scowling all the while, slowly shook his head. Then, without a word, he drove off.
I never ran that stop sign again.
Later, though, I got to know Limbo as a person. 7 years later, now sporting a shiny new master’s in education, I returned to my high school as a teacher, and he became one of my closest partners. As the new guy, I got all the “needy” classes – the slackers, hard cases, screwups, etc. They were all great kids and I loved them, but they were a challenge, and sometimes I tore my hair out trying to figure out how I was going to get all these kids over the graduation finish line.
No one worked harder at that, though, than Limbo. He met with me every day about a few students of special concern to him. Each morning he’d stick his head through my classroom door – most of his bulk still hidden out in the hallway. He’d fix me with his stare – still so intense.
“Hey. Did Cameron turn in his homework for this week?”
I’d flip through the records of one of our perennial project students. “…not yet, it seems.”
He would nod, gravely, a deep suspicion confirmed for him. “Well, if he don’t turn it in this afternoon, you send that boy straight to me, you hear?” Then he’d vanish to continue his prowl.
When I’d deliver the bad news to Cameron in 5th period that day, his eyes would grow as wide as dinner plates, but, helpless to resist, he would shuffle off to his fate.
And the next day the work would be turned in.
Cameron would pass. Lucas, a senior repeating freshman history, would pass, and would graduate. Sarah would pass, and Clinnon, and Chelsea, and Lauren, and a dozen other students, all of whom might have dropped out, might have given up, but instead graduated and earned diplomas because Limbo Parks would not let them fail. He spent the majority of his days running down students, staying on top of their assignments, keeping a close eye on dozens of students’ grades scattered across every class and year. He’d been doing it all along – he was so much more than an enforcer on a golf cart. For many students, Limbo Parks was the reason they graduated. Because he cared, as much or more than any of the classroom teachers. By now, I expect there are hundreds of students in the Kansas City metro area who owe their diplomas to his efforts.”
Gwangju Dreaming 