jerrym
05-31-2016, 03:35 AM
Like so many growing up in difficult situations, football provided Jermaine Gabriel with a way out.
Little Jermaine Gabriel owned only one pair of jeans, and he would sometimes wear them with a Bugs Bunny sweater and the purple collared shirt his mother liked. Then he would trundle out the door for a new day of elementary school in northwest Toronto, where he would often fight not only with students, but with adults. ...
Diamond studs sparkled from each ear. On his right hand, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring glittered off the table, a birthday gift to himself after he signed a three-year contract with theToronto Argonauts (http://www.argonauts.ca/)in February. That deal is believed to make him among the highest-paid safeties in the Canadian Football League. In football, he uncovered an outlet for the frustration he felt as the son of a single mother juggling a job and three children. He saw what the other children had, and knew what he did not. His father appeared in his life only as a passing mirage.
Football evolved into a destination, a glowing end point on a map Gabriel would wander Canada trying to navigate. In small-town Quebec, he fell into deepening poverty, without enough to eat. In Halifax, he took a job cleaning tables in a mall food court. In Calgary, he heaved gravel through dusty basements in between practices with a team on the edge of the sport’s scouting radar.
There was no financial help from home, no university degree, no backup plan.
“You know he wanted it,” said Roberto Allen, his former minor football coach. “He wanted to make it so bad, and there’s some kind of inner strength pushing this kid.”
https://www.thestar.com/sports/argos/2016/05/29/for-argos-jermaine-gabriel-football-was-his-salvation.html
Little Jermaine Gabriel owned only one pair of jeans, and he would sometimes wear them with a Bugs Bunny sweater and the purple collared shirt his mother liked. Then he would trundle out the door for a new day of elementary school in northwest Toronto, where he would often fight not only with students, but with adults. ...
Diamond studs sparkled from each ear. On his right hand, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring glittered off the table, a birthday gift to himself after he signed a three-year contract with theToronto Argonauts (http://www.argonauts.ca/)in February. That deal is believed to make him among the highest-paid safeties in the Canadian Football League. In football, he uncovered an outlet for the frustration he felt as the son of a single mother juggling a job and three children. He saw what the other children had, and knew what he did not. His father appeared in his life only as a passing mirage.
Football evolved into a destination, a glowing end point on a map Gabriel would wander Canada trying to navigate. In small-town Quebec, he fell into deepening poverty, without enough to eat. In Halifax, he took a job cleaning tables in a mall food court. In Calgary, he heaved gravel through dusty basements in between practices with a team on the edge of the sport’s scouting radar.
There was no financial help from home, no university degree, no backup plan.
“You know he wanted it,” said Roberto Allen, his former minor football coach. “He wanted to make it so bad, and there’s some kind of inner strength pushing this kid.”
https://www.thestar.com/sports/argos/2016/05/29/for-argos-jermaine-gabriel-football-was-his-salvation.html