Lou Gehrig played 2,130 games in a row, a streak so long that people called it unbreakable. On September 6, 1995, Baltimore’s Cal Ripken Jr. played his 2,131st straight game. When the game became official in the middle of the fifth inning, the numbers on the warehouse beyond right field flipped from 2,130 to 2,131 and Camden Yards erupted. The ovation would not stop until teammates Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bonilla physically pushed him out of the dugout to take a lap around the field shaking hands with fans. Ripken said he never really allowed himself to think about the streak. He just showed up and played, day after day.
When Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell learned that the 100 meter heats at the 1924 Paris Olympics would be run on a Sunday, he refused to take part, even though the 100 was his strongest distance, and news of his decision travelled around the world. He spent the next months training for the 400 meters instead, took bronze in the 200, and then, running blind from the outside lane in the 400 final, won gold in an Olympic record 47.6 seconds. “With the help of God, I ran the next 200m even more strongly,” he later said. Liddell then went back to China as a missionary and died at 43 in a Japanese internment camp in February 1945, just months before the war ended.
In a women’s 5,000 meter heat at the 2016 Rio Olympics, New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin tripped and fell, accidentally taking American Abbey D’Agostino down with her. D’Agostino jumped right back up, but instead of chasing the pack she stopped to help Hamblin to her feet and urged her to finish the race. D’Agostino had hurt her ankle in the fall, so Hamblin hung back to encourage her in return until D’Agostino urged her to go on without her. A few days later both women received Fair Play awards, and Hamblin said simply, “I am so grateful to Abbey for picking me up.”
Two weeks after an ALS diagnosis forced him out of baseball, Lou Gehrig stood at home plate in Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, in front of 61,808 fans. He had every reason to talk about his bad break, but instead he spent the speech thanking people: the fans, his teammates, his managers, the groundskeepers, his parents, his wife, and even his mother-in-law. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” he said, closing with the words that he might have been given a bad break, but he had an awful lot to live for. Gehrig died less than two years later, at 37, but that day he showed the whole country that gratitude can stand up tall in the middle of a storm.
