In March 1977, when Terry Fox was only 18, doctors amputated his right leg above the knee because of bone cancer. Within weeks he was walking on an artificial leg, and the night before his surgery a coach had brought him a story about an amputee who ran the New York Marathon. Terry decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He started at St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980, and ran an average of 42 kilometers a day, about a marathon every day. After 143 days and 5,373 kilometers, cancer had spread to his lungs, and he had to stop outside Thunder Bay, Ontario. He died in June 1981, a month before his 23rd birthday. The annual Terry Fox Run has since raised more than 800 million dollars.
Jim Abbott grew up in Flint, Michigan, born without a right hand. He became a left-handed pitcher anyway. People could have told him a thousand reasons he’d never make it to the big leagues. On September 4, 1993, pitching for the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium, Abbott threw a no-hitter against Cleveland, winning 4-0. He walked five, struck out three, and got 17 outs on ground balls. “A guy, growing up in Flint, Michigan, to this?” he said later. That afternoon nobody in the stadium was thinking about what he was missing.
In the summer of 2018, twelve boys and their soccer coach were trapped deep in a flooded cave in northern Thailand. Saman Kunan had already left the Thai navy, but he came back to volunteer in the rescue. His job was to carry air tanks into the cave for the boys and the other divers. On the way back out, he ran out of air himself, lost consciousness, and died. The rescue went on, and days later every one of the boys and their coach made it out alive.
In the summer of 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, the camp leader picked ten men to die by starvation as punishment. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children. A Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place, and to everyone’s shock the commander agreed. Kolbe died in the starvation bunker in August 1941. Gajowniczek survived the war and spent years telling people about the man who died so he could live.
