Thursday, February 13, 2014
Childhood cancer and amputation are no match for United States Olympic Sled Hockey teams Steve Cash...
Thud. Creak.
Thud. Creak.
Ms. Diehl offers a big grin, but the teacher's welcome isn't enough to calm her newest kindergartner. Not when there's at least 25 cold, perplexed stares fixed on him as he carefully works his way past his whispering classmates to the open seat at the back of the room.
Thud. Creak.
It's the first day of school in Overland, Mo., and Steve Cash can't hide his bald head, freshly shaved since the start of chemotherapy. Nor can he hide the creaking noise he makes when he awkwardly takes a step with his new right prosthetic leg.
As the day goes on, Cash's classmates pepper him with questions -- the kind full of blunt straightforwardness that only young children ask.
"What's wrong with your leg?"
"Why do you walk funny?"
"Why do you look like that?"
In October 1992, Cash was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer in his right knee called osteosarcoma. When he was three, he underwent complex surgery that resulted in the amputation and recreation of his leg. Doctors amputated from right below the knee up to the top of Cash's femur. They then took the perfectly healthy lower part of his leg, turned it around so that Cash's heel and ankle could be made into a knee joint and attached it to his hip. Cash would wear a prosthetic from his "knee" down, the first of which had a wooden core that produced the creaking noise when Cash walked.
Learning how to be upright and ambulatory following surgery took six months, and even then they weren't skills he mastered. Coming to terms with his new life took time as well, roughly eight years.
His peers often didn't help much. As Cash struggled throughout elementary school to learn how to use his new "knee" and run as if he had two normal legs, his classmates would bully and mock him.
"That really drew a lot of attention," Cash explained of having to kick his right leg outward and swing it around when he would attempt to run.
"I kind of dreaded going outside and playing with the other kids."
Some days brought worse ridicule than others. He'd come home from school and lock himself in the tiny bedroom he shared with his three older brothers. He would lie on his bed and wonder why he had to go through all of this.
Growing up, all Cash wanted to do was be like everybody else. With two of his brothers interested in hockey, it wasn't long after Cash was walking around with his prosthetic that the 5-year-old was strapping on hand-me-down Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Rollerblades for the first time.
Cash spent countless hours practicing skating with the help of his mother on the patio out behind the family's gaudy, yellow, aluminum-sided two-story house on Osgood Avenue. It was during these hours that Cash was changed. He felt free.
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Russell Isabella/USA TODAY SportsWith Steve Cash between the pipes, Team USA will defend the gold medal at the Sochi Paralympics in March.
"I didn't want to give that feeling up," he said.
When he was 8, Cash got his first taste of hockey. After duct taping pillows and newspapers to his legs for makeshift pads, Cash would stand in front of the fence in his backyard and face shot after shot from his brothers. Before Cash knew it, five or six hours after school would pass as afternoons gave way to nightfall.
"All I ever wanted to do was get home, put on the skates or put the pads on and play hockey with my brothers," Cash explained. "It was really kind of like a paradise and it still is to this day."
By the time he was a sophomore in high school, Cash had followed his older brother James' path to the net. All the years spent playing stand-up inline and ice hockey against older kids on his brothers' teams had turned Cash into a standout and starter on the varsity inline team.
That same school year, Steve was at a local inline tournament in St. Louis when he met Mike Dowling. Dowling was at the event promoting a sled hockey team he coached, and told Cash a little bit about the adaptive sport that has its players propel themselves with two 3-foot-long hockey sticks that have spikes attached.
That weekend, Steve was on the ice with Dowling's Disabled Athlete Sports Association Jr. Blues on a trial basis. It wasn't long until the trial became permanent.
Steve's success between the pipes didn't skip a beat as he transitioned to sled hockey. In January 2005, he was spotted at a tournament in Detroit by the coach of the United States men's national team and an invitation to try out in Colorado Springs, Colo., soon followed.
Five months later, Steve was on an airplane for the first time by himself as he flew out to Colorado. The tryout was a three-day jaunt, but he made the most of it, giving up only one goal through four scrimmages against the adults. By the end of the weekend, Steve had made the team.
"It totally changed the way I felt about his future and what he could accomplish," his mother, Tracy, said. "I always kind of feared that he wouldn't be what he would've been without cancer."
"Having a disability doesn't necessarily make you who you are. It's just something that forces you to live life in a different way."-- Steve Cash
Learning now how to play the sport he loved in a sled wasn't Steve's only new experience. Sled hockey provided his first encounters with others just like him.
