A Dad Who Truly Cares
里克·赖利/Rick Reilly
I try to be a good father.Give my kids gifts.Take them to swim.Work nights to pay for their text messaging...
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I’am lousy.Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son,Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons.Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on bicycle handlebars—all in the same day.Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S.on a bike.Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?
And what has Rick done for his father? Not much—except save his life.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass.43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life,”Dick says doctors told him and his wife when Rick was nine months old.“Put him in an institution.”
But the Hoyts weren’t buying it.They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room.When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate.“No way,”Dick says he was told.“There’s nothing going on in his brain.”
“Tell him a joke,”Dick countered.They did.Rick laughed.Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate.First words?“Go Bruins!”And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out,“Dad, I want to do that.”
Yeah, right.How was Dick, a self-described“porker”who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried.“Then it was me who was handicapped,”Dick says.“I was sore for two weeks.”That day changed Rick’s life.“Dad,”he typed,“when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”