It's funny. I had an awful experience at a local RV dealer this week while trying to buy an "apparently" outdated connection to wire onto my wife's Durango so we can pull our pop-up. I did finally find the part I needed, but only after I did all the looking and calling. This post was going to list many simple things this dealer could have done to impress me...but then I ran across a post by Justine Foo from Brains on Fire. It changed my whole demeanor.
She posted a copy of an article Rick Reilly wrote 3 years ago for Sports Illustrated. It was about Dick Hoyt and his son Rick. It's a beautiful story of a father's love for his child, and it's based around a simple desire; to see the joy in his son's eyes and a "cantaloupe smile" on his face. I've read this story before, and you may have too, but even if you've read it in the past, read it again. Here is a copy:
“The Strongest Dad in the World”
by Rick Reilly
Sports Illustrated, June 20 2005I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.
Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.
Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?
And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an Institution.”
But the Hoyt's weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”
“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a Lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”
Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”
That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, It felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”
And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly Shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”
How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.
Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?
Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.
“No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”
And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.” So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.
Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.
That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.
“The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”
So what does this have to do with sharpening? Not much, but it made me smile (it about made me cry). It also made me realize one of the main reasons I enjoy sharpening so much. I love to see the joy in the eyes and the "cantaloupe smiles" on my customers faces when they see how easy it is to sharpen if they follow the right steps, or when I repair a shear or other tool that's a family heirloom and the owner thinks of their loved one.
Does this compare to the greatness that is expressed in the love Dick shows his son? No way! But if we run our businesses with only a hint of the desire to see our customers as happy as Dick wanted to see his son, imagine how our businesses would stand out. It would be a breath of fresh air for many. It would drive loyalty. It would create something to talk about. And some...some might even call something as simple as creating smiles "remarkable." What are you doing to bring joy to your customers? What are you doing to put a smiles on their faces?
PS - If you'd like to see a great video of some of the adventurers Dick and Rick have shared, click here and scroll down to the bottom of Justine's post and click on the link to the video she included in her post.
Image: teamhoyt.com
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