What Really Matters

By the time you read this, the Houston Astros may be the winners of the 2017 World Series.  Or it might have been the Dodgers, and a year from now it won't matter anyway, because there's a World Series every fall, and it almost always turns out that a new team wins, and there you go.

And it's not likely that the Houston Texans of the NFL will win the Super Bowl for this football season, especially now that the owner made a dumb remark that would seem to compare football players to prison inmates.  

The point is, football games and baseball games are played, and some people win and some people lose, and Good Time Charlie's got the blues.

I happen to belong to a secret cult of people who are fans of the University of Alabama football team, an interest that I often display by parading around in 'Bama hats and hoodies and shirts.  I was, therefore, stunned and downcast this past January when Alabama lost to Clemson in the national title game. A win would have given Alabama the championship 5 times in the last 7 years. 'Bama leads all American colleges in sending players to the National Football League, and all that didn't matter when Clemson's great quarterback led his team to a win.

What does matter is that that quarterback, Deshaun Watson, who went on to play for the Texans, chose to donate his paycheck from his first professional game to three women who work in the cafeteria at the stadium where the Texans play. The women had suffered loss of property and income from Hurricane Harvey.

Watson is making a base salary of $465,000 this year, and cut a check for the women to the tune of $27,353.

It turns out that as a young man, Deshaun Watson and his family were helped out by Habitat for Humanity, and that's where he learned the value of charity.

"For what you all do for us every day and never complain, I really appreciate you all, so I wanted to give my first game check to y'all to help y'all out in some type of way," Watson told the woman in a video shared by the Texans. "Here you guys go."

"Hopefully, that's good and that can get you back on your feet. And anything else y'all need, I'm always here to help," he added.

Watson will win games and lose games and, we presume, make a good amount of money in his professional career, and while it's foolish to suggest that young people look to athletes as role models, he is already proving to be an exception to that.