Ten Men

Why He is a Good Man:

TOM MATLACK
TOM MATLACK was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal
September of 1996, the wunderkind behind the $2 billion sale of The
Providence Journal. Two days later he got kicked out of the house for
being a drunk and a liar, leaving behind two baby children. He’s spent
the last 13 years sober learning how to be a good dad and husband.
Excerpt from The Book:
“The first night I had the kids on my own I gave the them baths, slipped
them into matching footie pajamas, tucked Kerry into her bunk, and
then warmed a bottle for Seamus. In my bedroom, I turned off the lights
and rocked him gently while he drank. I inhaled deeply. It was the scent
of my son that changed everything—his scent and the sound of him
suckling his bottle, the softness of his skin and the sensation of holding
him as his body gradually went limp with sleep. I looked down and
realized that this—being a father—was my deepest satisfaction. Chasing
Kerry around the house at five the next morning, catching her, and
tickling her as she screamed with joy confirmed it.”

CHARLIE LEDUFF
CHARLIE LEDUFF won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting
while working for the New York Times. Not long afterwards he quit to
stay at home and take care of his young daughter.
“The governor won’t call anymore. Neither will the old colleagues. There
will be no more Hollywood parties. No expense account. No action. It
will be just you and the kid. And the kid will have no idea how good you
were. And worse, in the mania of your empty house and isolated by the
Los Angeles car culture, when the afternoon sun is bright and
debilitating and that old deadline time, that hour of adrenaline, is upon
you, right about then you will wonder whether you were really any
good at all. You will find yourself staring into a dirty diaper as though it
were tea leaves, trying to augur some story about the failings of the
latest immigration bill.”


ROLF GATES
ROLF GATES was an orphan adopted into a white family. He became
a Marine before his sister Wendy, his idol, committed suicide. Gates
kneeled at her casket and mouthed the words, “I will not die this way.”
He has since become a nationally famous yogi, husband and father.
“My older sister was born in Korea in 1959. She came to the U.S. at six
months extremely ill with tuberculosis and complications from that
illness. My parents loved her immediately and nursed her back to life.
She was the finest thing my parents have ever known. My older brother
came some time later also from Korea and I was adopted in 1966. My
first memory is of the night I was adopted. We were in a hotel room and
I became tremendously ill from the chocolate I was given by the nuns
who had cared for me. I woke up several times in the middle of the night
to throw up more powerfully than I ever have since. After one of these
episodes as I lay down in my bed I became aware of a sleeping form next
to me. It was Wendy.”

MICHAEL KAMBER
MICHAEL KAMBER gave up a chance at a normal life to dedicate
himself to “shooting the truth” about war. He has been nominated three
times for the Pulitzer Prize, twice photography and once writing, and
has covered more wars than any working photographer. See clip here:
http://bit.ly/Kamber
“I’ve covered a dozen wars since then. I manage it better now, but that feeling
of absolute, heart-‐pounding terror never goes away. In Iraq, near An
Nāsirīyah or Mosul, we would drive down a dirt road where, a day or two
before, a Humvee had blown up; we would see bodies being carried out in
small pieces. You knew the insurgents had been out at night setting new
IEDs—improvised explosive devices—and so you’d sweat and clench and
swear you’ll never do this again. If you can just make it through this time, you
promise, you’ll never come back. Then you turn around and do it again the
next day or the next week, and you can’t explain why.
Some men think its bravery. John Burns, the Baghdad bureau chief for the
New York Times, once told me that much of what is termed bravery is simply
men being too obstinate, or too dumb, to understand their own mortality. I
don’t know what it is for me, but I sometimes feel as if I’m standing on a beach
and there are waves smothering me—waves of advertisements for shit I don’t
need, of profiles of people who’ve never done anything except be famous, of
politicians mouthing platitudes, of hundreds of TV channels showing nothing.
And sometimes I can take one picture that lets me grab onto something real in
this world.”

JULIO MEDINA,
JULIO MEDINA once the leader of a formidable drug gang, turned his
life around in Sing Sing. When he got out he founded Exodus
Transitional Community. He has since helped 5,000 men leaving
maximum-‐security prison become productive members of society. He
was honored at the State of the Union.
“When somebody’s going to be stabbed in Sing Sing, you move out of the way. You
don’t want to get any blood on you because if you do, you have two options: talk and
then get killed by another inmate, or be put in the box for not talking.
One day, after I started going to the seminary, I was walking toward the chapel
when up ahead of me a guy got stabbed really badly. Everybody just kept walking.
“It ain’t none of your business,” someone said. Guys were jumping over the body and
the pool of blood. When I got to the man he was bleeding out onto the floor and, I
swear to God, I could not walk over that blood. It was like something was pushing
me to look at this man, look at what was happening here. Guys were like, “Yo! Yo!”
But I could not move. All I could do is say, “This has to stop.”
The guys looked at me like I was crazy; at one time I was involved in half the
stabbings at the prison. They started swearing at me, saying, “What the hell are you
talking about?” I said it again: “We have to stop killing one another.”
Everything changed for me at that moment. Finances didn’t matter anymore. It
didn’t matter if I traveled around the country, or if I could do whatever. It didn’t
matter. It was like, how do I not help people? How do I not stop and look at the
humanity in each person, man? How do I recognize that these are all God’s children,
man? And how do we become part of that human family so that we don’t kill each
other? I got the guy up off the ground and got his blood spattered all over me.”

