Even though my mother had told me growing up that, 'If you win, nobody cares what color you are,' that wasn't necessarily true in the N.F.L.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the disparity between personal beliefs and societal realities regarding race and achievement.
Warren Moon reflects on the lessons taught by his mother about winning and overcoming racial prejudice, emphasizing the stark contrast between her hopeful message and the harsh realities he faced in the NFL. Despite the belief that success would erase racial distinctions, he acknowledges that race still plays a significant role in how individuals are perceived and treated in professional sports.
In practice
During a speech about overcoming adversity, one might use this quote to highlight the complex relationship between race and success.
There are so many bad influences out there. I don't care if a kid is rich or poor, if he lives in a million-dollar house or the ghetto, he is going to find some sick things on the street. And if we don't clean it up soon, we're all going to pay the price.
In football, it's the ultimate team sport. You have to have good people around you as a quarterback for things to happen.
And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.
Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold onto something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain.
That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.
I shall remember the look in Margot's eyes all my life.
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