Few have heard of Glenn Cunningham. Yet, he was my first sports role model. Cunningham’s story is as relevant today as it was then.
We all need positive role models–those heroic people who show us how to act or conduct our lives, especially when it’s defined by the courage to do what was seen as impossible or unpopular. When we think of folks such as Rosa Parks, we encounter such a positive role model, an ordinary but heroic person, but one about whom people should learn.
My first role model was Glenn Cunningham, an athlete. Most people have no idea about the story I will tell, and that’s exactly why I’m telling it.
Glenn Cunningham ran for the University of Kansas and was a terrific middle-distance runner. In the 1932 Olympics, he placed 4th in the 1500 meters and won the Silver medal in the same distance four years later in Berlin. His best mile time was 4:06.7, and he retired in 1940 after holding numerous collegiate and national records in the half-mile and mile.
But those accomplishments tell little of Glenn Cunningham’s full story. For that, let’s turn to a cold Kansas schoolhouse where he and his older brother Floyd were burned in a stove fire.
The brothers arrived early and lit the stove to warm the room when the teacher and students arrived. Before lighting, they would pack the stove with wood and soak it with kerosene. But they did not know that someone had put gasoline in the can.
The explosion killed Floyd, and doctors told Cunningham’s parents he would never walk again. Glenn Cunningham wouldn’t accept that fate. Instead, he ran everywhere after teaching himself to walk and eventually became a world-class track athlete.
His story, read in school books, offered many of us 1950s elementary-aged children a role model for what could be accomplished with enough grit.
There is magic in Glenn Cunningham’s story that stretches far beyond a level of training hard and persisting in seeking to accomplish an athletic dream. Instead, it’s a story about how a person would not let tragedy get in the way of scripting a story of resolve, persistence, and triumph.
Remember the name, Glenn Cunningham.
