Feb. 29, 2004
LINK TO STORY: US Snowboarding coach from Memphis? Meet Mike Jankowski
(It was during the X Games that our one of my editors forwarded a voice mail from a reader asking why we weren’t writing anything on her brother, a Memphis native growing his reputation in the (then) growing sport of snowboarding. It was the middle of basketball season in Memphis but I’m eternally grateful I called Teri back …)
They walked up to Michael Jankowski, guys not yet 30 and already accumulating regret.
They were together again last September, the Christian Brothers High class of 1993, and many of them were hearing for the first time what had become of Jankowski, the old wrestling demon, the old drummer.
“Definitely it was jaws dropping and people could not believe it,” Jankowski remembered.
“Some guys came up to me and said, ‘Dude, that is so cool. I’m selling insurance and my life sucks.’ ”
Jankowski isn’t sitting behind a desk selling insurance, that’s for sure. No, the youngest of Madaline and Leonard Jankowski’s six children had chosen a path so different it stunned people to hear about it.
Michael Jankowski had just flown in from Chile, where he was serving as halfpipe coach for the United States Olympic snowboarding team.
That’s right. Snowboarding – the ultrahip sport for grungily attired athletes who surfslide, spin and flip down a corridor of snow, known as the halfpipe, in search of big air and amplitude (really big air).
If all goes as planned, Jankowski, 28, will be in Torino, Italy, two Februarys from now, helping U.S. athletes bring home medals in the most audacious of Olympic sports.
“Isn’t it crazy?” said Teri Trotter, his older sister.
“My brother, born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, is the Olympic snowboard coach. Everybody I tell is flabbergasted.”
It does seem strange. But if you know Jankowski’s story and understand his upbringing, it begins to seem perfectly logical – this Memphis kid teaching people to ride in the snow.
The lessons he learned growing up, and the audacious choices he’s made along the way, have given his life serious amplitude.
And no regrets.
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July 12, 2014
LINK: The Aurs — Brazilians imported by St. Jude helped build soccer in Memphis
(The 2014 World Cup in Brazil offered the perfect opportunity to tell the important story of how Memphis soccer blossomed because of a Brazilian family brought to Memphis by Danny Thomas in the 1960s to work at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.)
It was on one of those trips from their native Brazil back to their adopted hometown of Memphis, sometime in the mid-1960s, that one of Dr. Rhomes and Celina Aur’s five children walked off the plane carrying a soccer ball. That was how Celina, now 81, recalled it on Tuesday, the day before what she calls Brazil’s “awful, awful, awful” World Cup game with Germany. It was probably Amin, the oldest, or maybe the second son, Zito.
“Someone at the airport, they stop him and say, ‘Is that a soccer ball?’ ” Celina remembered.
At the time, to a Memphian, a soccer ball did indeed seem an exotic import, but in the half-century since Dr. Aur became one of the first doctors to join St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the game has become woven into the fabric of the Memphis area.
Nov. 3, 2003
LINK TO FULL STORY: Love story welcomes Tim Howard into Memphis family
(Through a connection in the Memphis soccer community, we received a tip that one of the the biggest sports stories in England had a strong Memphis connection. This would be the first local story introducing Memphians to Tim Howard, who would go on to make the city his hometown as he became an international superstar.)
The wedding was set, arranged down to the last detail, and all Laura Cianciola had to do was wait for Nov. 29, 2003, to arrive.
The wedding dress had been bought and sent for alterations. The flowers were chosen, the photographer booked. Lindenwood pastor Roy Stauffer would lead Laura and her fiance, Tim, through the vows and they would celebrate at The Racquet Club.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the altar. Several funny things, actually. Funny and wonderful and magical and, to hear Lauratell it, filled with the presence of the God she allows to guide her life.
Fate conspired to cancel the dream wedding for this quintessential Memphis woman.
Love has created a fairy-tale life, anyway.
There was no shower this past weekend. Nor a bachelorette night. Instead of preparing for a wedding, Laura was in England, watching her man do something no American has ever done, and that is to play goalkeeper for Manchester United, the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful sports franchise on the planet.
She was in Manchester, her new home, at one of the world’s most famous soccer stadiums, a place the Midlanders call Old Trafford. Laura was trying not to mangle her nails while her husband, Tim Howard, continued one of the most remarkable sporting stories of 2003.
How big is ManU, as the club is known the world over? Its stock is worth approximately $1.08 billion. A Google search on Manchester United yields 744,000 hits, or nearly 100,000 more than the New York Yankees.
Tim, a rangy bundle of fast-twitch muscle, has become a crowd favorite. When he makes one of his ridiculous, goal-defying saves, Laura hears the terraces come alive in song as thousands of ManU supporters serenade the man she loves.
It happened again on Saturday, in ManU’s shutout of Portsmouth.
Tim-Timminy, Tim-Timminy!
Tim-Tim Ter-eee!
Tim-Timminy, Tim-Timminy!
Tim-Tim Ter-ooo!
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Dec. 12, 2003
LINK TO FULL STORY: The day the music died — Remembering Rex Dockery
(As Memphis football was tasting its first real success in two decades, it seemed the right time to revisit the tragic plane crash that took the life of former coach Rex Dockery and three others, including a player and assistant coach. I’m grateful to the Tiger fans who have faithfully re-posted this writing every Dec. 12 since.)
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while
The chant began to build, and the players began clapping and a football team drunk on the giddiness that comes with newfound winning circled round their coach.
Memphis State had just thumped old rival Louisville, 45-7, and that meant a 6-4-1 record for the 1983 squad. It meant the first winning season in six years and vindicated their coach for coming from Texas Tech, showed he wasn’t loony for talking about chasing national titles even during a 17-game losing streak.
It also meant that coach, Rex Dockery , had a promise to keep, right there in Louisville, right there on the icy turf.
“County Fair! County Fair! County Fair!” came the cry, and pretty soon Rozelle Clayton was out in front, pumping his fists and doing a jig and Dockery’s upside-down smile grew even wider.
And next thing they knew, their coach was down and back up, down and back up and flopping and rolling through the grass drills they called the County Fair.
When he finished, Clayton lifted Dockery in a bearhug and the players carried him to the cheers of fans who had traveled up for the Tigers’ Thanksgiving Day finale.
Rex’s wife, Wallene, marveled at the joy her husband had created. “It was an incredible moment,” she says.
It has been 20 years since Rex Dockery had folks in this city believing the football program was on the verge of great things, and since his untimely death, the program has struggled to regain that optimism. The 2003 Tiger football team is 8-4, headed to the program’s first bowl game since 1971 and returning almost all of their key players next season.
Like Tommy West, the team’s current coach, Dockery played at Tennessee, and, like West, used his disarming personality to charm the city and tap into Memphis’s fertile recruiting market.
“It was very similar to the feeling going on here right now,” says Bob Winn, the football team’s media relations director since 1976. “It was euphoria and a feeling that, ‘Hey, we’ve turned the corner and this is the guy to take us to the promised land.'”
That was the feeling on Dec. 12, 1983, when Rex prepared to leave his Germantown home. He teased his 8-year-old son, Dee, making him surrender a kiss goodbye before catching the school bus, and then Wallene recalls Rex saying he hadn’t decided whether to drive to that night’s Lawrenceburg Quarterback Club meeting in Middle Tennessee or fly in a booster’s private plane.
“A voice in the back of my head said, ‘Wallene, you’ll never see him again,'” she says.