Sam Ehlinger
Coming from Canada, college football in America never really appealed to me until I got to school here. It has now become a tradition of mine to watch football on Saturdays with my teammates. I have no specific team to root for, but I love cheering for my friends teams.
On team that I often cheer for is the Texas Longhorns because of my good friend Hayden Baker. He grew up in Texas, and his family has always been Longhorn fans. But the team is even more special for him now because of one specific player.
Sam Ehlinger, the quarterback at Texas is a high school friend of Hayden. He tells stories of running routes for Sam for hours just so he could get his practice. Although Hayden was on the team too, he never had the aspirations of taking his talents to college, so he was really just doing it to be a good friend to Sam.
Now, Sam dominates most Saturday match-ups and is always exciting to watch. But what I did not know was that he had lost his father at a young age.
In this article by the Player Tribune, it talks about how his father passed away at the age of 46 due to a heart attack. It shows how close he and his father were, and how tragic the loss was to him. What was most important about the video though was how Sam thought he was being selfish for feeling bad for himself. He saw his younger brother and realized that he needed to be there for him instead of himself.
I love articles like this because it really humanizes athletes in a way that most people do not normally get to see. We put athletes on pedestals, and even sometimes see them as almost god-like beings. This is simply not the case. Professional and amateur athletes that are watched on a large scale are people too, and it takes articles like this one to really talk about their character rather than their talents.
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