It’s not very often in your life where you stand on Mount Everest and then see another mountain that’s higher, but that happened to me on Thursday.
From a personal standpoint, the highlight of my career was in Kansas City three years ago. If you ever had the chance to see the Ken Burns series on baseball that PBS aired in the mid-nineties, you became instantly over-whelmed with Buck O’Neil. I watched that series while I was in my second senior year in college. I never thought I’d have the chance to meet Buck. About 8 years later, I took a job in KC where Buck used to play first base for the Kansas City Monarchs. In May of 2006, Buck came in studio with me and told stories for an hour on the air. When that show ended, I thought that would be the highlight of my career.
Through my time in KC, I found out how soccer balls helped saved the lives of our soldiers in Iraq. The soldiers would give Iraqi kids soccer balls and the townspeople began to trust the soldiers more. As the trust grew, soldiers learned about IED locations and Al-Qaeda hide-outs. I will always take great pride in the soccer ball drive but I was out on my own. My station never got behind me and I probably collected only 200 total soccer balls. Neither of these two events come close to what I witnessed Thursday.
Sports 620 KTAR organized and drove something close to me like I didn’t know was possible. There are a flood of people I could spend time thanking but if I do, I feel like I’m taking away something from you. What you did by donating over $200,000 was close to miracle status. I have never been so humbled and exhilarated at the same time.
I had a flood of emotions a couple months ago when I took a tour of Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I can’t look at a NICU without being over-whelmed with the old anxiety I would try to hide before I visited my daughter during her 95 day stay at a Dayton hospital eight years ago. It was last Tuesday that Allison from PCH told me kids are being sent to Las Vegas or LA from time to time. When I found out the reason was something as simple as space, it was a punch in the gut.
I was working in Alabama when Vienna was born in Dayton, OH. Jennifer moved in with my parents and we lived apart so she could be with Vienna. I would take off of work every Friday and drive 6 hours to the hospital every Thursday night and go back to Alabama on Sunday night. I couldn’t believe that anyone from Phoenix might have to do the same thing I did.
Put yourself in that position. You take your family to PCH and they say there’s no room. Are you going to Vegas. Does your wife live in a hotel and you come up on weekends? How’s that gas bill going to look? Are you going to move into the hotel too and try to work out your room? Are you pulling your sick child’s siblings out of school? It is the most lonely feeling to come home from work everyday while your daughter fights for her life hundreds of miles away. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else going through what I did.
Because of you, we made a major dent in fixing those problems. For you to ignore gas prices, your declining home value, and saving for your own vacation to donate to this cause is amazing. I was floored when the donations reached $100,000 before lunch, but to double that shows the power of many. We didn’t receive any donation over $5,000. The vast majority of our donations were for $20. Fundraisers do not reach $200,000 on $20 donations unless an enormous number of people really believe in the need and their own community.
I realize my name is “on the door” since the event is titled “Doug & Wolf’s Big Pitch for PCH,” but we’re all on equal footing because I donated and you did too. It was OUR Big Pitch. Every time you hear someone talk about Sports 620 KTAR raising $200,000, tell them you were a part of that.
Thank you.
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