Stand Up Speak Out

Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey and Olympic gold medalist Kayla Harrison were sexually abused when they were young. What happened, and how they healed:

“The bad cop finally got through to her when she won the U.S. Open in 2007 and felt absolutely nothing and told him she was quitting for good. He invited her to his house, this silver-haired man with the curt air of an old European farmer bent over his grapes in search of fungus, and he sat with her in his backyard watching the steam rise from a lake at dawn. ‘You know, kid,’ he said, ‘what happened, happened. It was a terrible thing, but some day you have to get over it. It doesn’t have to define you. You have a chance to do something great with your life, but I can’t want it for you. Terrible things happen to people every day, but they’ve got to get back up.’

“No magic happened. She wasn’t healed. She needed to quit dropping out of therapy and stay with it long enough to dig deeper and see wider. She needed to keep going through the motions long enough to begin harvesting all the fruit that sports dangles alongside its thorns, the sense of purpose and belonging, the team dinners and encouragement and teasing and pranks. But the deep truth of Big Jim’s words finally sank into her: Yes, sex abuse had occurred to her, but sex abuse wasn’t her. And for crissakes, Kid, stop feeling guilty and put that coach in the slammer before he does it to someone else!

“She wavered, but finally, on a winter day in 2008, she walked into a federal courtroom in Dayton to confront her former coach.”

Author: Gary Smith
Published: Dec 17, 2012
Length: 37 minutes (9,332 words)
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