Wilma Rudolph was born premature, the 20th of 22 children, and as a little girl she battled pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, which left her with a weak leg and a brace. Because of segregation she couldn’t get treatment at the local hospital, so every week she and her mother rode a bus 100 miles round trip to Nashville. At home her family massaged her leg four times a day. By age nine she was walking without the brace. “My doctor told me I would never walk again,” she once said. “My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.” In 1960 in Rome she won three Olympic gold medals, the first American woman to do that at a single Games, and cemented her status as the fastest woman in the world.
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.
On a foggy morning, February 2, 1949, golf champion Ben Hogan and his wife Valerie were driving home to Fort Worth on a two-lane Texas highway when a Greyhound bus trying to pass a truck came straight at them in their lane. At the last second Hogan threw himself across his wife. The steering wheel was driven through the seat where he had been sitting, and he was convinced he would have been crushed. He ended up with a double fracture of his pelvis, a broken collarbone, a broken ankle, and a chipped rib, and blood clots nearly killed him. Sixteen months later he was at Merion for the 1950 U.S. Open, wilted in the heat on the final day but still forced a playoff, and won it.
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.
