Harrison, other African-American All-Stars hope to expand game’s reach

An enterprise story from the 2017 MLB All-Star Game on African American participation in baseball. 

MIAMI — When Josh Harrison looked around the National League clubhouse at Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Marlins Park, he didn’t see many faces that looked like his.

There were several other players of color, but most of them were Latin American. Harrison was one of just two players with African-American heritage in the National League clubhouse along with the Marlins’ Giancarlo Stanton. There were six African-American players over on the American League side: Chris Archer, Mookie Betts, Michael Brantley, Aaron Judge, George Springer and Justin Upton. But that was still just eight of the 71 total players invited to the All-Star Game.

Harrison wasn’t bothered because he believed African-Americans were not proportionately represented. He was bothered because he knew they were.

Fueled by late father’s firefighting, Dangerfield finally gets his shot

The words “Everything Happens For A Reason” are tattooed in cursive at the peak of Jordan Dangerfield’s left shoulder.

Just below on his left bicep is tattooed a picture of the man who taught him that life philosophy, his father, David.

Right below that are tattooed an acronym and a word that would give him every right to doubt that philosophy. It says, “RIP Dad,” because David died of a heart attack in 2009 at the age of 51.

But Jordan has never let his father’s death shake his faith, because his father didn’t let anything destroy his. David was a New York City firefighter for 18 years. He lost friends and co-workers when the World Trade Center was brought down by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, and he worked at Ground Zero after the attack.

No one gives more than Arthur Moats

 Arthur Moats doesn’t have a pet cause.

 

The Steelers’ most charitable player and NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee doesn’t have a foundation bearing his name. He isn’t directly associated with a specific public mission in the same way DeAngelo Williams is with the fight against breast cancer, William Gay with support of the victims of domestic violence, or Ben Roethlisberger with support for police, fire and rescue workers and police dogs.

Moats’ causes are myriad and his methods in contributing are virtually limitless. He is part of the board of directors at the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Pittsburgh, which help parents of children experiencing long-term hospital stays, but he is also involved with charities that help everything from impoverished children to troubled teenagers and young adults to war veterans and the elderly.  He gives direct gifts to the underprivileged while also investing in disease research. His $300,000 gift to his alma mater James Madison University last year provided money to the athletic department for a new basketball arena and athletic scholarships, but also for an endowed scholarship in the university’s studio art program.

“A lot of it does focus on kids, but I wouldn’t say that there’s one specific focus because he really wants to be involved in so many different things,” said Jaime Greenwald, the Steelers’ community relations manager. “He’s done stuff with kids, with sick kids, with military, in the schools. There’s a wide variety.”

That much involvement makes for a tight schedule, to be sure, and it invites the question about whether so many causes can force Moats to spread himself and his influence too thin.

But the 28-year-old linebacker has never seen it that way.

“I look at it like, yes, you could put all your time in one organization,” Moats said. “But I just personally feel like, there’s so much more you can do. You know? If I’m spending a little bit here, a little bit there and a little bit there, I feel like I’m still going to collectively have that impact because I’m planting seeds. That’s my thing. I’m saying, yeah, you can just watch this one seed grow and make sure it’s the best seed ever, but I’m like, ‘Hey man, I want to have thousands of seeds out there.’ Because every person you come across, you have a chance to positively impact them and ultimately change their life for the better.”

Moats’ outlook comes from both his nature and his upbringing. He is what happens when you combine a rambunctious child who always smiled, never could sit still and never seemed to need sleep with a devout family that considered community outreach to be the path to godliness, then give the product of that rearing the platform of the nation’s most popular sport. He never wants his hands to be idle, and he believes every free moment is an opportunity to help someone somewhere, regardless of that person’s particular affliction or circumstance.

“What can I do to maximize all 24?” Moats said. “That’s what I try to do every day.”

That approach formed in Moats’ first decade on Earth in the church his parents formed.

FAMILY MATTERS

Rosalind and Arthur Moats Jr. didn’t become pastors in their own church by necessity, Rosalind said, but by calling.

Arthur became a high school math teacher after his career in the Marines. Rosalind had been a legal secretary and then ran a day care center out of their home in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Neither they nor their three children were wanting for anything.

“We lived in a five-bedroom home,” Rosalind said. “… I owned and operated a day-care business and all of our clientele were lawyers and doctors and people in our community. We were comfortable sitting in a nice church with padded pews and everything in place.”

