Fingers, Toes and Other Body Parts

By Jude T. Feld

I guess I was wrong.

I owe my late father an apology.

I made fun of him for years – long before the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I suppose he was just ahead of his time.

He thought legendary Cubs pitcher “Three Finger” Mordecai Brown should have been banned from baseball.

At the age of seven, Brown got his hand caught in his uncle’s corn shredder, losing parts of two fingers.

“He could put a spin on the ball that nobody with a whole hand could,” Dad said. “They should have never let him pitch in the Majors.”

That was before my time and I was just a kid when I heard the story, but it didn’t seem like banning him was the right thing to do to me.

Later, Dad wanted to ban Tom Dempsey from the NFL.

Dempsey was born without toes on his right, kicking foot. He wore a modified shoe with a flattened and enlarged toe surface.

This generated controversy about whether such a shoe gave a player an unfair advantage.

My father, one of the most gentle and understanding men I have ever known, said it did.

I laughed my ass off.

“You want to ban a guy born without toes from being a kicker? Go ahead. You be the jerk to tell him. That’s ludicrous. They should build a statue of him not ban him.”

In 1977, the NFL added a rule, informally known as the “Tom Dempsey Rule,” that “any shoe that is worn by a player with an artificial limb on his kicking leg must have a kicking surface that conforms to that of a normal kicking shoe.”

“You people are a bunch of idiots,” I said when my Dad came in waving the Sports section and saying, “I told you so”.

Now, the IAAF rules on Monday that double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius is ineligible to compete in the Beijing Olympics because his prosthetic racing blades give him a competitive advantage.

Who is the poor soul that had to break the news to a guy with no legs that he couldn’t run in the Olympics?

The “kicker” of this story was that virtually every comment on AOL regarding the ban agreed with the decision. I guess there are a lot of runners who would be embarrassed by getting beat in a race by a guy with no legs.

I think the world has taken a turn for the worse.

It won’t be long before people will be blaming Jessica Simpson for losing NFL games.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Featured Articles. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.