Alwyn Lea knows where he and his wife, Vicki, would be today if not for Steve Zabel and the organization he helped found.
“Without them, we’d be dead,” Lea said. “We were both heroin addicts and not in real good shape. We’d both lost most of our family.
“They trusted us and respected us. You can’t beat that. You can’t betray that. That’s the start of a really, really good deal. We’ve treasured it ever since.”
Zabel will enter the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame on Monday, Aug. 3 because of his athletic prowess. He was a first-team All-American football player at Oklahoma — where he played tight end and linebacker — then spent 10 years in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles, New England Patriots and Baltimore Colts.