Amazing Gifts by Pinsky Mark I.;

Author:Pinsky, Mark I.; [Mark I. Pinsky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 1674079
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Everyone Has Some Challenges

Al Mead

Even as a young boy living on Chicago’s South Side, Al Mead was a competitor. In 1968, when he was in the third grade, he found himself in a race for his life after a sports accident resulted in a blood clot and gangrene. Doctors were able to save him, but only after amputating one leg above the knee. That experience, he says, “framed the foundation as to who I am today and the journey I was put on, to be an example and an advocate for people with disabilities, particularly in the area of sports.”

Mead grew up in a Christian home, and his family’s small African American congregation rallied around him after the accident. His personal relationship with Jesus Christ deepened, he said, and helped him in the trials he faced in the months and years that followed. His father was a deacon, the pastor’s right hand, and the congregation “embraced me and accommodated me in every aspect. I participated in every event that involved kids; inside or outside the church. I stayed plugged in because the church was so embracing and encouraging. As a result I became the ‘encourager’ for the church because of my perseverance and action.”

The major hurdle Mead faced was that he wanted to continue as an athletic competitor, and prosthetic legs at that time were not designed for use in sports. The boy’s life changed when he met an African American prosthetist—one of the first designers of artificial limbs in Chicago—named Mike Lewis, who began designing stronger and faster legs that would allow Mead to compete in high school, intramural, and recreational team sports, from baseball and basketball to ice hockey. He was good at all of them, and not just good for a kid with an artificial leg, which enhanced his confidence.

At Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically African American institution, Mead studied biology and business and continued his interest in club and intramural sports. He expressed his religious faith mostly through choir singing, both in a local congregation and with the renowned gospel choir of the Atlanta University Center. During his time at Morehouse, Mead made another fortuitous connection, with a prosthetics designer named Larry Rice, a Georgia Tech engineer who wanted to take artificial legs to a higher level.

Equipped with one of Rice’s prosthetics, Mead began winning track and field competitions. Indeed, in his first outing with the leg, a regional meet in Statesville, Georgia, in 1982, he broke the world record in the hundred meters for an above-the-knee amputee. He quickly advanced to elite world levels of performance, eventually participating in international Paralympic competitions—which follow the quadrennial Olympics—in events for amputees, using his new leg. In the process, he attracted the interest of sponsors, manufacturers of prosthetics for nonathlete amputees, who could underwrite even more sophisticated limbs. These companies hoped that the attention Mead brought to their products would convince insurance companies to pay for less costly, mass-market versions.

Mead had a breakout performance in 1988 at

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