This story starts back in 1973. I would ask you to read this through to the end. Before you do, I want to thank you for taking the time.

            I was going to be playing Santa Claus at the elementary schools in our little town. (Back then I needed to wear padding. If I did it now, probably not. But now I wouldn’t be playing Santa, either.) There was a girl in my class who had the same eye glass prescription as I had, but her glasses were gold wireframes, which were not a common choice back then. The glasses would be perfect for Santa though, and she said I could wear them. On the day I needed them, though, she had forgotten them at home. (Her name was Marsha and I later married her. Now, 41 years later, she still forgets her glasses. Or sticks them in her hair and forgets them there.) She called her mother from the pay phone and arranged for me to pick them up on my way to the elementary school. Her little brother, Joey, was home sick and this way he would get to see Santa, too.

            So, I stopped at the Medlen home. I met Mrs. M, who wasn’t really happy to be turning her daughter’s glasses over to a guy who had driven up in a beat up old farm truck. (Trucks were not cool back then.) And I got to meet Joey, who was stunned to have Santa walk into his home. He didn’t care about the truck rather than the sleigh, it only mattered that Santa was there. I don’t know if he knows to this day that it wasn’t really Santa.

            Marsha and I started dating that Spring and I got to knowing the family better. Dorothy, her mother, had very little use for me back then. Loring, her father, just assumed I was another in the line of boyfriends. All three brothers were young than Marsha, the oldest being Buddy and then Mike and, last, Joey. Buddy and Mike cared little for sports but Joey was a sports nut and I gravitated towards him. He got to where when I came over he thought I was there to play ball with him. Sometimes he would get a little bothered that Marsha would butt in.

            We got married and moved to Tennessee for college and then eventually returned to Ohio for a couple of years. For Joey, this was the time he was becoming a standout Little Leaguer. At his insistence, I wound up helping with his Little League team. He would make a good play or get a hit and he would look at me from the field. “Good job, Joey, way to go!” Only when I said that, or something like it would he smile. We took him sledding, I played football and baseball with him and then one evening we took him to his first major league baseball game. The Cleveland Indians were really bad back in the late 1970s. Really, really bad. Unbelievably bad. Joey was their biggest fan. They could do no wrong. So, one night we loaded him into my 1973 Vega and we headed to Cleveland to the old, decrepit Municipal Stadium to watch them play ball.

            The Stadium had been built in the 1930s and it was old. The restrooms usually didn’t work. If you saw a cop standing around for security reasons he was usually leaning against a wall eating a bratwurst. Usually, during baseball season, half the lights in the concourse were burned out. The place would fill up during football season, but baseball was really pathetic. Not only was the team bad, but it was sometimes dangerous to be in or around that old barn. Games played at night were poorly attended. We pulled up to the 74,000 seat stadium in a parking lot designed for a lot of cars to see less than a hundred cars, all parked up close to the building. Marsha even wondered if the game had been canceled. But Joey was bouncing around in the backseat. (being a Vega didn’t leave much room to bounce, but still….) When the door was opened he was gone like a shot. He got 20 yards away and turned and said, “COME ON YOU GUYS!!! WE WON’T GET A GOOD SEAT!!!” 74,000 seats, a hundred cars, evidently math wasn’t his strength at the time.

            We got inside, got our tickets and bought the hot dogs, then stepped out to where we could get to our seats. Joey’s mouth dropped open. To him, it was beautiful. Awesome, even. I don’t remember who won that night, but I remember that Marsha and I had the most fun watching Joey be amazed. Every fly ball brought him to his feet, every catch in the outfield brought him to his feet, every sharp grounder brought him to his feet. Actually, I don’t think he sat down at all during the game. When we got back to the car I dropped the back seat so he could lay in the back and look up at the stars through the hatchback. He did that all the way home, probably thinking of the day he would win the World Series for the Indians with a bottom of the ninth homerun in Game Seven.

            That Fall Marsha and I moved to Florida to pursue the ministry. Joey stayed in sports, but not so much the ball sports. He developed a real love for running. By the time he was in high school he would run the five miles to the center of the next town and turn at the stoplight and run home. Just to get loose. He loved to run. He wrestled, too, but the running was the focus. He became an all-state runner and is still remembered as the best of our old high school’s runners. He got a scholarship to college and was being groomed for the 1988 Olympics. Seriously, he was that good. Dedicated. He still loved all the Cleveland sports, but by then his dream was to be standing on that center podium with the Star Spangled Banner playing and a gold medal being placed around his neck.

