Up until the last month or so, I never paid much attention to foundations which were set up by professional athletes. The one exception is the Page Education Foundation, named after its originator and leader, Alan Page. The mission of that foundation is to provide college scholarships to Minnesota high school students of color. In return, the recipients enter into a contract by which they agree to perform community service, mentor younger students, and maintain a certain level of academic achievement.
Alan, a living legend in Minnesota sports history as one of the Vikings' four Purple People Eaters, is an NFL Hall Of Fame member and a recently retired justice of the Minnesota State Supreme Court. I know him as a fellow Notre Dame alum who graduated two years ahead of me in 1967. He was a starting defensive lineman on our 1966 National Champion team. The combination of praiseworthy mission and ND connection have led Momma Cuandito and I to be donors to Alan's foundation since its inception in 1988.
So, why have foundations set up by other professional athletes caught my eye (and maybe yours) recently? It all began on December 31, 2017, the last day of the current NFL regular season.
Andy Dalton's Foundation. We Vikings fans are feeling cursed by our team's string of bad luck in playoff games. The team has broken our hearts time and again, including two weeks ago in the NFC Championship Game, yet we keep tuning in. But if we think we have it bad, consider the plight of the Buffalo Bills' fans. Going into the current season, the Bills had gone seventeen years without making the playoffs, not even as a wild card team. That is the longest drought of any team in any of the four major North American profession sports leagues.
On that last regular season Sunday, the Bills still had a glimmer of hope to finally achieve the playoffs, but required two things to happen. First, they had to defeat the underachieving Miami Dolphins in Miami. Check. Final score: Buffalo 22, Miami 16. Next, the Bills needed the Cincinnati Bengals, who had no hope of making the playoffs and thus were mostly just playing for pride, to upset the Baltimore Ravens in Baltimore. A Ravens' win would clinch the playoffs for them and eliminate the Bills.
The Bengals trailed 27-24 with forty-four seconds left when Cincy quarterback Andy Dalton threw a forty-nine yard desperation bomb to wide receiver Tyler Boyd. Touchdown! Bengals win, 31-27, the Ravens' season ends and the Bills make the playoffs, ending their futility streak!
The Bills players, still in their uniforms following their Miami game, were able to watch the final moments of the Cincy-Baltimore game on locker room televisions. The room erupted with glee, as did virtually every sports bar in the city of Buffalo.
This is where the foundation follies begin. Some ecstatic Bills fans took to twitter and suggested donating to Dalton's foundation, the Andy & Jordan Dalton Foundation, as a way of showing their collective appreciation for the Bengals' quarterback's last minute heroics. The Dalton Foundation states its mission as follows: "To provide daily support, opportunities, resources and life-changing experiences to seriously ill and physically challenged children and their families in Cincinnati and Fort Worth." (Andy and his wife, Jordan, are both alums of TCU, located in Fort Worth.) The twitter suggestion caught fire. In less than a month, approximately 16,000 Buffalo fans have donated $360,000 to the foundation. "I think I'm the hottest guy in Buffalo right now," exclaimed the Cincinnati QB. He and his wife have expressed their gratitude to Buffalo by putting up five billboards in that city.
You might wonder, "What about Tyler Boyd, who caught the game-winning TD pass?" The Bills fans did not forget his role in the victory. Boyd's favorite charity, the Western Pennsylvania Youth Athletic Association, has received over $20,000 from Buffalo donors this month.
Blake Bortles' Foundation. There are many heated rivalries among the fans of the thirty-two teams in the NFL. Various ranked lists have been compiled, but regardless of the author, you are almost sure to find the Bears-Packers, Chiefs-Raiders and Redskins-Cowboys among the top ten, if not the top five. Another no holds barred relationship is between the Bengals and the Steelers. They are both NFC North Division teams, and therefore face off twice a year. There is an old saying, "Familiarity breeds contempt." That applies to those teams' fan bases. Each derives almost as much pleasure from the other guys' losses as it does from its own victories.
That's the set up for what transpired in the second week of the playoffs earlier this month. Most of the football gurus and oddsmakers had already penciled in the New England Patriots and the Steelers as the two teams who would meet in the AFC championship game the following week. Their respective opponents in the playoffs' second week, the Tennessee Titans and the Jacksonville Jaguars, respectively, would be mere speed bumps. Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin even let it slip a couple of times while talking to the media that he was thinking ahead at least a little bit to facing the Pats. The Jags had other ideas.
