8 minutes ago
Sometimes Antwan Cordy gets caught up reflecting on his life.
He thinks about growing up in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house packed with six people in a high-crime, low-income area near Miami. He thinks about old friends, either in jail or dead. He thinks about the bad decisions he almost made, the ones he easily could have made and the ones he actually did.
Then he looks down at the gold football hanging at the end of the chain around his neck.
“Football,” Cordy said, “that was my escape.”
Football saved Cordy from what his father calls a “war zone,” where he says teenagers roam the streets with AK-47s and other guns shoved down their pants.