Prior to joining the Jr. Blues, Steve had never met someone else with a disability. His first practices with the team, and with kids younger than he was, and sometimes with disabilities worse than his, were an eye opener.
"Looking back on it now, I can see why other kids stared at me," he said, remembering that it would take him 15 to 20 minutes to get ready for practice, but some of his teammates would require 45 to 60 before they could get on the ice.
His teammates on the Jr. Blues showed Steve how fortunate he was. Looking around, he realized his disability and life could be much worse and that there was more to life than what he had previously known.
Despite it all, Steve was still uncomfortable being around others with disabilities. It wouldn't be until after his first couple of trips with the men's national team that this unease would go away.
It was then that he realized, "Having a disability doesn't necessarily make you who you are," he said. "It's just something that forces you to live life in a different way."
The atmosphere inside UBC Thunderbird Arena during the gold-medal game of the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics was not like anything Steve had experienced. He was on Team USA when it won bronze at the Torino Games, but he was a backup in Italy. It isn't like being a starter in a country that, when it comes to hockey, vehemently loathes anything red, white and blue.
At 1:40 into the second period of the decisive contest between the U.S. and Japan, action on the ice was whistled dead. Japanese captain Takayuki Endo was awarded a penalty shot after being interfered with from behind on a breakaway resulting in Endo barreling into Cash.
One of Japan's biggest offensive threats was now looking to even the game at 1-1.
The arena rumbled as nearly 8,000 fans made their presence known before Endo took the puck at center ice. Many were Canadian and chanting in unison, practically pleading for their neighbors from the south to fall short.
"You could feel it through your bones," Cash remembers. "It's something that I can feel to this day."
As Endo touched the puck, Cash sat still in the crease, focusing on the moment and what it would mean if he stopped the penalty shot. Endo, a double amputee known for his ability to change direction, came skating down the slot.
"Don't commit too early," Cash thought to himself, waiting for Endo to make the first move. "Be calm and be composed."
But the move never came. Instead, Endo snapped a shoulder-height shot toward Steve's glove side, which the netminder snatched.
With 1:55 left in the game and momentum on its side, the U.S. went on the power play still leading 1-0. The Japanese tried to kill the penalty and equalize on the scoreboard, but the Americans continued to work the puck. Less than 40 seconds after Noritaka Ito was sent off for holding in his offensive zone, Taylor Lipsett deflected a shot from the low slot past Japan's off-balance goalie for the U.S.'s gold medal-insuring second goal of the game.
As the American flag arose high above the ice toward the end of the gold medal ceremony, the national anthem played over the public address system. Steve and his teammates sang along, their arms draped around each other. The medal dangling from Steve's neck felt weightless.
"We worked so hard," said Cash, whose shutout performance in each of Team USA's five games in Vancouver set an individual Paralympic record that, in the current system, can never be broken.
"It was that moment when we were singing the national anthem that I knew that we were going to be bound as brothers forever."
Following the Vancouver Games, Cash became a local celebrity at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he is studying business. He was featured on the cover of a magazine that's published at the university and people stopped him to shake his hand and hear his stories.
As time has passed and people have come and gone on campus, Cash has become another face in the crowd. For someone who so badly wanted to be normal growing up, he doesn't mind the lack of attention as he juggles college courses with strengthening his post-hockey résumé, all the while preparing to defend his gold medal at the Sochi Paralympics in March.
Those close to him, though, see the 24-year-old for something more: an example of perseverance.
Older brother James explains, "Anything I am going to run into in life is probably just a speed bump compared to the mountain that he climbed over."
Every little bit helps as Lee Bissell reaches out to help Jean Winsor with her mortgage...
Unemployed worker Jean Winsor was close to breaking point after her jobless benefits expired at the end of December.
She wore extra layers to keep warm in a bid not to run up her electricity bills and contemplated selling her living room furniture to make her monthly mortgage payment of $481.
That's when hope came calling in the guise of CNNMoney reader Lee Bissell, who read about her plight and offered to pay Winsor's mortgage for a month. CNNMoney first wrote about Winsor in December, when she was among a million Americans who lost jobless benefits.
Bissell is not a millionaire with thousands of dollars to spare. In fact, she is a federal worker living in Herndon, Va. supporting a sick husband, a 15-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son.
What resonated with Bissell was that Winsor had worked as a home health care aide for 12 years before losing her job.
