A gift for giving

Sporting News, The, August 2, 1999 by Paul Attner

Because of their hands-on commitments to their communities, David Robinson and Darrell Green stand tallest among our 99 Good Guys in pro sports

Why is THE SPORTING NEWS honoring the 99 outstanding Good Guys in pro sports?

Let me show you. Come with me to San Antonio. Drive a half-mile east from the downtown Alamodome, away from the raucous, high-roller River Walk, where conventioneers pay $200 a night for a hotel room. Turn onto Hackberry Street. Peer into the neighborhood that time has overlooked. Houses are boarded up, factories abandoned, lots vacant, grass overgrown. Sprinkled amid the poverty are a few homes of dignity: lawns tidy, doors painted. But mostly there is dust and dirt and depression.

Stop in front of a soaring building halfway down the block. This is Carver Center, a thriving core for community meetings and theater arts, art deco in design and sturdy in form, the only structure of substance visible on the East Side of town. Now, use your imagination. Instead of a parking lot to the right of the 60-year-old building, see instead a school complex of six one-story units covering three blocks. See students wandering a sprawling campus full of trees and manicured grounds where two blocks of beat-up structures now stand. See a $6 million investment in the future not only of these children, but in the East Side itself.

See David Robinson standing on this June day in the parking lot, shortly after winning his first NBA championship, leaving a meeting of the board that will oversee what will be called the Carver Academy. In August 2001, when the institute will welcome its first student, Robinson will be at the front door, holding out his hand. For this vision and this investment in a section of town forgotten by mainstream San Antonio is the dream of Robinson and his wife, Valerie. To make it come true, he already has committed $5 million of his money and likely will come up with another $1 million to $2 million so the school is built correctly.

The first shovelful of dirt won't be turned for months, yet others already are riding Robinson's momentum. See that factory a block from the school grounds? Before it was closed and the windows shattered, it churned out refrigeration equipment. Now, investors see a great place for a combination condominium/business complex. Funny, for 30 years people looked at the East Side and saw declining property values and bad neighborhoods and white flight and high crime. No one looked at the East Side and saw a future. Until David Robinson.

"This means a tremendous amount to that part of town," says Navarra Williams, president of Paragon, a local cable company, "and a Carver board member. "Someone needed to kick-start development there, and he did it. You are bombarded about how pro athletes behave badly, get in trouble, abuse drugs. You never hear stories about what people like David have done. And he has taken his service to another level."

This is why we present to you these 99 Good Guys. This is why we think it is important for you to know, amid all the self-awareness and swagger and trash talking of today's athletic generation, that there are these 99, and hundreds more like them, decent-thinking, community-minded, generous athletes who deserve your admiration and thanks for their selfless deeds.

We have it all wrong about the athletes we watch. We have let a few degenerates draw our wrath and earn our disgust. Blame the media if you want. Say it's because we write and talk only about the controversial and the bombastic, that the news we see fit to print and videotape is usually bad, that the good is not worthy of our time. Yet, it is more than that. When THE SPORTING NEWS sent written requests to the 116 teams in the four pro sports leagues we cover on a weekly basis for Good Guy nominations, half didn't respond. A second request was ignored again by 34 clubs. If these franchises don't care about their good guys, how are their fans to know they exist?

What is a Good Guy? Come with me into the inner city of Washington, D.C. Drive three miles from the Capitol and mm onto Franklin Street, in the city's northeast quadrant. Stop behind the Franklin Commons apartment complex. Despite stepped-up police efforts, this still is a city full of crime and drugs, of unsafe streets. It is a city with too many underachieving schools and single-parent households, of too many apartment complexes like this one, where residents have missed out on the booming economy and poverty dominates and too many kids have too little supervision.

Look for the sign to building 119. Go to the second door and ring the bell. Inside is the Darrell Green Learning Center, a four-room oasis of hope for 38 students, a caring, giving, loving environment with structure and roles and a future. Inside, learning skills are refined and elevated, enhancing opportunities for these students to receive the kind of education most D.C. schools can't promise. But there is more. Family can't pay the electric bill? You don't have shoes or a coat? No one around to attend a school conference? The Learning Center will fill the voids.