But Rosalind said she and her ex-husband believed that God was asking them to do more for the less fortunate in the area, and there were plenty of people in the Tidewater area who were much worse off. So they left their church in 1995 and started Selah Christian Fellowship Center in Chesapeake, Va. They initially ministered to children in the area, working out of a classroom in a Boys and Girls Club in town, but eventually grew to a 200-person congregation and held church in the organization’s gymnasium.

“It was a calling,” she said. “A spiritual calling. That’s the only answer. There was such a tug in our spirit from the Lord to go back and serve and serve those who he always referred to in the Bible as ‘the least of these.’”

Arthur and Rosalind naturally involved their children, taking them door-to-door on Saturdays in to pass out bread loaves to the poor in Chesapeake and involving them in the church’s other charitable works.

They initially weren’t sure how their middle son Arthur III would react to involvement in charity, simply because at the time they weren’t sure how he would react to anything. He was 7 years old at the time, and as Rosalind put it, “a behavioral challenge.” He was a good student, and generally kind, but an impossibly hyperactive handful.

He took to it better than they could have possibly expected.

“He was the one that was most excited about going door-to-door and handing out the bread,” Rosalind said. “…If you would have asked us 20-plus years ago which child this would have permeated in to this degree, I would have never said him, hands down. But it was him.”

It was an uplifting experience for him, and it felt natural and it coincided with what he was learning through his parents about Christianity. It was something that a family should naturally do.

“It was something that you get used to that just became part of the routine and that’s even more so why that got instilled in me at an early age,” Moats said. “…We never actually addressed it or identified it as charity. It was just, you’re helping others out. You’re doing something good. … It’s no different than praying before dinner, or you wash your hands before you eat. Same type of concept. It was just second nature. That’s kind of how we did it.”

Moats stayed in his parents’ church throughout its existence. He continued to help in their charity work until they transferred the church to others in 2004, not long after they had decided to divorce. Beginning his own philanthropic work required him to first develop a platform, which required the somewhat undersized Moats to devote himself to the dream of professional football.

PARENTAL GUIDANCE

Moats carries his father’s and mother’s traits in equal measure.

The genuine smile and the laugh come from his dad. So does Moats’ profound ability to make everyone around him feel comfortable, even strangers he’s never previously spoken to.

“Arthur is the epitome of his father’s personality,” said Rosalind, who remains close friends with Arthur Jr. 14 years after they divorced over what she called “irreconcilable differences.” “… His father is the warmest, most outgoing person you could ever meet. Everyone feels like they’ve know him forever.”

Rosalind is a little more guarded, but his desire to make every moment of every day count comes from her. She is now a pastor at a traditional Baptist church and runs outreach programs from the church to prisons, housing projects and various other charities. She earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree later in life after working as a legal secretary and running a daycare center.

Moats approached sports the same way she approached everything else. He wanted to keep himself busy in part because he simply couldn’t sit still, but also to do everything he could to make himself the best football player possible.

Moats ended up playing five sports as a junior and senior high school — football, basketball, wrestling, soccer and track, playing goalie on the soccer team, running sprints and throwing discus for the track team. While he was doing all of that, he found a way to pull a B average and maintain a job as a cook and cashier at a Wendy’s, working the closing shifts from 8 p.m. until 1 a.m.

“It was kind of my way to avoiding trouble,” Moats said. “I felt like if I stayed busy with sports, with work and school work, I didn’t have enough time to get in trouble, because I saw a lot of my peers would get in trouble living into some of the rougher neighborhoods. I just tried to stay as busy as I could and I understood that, hey, if I’m successful in football, what else can I do to improve myself? I did basketball to work on my cardio, did wrestling to work on understanding of leverage, footwork, things like that, track to work on my speed and soccer to work on my footwork also. … And working at Wendy’s was just so I could have some money.”

The coaches at Churchland High School in Portsmouth, Va., were happy to find a way to let him do it all. He was the best athlete in the entire school according to then-football coach Carl Winckler, now the offensive line coach at Oscar Smith High School in Chesapeake, and coaches would make accommodations because it made every team better just having him around.

He took advantages of the opportunities and became not only an all-state defensive end, but a district champion in both wrestling and the shot put on the track team.

“He always had a smile on his face, and he acted like he loved life no matter what he was doing,” Winckler said. “… Our football team wasn’t the greatest of talented teams. By far, he was the most talented person on our team. He led through that example. Every time there was a negative situation, his personality, his leadership, the way he approached things, the way he saw things in life in a positive matter helped everyone else get through some of the hard things and the summer practices and some of the difficult challenges during the season that he was involved with. He was able to use that demeanor, use that personality, use those leadership skills. He was very instrumental in keeping us together as a team every year he played.”

