Clearing out the bookmarks

Couple of good recent stories from the New York Times:

First, a look at the first non-white person to ever play in the NBA: Wat Misaka, who played for the Knicks for a short time in the late 40's.

Definitely a trip for me, I'd have never thought that the first "colored" person in the Association would be of Japanese decent. Real impressed with his college story, he definitely deserved to get his shot, of course in the end his basketball career wound up being a victim of the times but the man himself still went on to have a full life. The story centers around his first visit to the Garden since the 40's, that return should have happened a long time ago as should have Misaka's return to the spotlight.

In this story a brother braver than most maybe on his way to competing in the 2012 Paralympic Games and could be as good of an amputated athlete as we've seen. Jerrod Fields is a Chicagoan (which always gets much love from me), grew up in the hood, managed to just avoid the ganglife and eventually went on to serve in Iraq, where he lost the bottom half of his left leg gruesomely:

...reports of a dead dog on a Baghdad road — animal carcasses were often booby-trapped with explosives — led his platoon to drive in to investigate.

The dog itself was harmless, but still a trap. A small bomb went off nearby. Fields laughed; he thought he had dropped a grenade. Then another explosion destroyed his lower left leg.

Fields kept his wits enough to drive his Bradley armored vehicle and fellow troops out of danger. But when he eventually came to in a hospital in Germany, he was so disoriented that he tried to choke his nurse. (“The last thing I remembered was fighting,” he said.) Doctors explained what had happened, and told Fields they could rebuild his leg by grafting muscle and fusing his ankle.


Fields wasn't having that, he went for the amputation, and he still may serve again in the Middle East. Amazing.

An Injured Soldier Re-Imerges as a Sprinter (NYT)