The Basketball Prodigy

The Basketball Prodigy
Akron's Favorite Son

Fiction edward W Pritchard

A coaches dream, practiced early, long and often, proper attitude in all ways, respected the game and other players and was the very best; but improving and they called him the best of all time and for now he was.

All was in jeopardy because of a seven year old Navajo Indian girl who hadn't been properly screened. He was touring with a few other celebrities from Los Angeles to to Phoenix, and in Northern Arizona at a staged event at a school near an Indian Reservation, where he was passing out shirts and other presents ; one girl had rocked and unsettled his world and even now weeks later he was having trouble concentrating. As he had asked her what she would like before he handed her a gift she had looked him in the eye and said water for my family. This lead to research by himself and later by his assistant and also his "people" [ staff] into water issues in Arizona and New Mexico; and especially how American Indians and other poorer people in the area were suffering over the lack of water and were often porting water from public facilities, sometimes in the back of old trucks, but unbelievably often by hand in buckets.

Of course his coaches had brought in experts to try and appease his conscious on the matter, experts who supplied him with information on economic development, the growth of cities, and ranchers and farmers rights and other factors; but truth was he was unable to forget the Navajo girl's request for Water. Although he himself had come from an impoverished background and knew through-out his teens what it was like to do without in America , lack of water had never come into the equation and his consciousness and awareness had been awakened by the Navajo girl. Now several weeks later he was unsure how to proceed but knew he must do something.