When James Madison’s coaches came to recruit him, they saw all of the qualities that Winckler saw, the ones that came from both his mother and his father. In one day when they visited him at Churchland, they saw him pin his opponent in a wrestling match, then immediately go to an away basketball game where he was the team’s leading rebounder, then head straight from the game to Wendy’s where he worked his shift. It wasn’t until the coaches got to Wendy’s that they had a chance to meet with Arthur and Rosalind.

“This is the best kid I ever met in my life,” said Curt Newsome, then JMU’s assistant head coach and offensive line coach, now the head coach at Division III Emory and Henry. “Even in high school, he was a special guy. You walked down the hallway with him, everybody wanted to shake his hand.”

Not every Football Bowl Subdivision program wanted to recruit him in 2006, and that was mostly because of his size.

Moats was listed at 6-foot-1, 213-pounds as a recruit, but he was explosive and relentless and that made him exactly the sort of player Football Championship Subdivision programs like JMU hope slip through the cracks.

“He was all twitched up,” Newsome said. “… He had a lot of twitch. A lot of pop. He had a heavy shoulder when he hit people.”

Said then-JMU defensive line coach J.C. Price: “He was a no-brainer I-AA kid. You take him every day in I-AA.”

East Carolina offered and Wake Forest nearly did before pulling back, but Moats picked JMU in part because of loyalty. The Dukes had been one of the first teams to recruit him, and it didn’t bother him that they didn’t play at the highest level.

Moats did the same thing for James Madison that he did for Churchland. At JMU, he wasn’t considered one of the team’s best players until his junior year, but he was one of its most beloved personalities throughout his career. He took his work serious but found unconventional ways of lightening the mood.

“At the end of practice, you always call the guys up and talk to them real quick and have them break it down on something like ‘Hard work, or ‘D-line on three,’” Price said. “Anytime I let him break it down, he’d look at me and say ‘Rainbows and butterflies on three,’ and crack everybody up. That’s him. …  Everyone just flocked to him because of his personality. He was the ring-leader and one of our most popular guys because he was always the same person every day. He’s the epitome of never having a bad day, and who wouldn’t want to be around a guy like that?”

Moats broke out as a junior in 2008 with 11.5 sacks for a team that reached the FCS semifinals, earning third team All-CAA honors. The next year, he was even more dominant, recording a team-high 90 tackles, including 23.5 for loss and 11 sacks to earn the Buck Buchanan Award as the top defensive player in the FCS.

That performance got him drafted by the Bills in the sixth round of the 2010 draft, which led to him getting the platform, the financial stability and the free time to make the charitable contributions he’d always wanted to make.

TIME TO GROW

Moats contributed what he could in terms of community service in high school and college, but the demands of playing his sport, going to class and working part-time jobs didn’t leave much time.

But in high school, he joined service clubs, and at JMU, he was part of Big Brothers and Big Sisters, taking on a 10-year-old from the Harrisonburg, Va., area as a little.

In Buffalo, he had to work hard to keep a spot on the roster, but he didn’t have to take classes or work a job in his off-time, so he embraced the opportunity to get into more extensive philanthropic work.

Moats said defensive backs Bryan Scott and George Wilson took him under their wing to get him involved in Buffalo area charities and with events and causes they were involved in. They were both Walter Payton Man of the Year Award nominees themselves, and they had extensive connections in the city already.

Wilson’s central cause was mentoring high school kids. Scott, a musician, had a passion for the arts. Moats had a passion for both, having always believed in the importance of mentoring for teenagers and young adults and having learned how to play piano and drums as a child. Moats helped with Wilson’s causes, and he would sometimes play music with Scott at some of his events. Scott involved him in philanthropy for theater and classical music in Buffalo.

“Just seeing those guys, going to different charity events with them and just picking and choosing what I personally have an interest in, that’s how I was able to get my niche,” Moats said.

In the offseason after his rookie year in Buffalo, while finishing his political science degree at James Madison, he added another influence to his philanthropic endeavors. In that time, he met and married his wife, Shonda, who was herself the daughter of church pastors, the granddaughter of a Korean War veteran, and active with the YMCA. His father’s career with the Marines gave him some connection to veterans’ affairs, but her experiences increased his awareness. Shonda became directly involved in Moats’ charity work, and they involved their three children, making sure it wasn’t something Arthur had to leave the family to do, but something they did together.

Scott and Wilson stayed in Buffalo through the 2012 season before Scott retired and Wilson moved on to the Titans. The year after they left, Moats became the Bills’ Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee.