Houghtons have run Corning Inc. since it’s founding. JAMES
HOUGHTON was groomed for the job by his dad, the 5th generation
CEO. Bucking the weight of family and expectation, James decided not to
take the job. For the first time a non-‐Houghton is running Corning.
“I had many long, heartfelt talks with Dad and would confide my doubts
about my ability and my passion and my long-‐term future at Corning.
Dad would listen sympathetically, acknowledging that he too had
doubts at my age, that his nickname in college had been Atlas because
he seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. But he
would also tell me he had no doubts about my ability, that he was
hearing nothing but great things about my performance and people
skills, and that all these current jobs, while perhaps less than
stimulating, were the important stepping stones for the years ahead. I
always felt better after we talked. His calming assurances would settle
me down for a month or two. But as this pattern repeated itself, I began
to wonder if my ambivalence and reservations were a result of
something more than just our shared tendency to worry. Maybe, I
sometimes dared to think, we were just different people. Maybe this was
not about my ability but about my desire.”

A Ranger and member of the 82nd Airborne, JOHN OLIVER
J OHN OLIVER led the
charge in Desert Storm. He survived the war but lost the toddler
daughter he conceived the night he returned from battle. She died in his
arms on the way to Fort Bragg’s hospital. He had to learn how to feel the
pain.
“If people ever wonder why there is always a baby boom after a large-‐scale
deployment of military forces, it seems fairly obvious to me. It’s not the
product of pent-‐up sexual energy, although that undoubtedly helps. The real
cause is basic human nature. When we confront our mortality, we’re driven
to reproduce. It’s primal. It’s instinctive. And it’s the most powerful force in
the universe.”
“There’s a special room in every hospital where people wait for doctors to
come and tell them the shocking news that someone they love has just died.
It’s a really awful place. It’s a place where you enter as one person, with naïve
hope, filled with prayers and fears. And it’s a place where you exit as
someone else, filled with nothing, no hopes, no fears and no prayers…only a
numb feeling, a sickening awareness that you’re alive, wondering what to do
with yourself because someone you’ve never met before just told you the
focus of your life is gone.”


AMIN AHMAD
AMIN AHMAD was born in India and came to Boston, with his wife, to
be an architect. When his marriage fell apart the only person Amin
confided in the African American handy man he worked with. He is now
a father, husband and novelist. See his story here: http://bit.ly/GMAmin
“I always let Peter go through the door first. You never know who’s on the
other side. It could be a man with a gun. Peter bangs on the door and shouts,
‘Anybody home? We got to inspect your apartment! It’s just me, the janitor,
and an architect!’ Silence follows.
Peter, a short and wiry man with close-‐cropped gray hair, unlocks the door
and pokes his head into the room. ‘Nobody home,’ he says, with a grin. ‘All
safe. We can go in.’
I start breathing again. It was Peter who told me how he once had entered a
dark apartment and found a revolver aimed at his head. He has plenty of
stories; he’s been a janitor in these Boston projects for twenty-‐two years.
The temperature inside the apartment is stifling. Peter turns on the lights and
we watch the roaches scuttle for cover. I take out my clipboard and we start
the inspection: Sagging floors indicate structural failure; green stains on the
walls are mold; buckled tiles hide water leaks. “

KENT GEORGE
GEORGE grew up in South Boston the son of a single mom who
suffered from borderline personality disorder. His mother and his
sister beat him. Despite these difficulties he has gone on to be an actor,
father and husband. See his story here: http://bit.ly/GMkent.
“I have never been in a physical fight in my entire life. Truly. Though I’m
not some sort of wimp; I have been in heated arguments, even shouting
matches. But amazingly, I’ve never been in an actual physical fight.
I say amazingly because where I come from it wasn’t easy to avoid
getting into fights. I grew up in a very Irish Catholic family in a very Irish
Catholic suburb of Boston, and let’s just say that sometimes stereotypes
exist because they’re true. My people love to drink and fight. (I prefer to
just drink.) To make matters worse, I grew up playing ice hockey, and
hockey players like to fight..
But it wasn't my teammates who gave me the hardest time; it was my
mother. See, my mother was a fighter. She loved to fight, and she loved
and respected people who fought. She was like a hardened IRA terrorist
who’d been dropped into a witness protection program in American
suburbia. She’d drive around the town where I grew up giving people
the finger and then, if she got any reaction at all, jamming the brakes
and looking in the rear-‐view mirror at them: ‘Wanna go?’ Oh yeah, and
she’d get out of the car, too.”

ANDRE TIPPETT
ANDRE TIPPETT grew up in Newark with no father and no money.
He took up Martial Arts to protect himself and his family. It became the
central discipline in his life, leading him to a philosophy and physical
training that ultimately led him to the NFL Hall of Fame.
“I was always big for my age, so guys were trying me all the time—
warranted, unwarranted, just all the time. Mom got after me to stop
running in the house every time I got chased home from school. One
time she met me at the top of our steps when she saw me running away
from a fight. She said, “Andre, you turn around. You’re going to fight
them. You’re not going to keep getting chased home.” I dove off the top
of the steps onto those guys. That was the end of me getting chased
home.”
“A core idea of martial arts is something called “beginner’s mind.” I’ve
been doing karate for over thirty years now, but I’m still a beginner. You
should never think your ranking is so high that there’s nothing more for
you to learn. If you do get to that point, you should leave. You should
stop training. You should find something else to do with your life. No
matter how high your ranking, you always want to keep a beginner’s
mind. If you do that, there’s nothing that you can’t achieve in martial
arts and through your training.”

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