Playing with a huge chip on their collective shoulders, Jacksonville upset Pittsburgh 45-42. Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles, usually considered several tiers below Pittsburgh QB Big Ben Roethlisberger, managed the game well enough, completing fourteen of twenty-six passes for over 200 yards and a touchdown. The Jacksonville fans were dubbing the upset a prevention of the Steelers "Stairway To Seven," a reference to the number of Super Bowls Pittsburgh would have attained had they beaten Jacksonville as expected.
The Cincinnati fans, delirious with joy over seeing their enemy, Pittsburgh, lose, and still mindful of the Buffalo fans' donations to the Dalton Foundation, decided to play it forward. Within a few days, more than $11,000 from approximately five hundred Bengals loyalists had poured into the Blake Bortles Foundation, whose dual mission is to support those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and to support first responders in the Jacksonville and Oviedo (Bortles' home town), Florida communities.
Thomas Morstead's Foundation. Thomas Morstead is the punter for the New Orleans Saints. Most NFL games are played with each team's punter participating with total anonymity. (How many of you can identify the Vikings' punter?) But in the Saints' January 14 playoff game against the Vikings, the final game-winning play of which has been called the Minneapolis Miracle, Morstead stood out for two reasons.
On Morstead's first punt of the game in the first quarter, he fractured his ribs while tackling Viking punt returner Marcus Sherels. A little while later Morstead had to punt again, and he clearly grimmaced in pain, holding his side as he kicked. It was tough for anyone, fan or foe, to watch. Because NFL teams activate only one punter for each game, Morstead ended up punting four times, with an unbelievably excellent average, even for an able-bodied athlete, of forty-eight yards.
Here's the second reason. NFL rules dictate that if a game ends with a touchdown on the last play of overtime, the scoring team does not have to attempt the extra point kick, aka PAT for "point after touchdown." But -- and here is the stupid part -- if the game ends with a touchdown on the last play during regulation (60 minutes), the scoring team does have to line up for the PAT. So, when the Vikings ended the game with the historic touchdown pass from Case Keenum to Stefon Diggs as regulation time expired, the game was not technically over. By rule, both teams had to line up on the two yard line for some semblance of a PAT. This would prove to be more difficult than you'd expect.
The home town fans were delerious, as were the Vikings players celebrating on the field. The Saints, whose coach, Sean Payton, had been irking the fans with "skol claps" moments before, hastily retreated to their locker room. One of the game officials had to fetch eleven Saints back onto the field. Who should be the first of their fifty-three man roster to make the long trek? None other than Mr. Morstead, the punter with the broken ribs.
This display of sportsmanship so impressed some Vikings fans that a suggestion was made on Reddit to do what Bills and Bengals fans had done, viz., make a donation to Morstead's foundation, What You Give Will Grow. That organization, founded by Morstead and his wife Lauren, donates raised funds to other non-profits in New Orleans and Gulf South communities, with a focus on children's charities. Only four years old, it has delivered over $2.5 million to those causes.
The latest reports indicate that over five thousand Vikings fans have followed the suggestion by donating more than $200,000 to What You Give Will Grow. Morstead graciously thanked the Minnesotans, with a promise to hand-deliver a check equalling 100% of the Minnesota donations to the Child Life Department at Children's Hospital in Minneapolis. Wow!
Gratuitous question which I cannot resist asking: Do you think the Eagles fans, whom veteran Star Tribune columnist Jim Souhan called "the worst fans in sports" and "a rotting orchard," would recognize the good will of the Bills, Bengals and Vikings fan bases?
Noteworthy Numbers: Several Buffalo fans who contributed to Andy Dalton's foundation did so in the amount of $17, representing the length of their team's playoff drought. Some Cincinnati fans who contributed to the Bortles foundation upped the ante a little with gifts of $45.42, the final score of Pittsburgh's defeat at the hands of Bortles and his teammates. But most of the donations made to the three players' foundations described above were for smaller dollar amounts, often matching the relevant players' uniform numbers: Dalton # 14, Bortles # 5, and Morstead # 6. One lesson to be learned for aspiring NFL players: choose the biggest two-digit number you can, in case some day you become a hero.
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