“Ultimately, the relationships I built during that time, I was able to have more of an impact,” Moats said.

Moats was determined to be just as impactful when he came to the Steelers as a free agent in 2014. He developed some charitable traditions that he brought with him, including an annual event in which he takes underprivileged teenagers from the Boys and Girls Club on a shopping spree just before Christmas, but he also tried to branch out in ways he hadn’t before.

In Buffalo, he focused a lot of his time on events with United Way and the Red Cross. In the past two years in Pittsburgh, according to Greenwald, he has been a part of events with the Ronald McDonald House, the Veterans’ Affairs Hospital of Pittsburgh, Magee Women’s Hospital, the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the Salvation Army among other charities. He was also the co-captain of the Rock Steelers Style Fashion Show along with David DeCastro, a fundraiser run by the Steelers that benefits the UPMC Sports Medicine concussion program and the Cancer Caring Center.

“There’s just certain special people that come through the door,” Steelers director of communications Burt Lauten said. “It might be once every four or five years someone will take it this serious. It doesn’t happen every year, and that’s not a knock on our other players. A lot of the other guys have something that, there’s something that happened to them personally and they want to be involved with that. … Arthur is the type of guy that, he came in here with the mentality of being a part of the Pittsburgh community. That doesn’t happen very often. That’s not a knock on anyone else, that’s just him being willing to go out of his way. Special people like this don’t come around every year.”

Like Wilson and Scott did for him, Moats tries to get others involved in his charities, especially younger plays to whom he can pass the torch when he moves on, whether through retirement or free agency. His three-year, $7.5 million contract is up after next season.

“There’s been a couple of times where he’s been doing things and guys have shown up and I didn’t even know they were coming,” Greenwald said. “Because he rounded them up and brought them along. The guys look up to him and understand and see what he’s been doing. I think it’s really helpful for the younger guys.”

Said DeCastro: “It fits his personality pretty well. He’s one of the most outgoing guys that cares. It’s one of those things that you can tell it means a lot to him. It’s pretty awesome to see the effect he has on people.”

Moats doesn’t plan to change direction when he leaves football. He’s a paper away from finishing an master’s degree in community economic development through Empire State College’s online program, but he wants to maintain a public platform through media, possibly as a broadcaster, which seems like an easy fit.

And he doesn’t want his philanthropic efforts to be any more focused, intending to continue to cast his net wide.

“I don’t like to feel bored,” Moats said. “No offense to any charity, but sometimes I feel like if all you do is work with one charity and one venue for so long, you can become complacent a little bit. I love the aspect of having fresh ideas, getting new experiences, and continuing to spread seeds. The more people you meet, the more impact you can have.”

That approach keeps Moats focused not only on organizations, but on even the smallest of individual interactions.

Moats has been gone from James Madison since 2009 and J.C. Price isn’t there anymore either, but Price still considers Moats family and so do Price’s children. Price’s daughter was having a bad day recently and saw something inspirational Moats had put on his Twitter account. She asked her father if she could text Moats. They exchanged texts for about an hour, and by the end of it, Price’s daughter was feeling much better.

“That’s the way he leads his life,” Price said. “Everything you see with him is just genuine. Some people fake it until they make it. This guy is absolutely the most genuine person I’ve ever been around.”

And he uses every waking hour to show that to as many people as he possibly can.

No dummies on this practice squad

A story on the contributions of the Steelers’ practice squad to their AFC North title team. 

Johnny Maxey came to Pittsburgh in the spring as a mound of muscle. 

He was 6 feet 2, 285 pounds, and just about all of it purposeful. He had giant biceps and hulking shoulders and nowhere near the waistline that players his size seem to have.

But no team was willing to draft Maxey’s archetypal 3-4 defensive end build because they weren’t sure what it could actually do in NFL games. He had spent his career at Division II Mars Hill University, and what little video there was of him showed that, at that level, he didn’t have to bother with the finer points because he was that much stronger and faster than the linemen he was facing.

Bell crafts his story the same way he runs

A feature story on Le’Veon Bell. 

Le’Veon Bell initially resists the pull of the word.

It seems too pretentious, too self-important for a 24-year-old in his fourth year in the NFL, and he knows it. He tries to dig his heels in as he stumbles toward it, throwing out air-filling pseudo-words and phrases to give his mind time to search his vocabulary for anything else that might work better.

Video: ScoopTalk

After each Indiana football and basketball game and on other occasions where there is breaking news, we shoot a video from a laptop webcam. Some of the better ones follow.