Bissell's 64-year-old husband is struggling with end-stage dementia, and aides like Winsor have been a godsend.
Bissell wanted to express her gratitude by helping one health care aide in need.
"I don't know that I can do it again. But in that moment, it felt right," said Bissell. "I feel really blessed I can do something like that and not worry about paying my own bills."
Winsor dissolved into tears when she heard Bissell wanted to help. She hasn't been able to find work after losing her job a year ago in Shinglehouse, Pa.
Winsor sent Bissell a thank you card with a copy of her receipt to express how grateful she was and also to attest that she used the check to pay for her mortgage.
"It made me feel like a heel in one sense and very blessed in another," Winsor said.
Winsor is among more than 1.6 million jobless Americans entering their sixth week without federal benefits.
It has meant really tough choices for the long-term unemployed. Winsor borrowed money from a friend to pay car insurance in January. Last week, she borrowed a car from another friend to get to the grocery store, because she couldn't afford to fuel up her own car.
Extended federal benefits expired the week of Dec. 28. The program first went into effect during the recession, in June 2008. Benefits were put in place to help unemployed workers who couldn't find jobs and whose state unemployment insurance had run out.
Back then, the jobless rate was 5.6%. It later climbed to more than 10% in 2009, and the government extended or expanded the federal benefits 11 times into the weak recovery,most recently in January 2013.
Members of Congress have attempted to extend benefits over the past several weeks but haven't been able to get enough support.
Federal worker Bissell was hopeful that Congress would step up its compassion for the struggling jobless and extend federal jobless benefits.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Canadian ski coach Justin Wadsworth lends a hand to Russian skier Anton Gafarov at the Olympics in Sochi....
You don't have to win a medal to be branded an Olympian. Sometimes you don't even have to compete to show what true sportsmanship is about.
Justin Wadsworth proved that.
During the men's cross-country sprint in the mountains above Sochi, Wadsworth, the head coach of the Canadian team, ran onto the course Tuesday to help a Russian skier who had fallen three times and broken a ski.
The base of Anton Gafarov's left ski had come off. Forget about reaching the podium; Gafarov looked as if he would suffer an inglorious defeat by not finishing the race.
So what compelled Wadsworth to help a rival when no one from the Russian coaching staff rushed to Gafarov's aid?
It just seemed like the Olympic thing to do.
"I was on the course with spare skis and poles for Alex [Harvey, a member of the Canadian team that didn't qualify for the sprint final]," said Wadsworth. "I just went to watch. The Russian fell on the big downhill before the finish area and broke a ski. I was surprised no one else on the course gave him anything.
"I went over and gave him one of Alex's spare skis. It was about giving Gafarov some dignity so he didn't have to walk to the finish area."
Wadsworth was an Olympic skier for the U.S. before becoming a coach.
This was not the first time a coach had helped a cross-country skier from another country. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, Sara Renner and Beckie Scott were racing in the team sprint final when Renner broke a pole.
Watching from the sidelines, Norwegian coach Bjornar Hakensmoen gave Renner a new pole which allowed her not only to finish the race but to win a silver medal with Scott. The Norwegians came in fourth, meaning that Hakensmoen's heroics may have cost his own team a medal.
For offering his help to Renner and Scott, Hakensmoen was applauded by Canadians and showered with gifts. Renner sent him a bottle of wine. A Canadian businessman donated 8,000 cans of Maple Syrup to the Norwegian embassy, which was also flooded with letters and phone calls from appreciative Canadians. Hakensmoen rode in the Calgary Stampede parade and had his Turin moment made into a TV commercial.
Asked if he was expecting a parade through Red Square, Wadsworth laughed and replied: "We help because we know everyone works so hard in our sport. Everyone wants fair results. I watched and couldn't understand why no one was helping him. I guess the Russian staff didn't have a spare ski. It was a matter of allowing him to finish the race."
Gafarov finished dead last in his final run and applauded the fans for cheering him to the end.
As for Canadian sportsmanship at the Olympics, Larry Lemieux showed his true colours in the sailing event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Lemieux sailed off course to help the Singapore entry that had capsized in the water.
Lemieux's rescue efforts scuttled his medal hopes in the Finn class.
However, at the sailing medal ceremony, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee, presented Lemieux with the Pierre de Coubertin Medal for Sportsmanship. "You embody all that is right with the Olympic ideal," Samaranch said.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
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