Ricky Honors Vets Over Lunch
The '04 Dolphins kept people going in Iraq? That's military-grade perseverance right there.
By JANIE CAMPBELL
Updated 3:00 PM EST, Wed, Nov 11, 2009
Ricky Williams did a pretty awesome thing yesterday on Veteran's Day Eve: he rounded up 20 hometown veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (no, he didn't have to smoke 'em out) and took them to lunch in support of the Wounded Warrior Project, an organization that provides services and programs that assist seriously wounded military personnel and their families.
"It's great and I never imagined myself meeting Ricky Williams, let alone eating lunch with him," said Steve Lora, a Purple Heart recipient who clearly expected munchies instead (okay, sorry, we'll stop now). "It really does mean a lot. You can see that he's very sincere, he's very appreciative and he means what he says, and for a lot of us, and I'm only going to speak for myself, I really saw that it really came from the bottom of his heart."
Williams says he feels particularly drawn to the cause of veterans because his grandfather was in the Navy and his mother worked for years at a Naval base near their home in California. He was joined at Duffy's in Plantation by Ronnie Brown and Kory Sheets, where they sat and talked to their honored guests about their lives at war before providing them with tickets and concessions vouchers for Sunday's game against the Bucs.
"You see the strength of the human spirit and you see that these men and women can go through these experiences and still come back and retain any sanity," said Williams afterward. "It's amazing. We consider what we do to be hard on the football field but what they do puts our hard work to shame."
Lora said that some of what kept he and others going in Iraq was the ability to watch and root for the Dolphins on Sundays. Considering that when Lora was deployed the Dolphins went 1-8 under Dave Wannstedt, perhaps Williams should have taken the poor man to dinner instead.
Or whittled him a new medal for miraculous fortitude.
Copyright NBC Local Media
First Published: Nov 11, 2009 2:18 PM EST
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