            Then, in a race in college, he took a fall and got hurt. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to recover. Finally, they did a series of tests on him. Turned out that the fall was just a fall, but his real problem was something called ankylosing spondylitis. An auto immune disease, at the time it was considered very rare. It was an ‘orphan disease,’ a disease so rare there was no medical treatment for it, no money spent fixing it and would always lead to death. Before death it would damage the spine and hips. Just a couple of years and he would be wheelchair bound. Imagine the blow, the destruction of the dream, the death sentence.

            The next few years were very hard for Joey. It was around this time that he became “Joe.” He got worse all the time. Watching this young man painfully walk after watching him gracefully speed along was hard for everyone. During this time their father passed away, and Joe felt that maybe harder than the other kids. But, as he struggled on, that old stubbornness that used to get him to run ten miles a day began to resurface. He began to date a young lady from the town named Stephanie, and she encouraged him. She was a student at Ohio State University and she got him to see a doctor there at the University hospital. This doctor was focusing on auto immune diseases and he began to devise a treatment regimen for Joe. He was a test subject, but much of what they learned with him has helped others, including his sister Marsha, over the years. Slowly, he got back to where he could function. He worked, he moved forward. People he was around would have no idea of the athlete he had been, but they knew him as a guy would shoulder any burden.

            He and Stephanie married in 1995. It always amazed me that she would marry someone with the kind of physical issues he had, but she loved him. They lived in Columbus, Ohio. Joe eventually was hired at Sears in security. He excelled and wound up working for Sears corporate over a large area, working to improve security in the chain. They had two children, Joey and Savannah, and Joe and Steph decided to move back to the hometown so the kids could be brought up in a safer and cleaner environment. And, truth be told, to be closer to Cleveland sports. The dream was gone, but the love of sport was still strong.

Joe left Sears and had a job or two and then, sort of out of the blue, he was hired as the head of security for Gateway Corporation. This is the Corporation that operates Progressive Field (the newer park where the Indians play) and Quicken Loans Arena (where the Cavaliers play). Joe’s office overlooked the baseball field. Wow. For a Cleveland sports fan there could be nothing better, short of playing and winning a championship. Of course, it wasn’t as it seemed. When he was there for a game he was security conscious. Watching the crowd rather than the game. In our terrorist prone society, security is a real issue. You go to any venue today and you won’t see a cop leaning on a wall eating a bratwurst. They are ready to deal with most any situation. Every event has its tense moments. Joe has to link city police with private security and create assignments to cover any eventuality. Nothing easy in the job. Meanwhile, he is the coach for the varsity girls’ softball team at his old high school. Not bad for a guy who was supposed to be in a wheelchair and then die years ago.

But, I have worried about him and the immensity of the job. This past year, especially. The Cavs hit the playoffs and made their run, eventually winning the NBA Championship. During the playoff run there were ten home games. 20,000+ people crammed into an arena, national media coverage, what a target for a terrorist attack. To make matters worse, the Indians were playing in adjacent Progressive Field for four of those nights, so security was a nightmare. When the Indians hit the playoffs, and made their run, they played nine home games. 40,000+ each game; another terrorist target. And maybe the worse stretch of days; the Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena for four days in July. All the promise of violence, coordinating between federal and local security, the ever present danger of terrorist attacks. 2016 had to be a nightmare. But Joe got through it all.

Monday night Marsha brought me her phone and said, “Tell me what this is.” She had a series of downloaded pictures Joe had sent her. In the pictures was a ring. A massive ring that dwarfed the hand wearing it. I scrolled through the pictures. The first was a shot from the top of the ring and the caption, “Show this to Larry, please.” Diamonds and rubies were all over the ring. The next picture showed the side of the ring with the word CAVS on it. It occurred to me that it was a Cavs championship ring. Championship rings and always big and gaudy and clunky and the most sought after item in any sport. The next picture was the other side of the ring. The word on it was MEDLEN, It took me a minute, a long minute, and then I realized that Joe, because of his hard work keeping everyone safe and the venues secure, had been awarded a championship ring by the team. I stared at it for quite a while and all I could think of was the little boy laying in the back seat of my car looking to the heavens and dreaming of a championship.

Here is the point of this story. Everyone has a dream. Few ever achieve their dreams. But only the very special can see their dream shattered through no fault of their own, then pick themselves up and make the dream happen in another way. Joe won’t wear that ring much. Where would you wear something like that? But he has it.

And Joe, if you are reading this; Good job, Joey, way to go!