Like many athletes, I started playing sports at a young age. My earliest memories take me back to wrestling mats and arenas and early-morning drives with my father as we traveled to find the best competitions and open tournaments. We spent thousands of hours (yes, thousands) together in the car preparing for matches and talking about life. Though these conversations focused mainly on wrestling technique and tournament brackets, more often than not my dad found a way to weave lessons about decency and morality into discussions about athletic achievement. As he talked about his heroes -- the New York Yankee legends of the1950s who lifted American spirits in the wake of World War II -- my father set up a hierarchy of sports-based integrity that is still with me: Athletes become worthy of the greatest respect not when they win at their sport but when they stand up for the dignity of others and represent something bigger than themselves.
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