Team Hoyt: A Father’s Love
Saw this for the first time when our boss, Danny, showed the video to us in a Strategic Planning session a few weeks ago. What you are about to see is one of the greatest love stories of our modern times. This love story began around 43 years ago, when Rick Hoyt was strangled by his umbilical cord during birth, leaving him with Cerebral Palsy and unable to control his limbs.
“Rick will be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick Hoyt says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an Institution.”
They didn’t.
And that was the best decision they ever made.
When Rick was 11 years old, a new technology allowed him to communicate. He was rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head. With this technology, Rick began to communicate to people around him.
One time, he was part of the audience in a charity run amazed at the people running in the contest. He said to his dad, “I want to do that.”
The next best decision Dick made was to take his son seriously.
For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.
One night after a race many years ago, Rick wrote on his communicator: “I do not feel handicapped when we’re competing.” It is that promise of giving his son the best life he could give that has kept Dick running all those years.
And when he was asked what he’d love to do most if a miracle happens and he’s not strapped to his wheelchair for a day, Rick answers, “The thing I’d most like, is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”
And that is why this is one of the greatest love stories ever told.
Click here to watch a YouTube Vid of their story. Watch it and be even more inspired. :-)
Leave your response!