Marquis Cooper and his family enjoying the sport he loved best next to football
Aboard a flight from Tampa to Denver the Yuppie conversation in the adjoining seats veers suddenly from resort vacations, bikini waxes and remodeled kitchens with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances (what recession?) to the lost football players. Judgments are passed:
“How could you go out in a storm like that?”
“Couldn’t he have kicked out the hundred bucks for a rescue beacon?”
“His father doesn’t believe he gave up? I heard him on TV last night; says his son is too smart and too strong to give up.”
“The Gulf with 14-foot swells? In Tampa? Really?”
The Yups don’t know Marquis Cooper or his parents, so it’s easier to second-guess the entire affair as many others are most certainly doing, safely perched in front of computer screens and TV news shows where their only contact with the events are the gripping images of this story.
The rescue of Nick Schuyler by the Coast Guard on Monday
In the meantime, Bruce, Donna and Donielle Cooper sit in Marquis’ Tampa home and wait. They are most certainly asking the “Why?” questions and likely will for as long as they are alive.
That this is a tragedy for all the victims and their families is inarguable. That it may be more so for the Coopers is debatable. Unless, you know them as we do, proud parents with a son born at the right time, possessing amazing gifts and raised with the values of honest, hard-working and humble people.
Marquis Cooper had the physical skills that made him a prospect as a professional athlete. Apparently though, it is his champion’s heart, which kept his NFL career alive as an opportunist, moving from team-to-team whenever the calls came and when he could stay healthy in a brutally violent game. “Will work hard and try hard and have fun for a chance to play,” may well have been his calling card. His reputation included ultra-professional behavior on and off the field and a visibly expressive love for a young family notable given the high-profile thugs that regularly capture the headlines and ESPN commentary.
That this story of a seaborne misadventure not a game-saving play is his biggest headline is one more tragic brick in the proverbial wall keeping Marquis from what would certainly have been an impressive future. The failures of African American men in everyday life are often noted – the high rates of criminal behavior, imprisonment, and abandoned children – a stereotypical image that Marquis both did and would have continued to turn on its ear.
Marquis Cooper was highly intelligent, well-spoken, well-educated, and the product of a high-achieving, two-parent household. In a few years, when the pro football career was complete, Marquis would have entered new arenas at a time when African American men are celebrated as the top performers in business, science, the arts, and most obviously now, politics. The benefit of timing and its amazing prospect, ingredients that would have taken him to the top in his next profession, is now lost at sea. Who knows what he would have achieved to the delight of his attentive and cheerleading parents sister and friends. This is one of the many tragedies of the accident – a future lost.
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