Playing With Pain

Playing with PainPettis Norman was 11 when he stood in the shade of the tree and watched those bad-ass boys with that weird-looking ball. It was the first football he had ever seen. One of ten children, the son of an impoverished black sharecropper, Pettis could not understand why they were fighting so hard for that piece of leather.He had five miles yet to walk home from school, across the tracks to the rough side of Charlotte, North Carolina, but the game and the laughter and the ball now had...