With the eye of Hurricane Katrina staring menacingly at New Orleans, the last thing on a fleeing mother’s mind was the football cleats her young son had left in the family automobile.
When 10-year-old Kyle Carter laced up those cleats in Colorado this past week, his whole world had changed. But, for the first time, a kid on the run felt at home.
“Look,” young Carter told his mother. “The colors of the uniforms are purple and yellow for this team. Just like my old team.”
The Aurora Spartans have acquired a new defensive end, a transfer from Louisiana.
Sometimes, the most important sports stories do not make the headlines.
Could any recent NFL transaction have any more positive impact on a single life than this simple move by a youth team in Colorado?
“The life my son and I had in New Orleans? It’s all underwater,” 36-year-old Darlene Carter said. “We’re not going back to New Orleans. That life is gone.”
Her city in ruins, the family townhouse awash in toxic sewage, the keepsake photographs of holiday smiles destroyed and a son’s track medals floating away, there’s no reason to return to New Orleans.
Darlene and Kyle Carter piled in the car and departed the Gulf Coast a scant few hours before Katrina crashed ashore on Aug. 29.
A single mother and her son found safe haven at an Arkansas campground, not bothering to pack prized toys or so much as a cosmetics bag, because they figured to return home in a matter of days, as soon as the rain stopped blowing sideways.
Instead, the lives of the Carters were turned upside down. Imagine the shock and horror of watching television, and right there on the screen, seeing the street you call home transformed into a putrid river of death.
“A complete return to New Orleans is probably not an option for me,” Darlene Carter said. Nightmares of a bed adrift in an angry, roiling sea are too vivid to ignore. “I think anytime there was a storm churning in the gulf, I would freak.”
There are 1,400 miles of highway, tears and goodbyes between Katrina and the Carters.
Colorado is home now.
What brought a mother and child here?
“Divine intervention,” Carter said.
Sports are what build community. An athletic field is where we go to play, to swap high-fives and endure setbacks.
Together.
What the Colorado sports community, from the peewees to the pros, has already done for the Carters will make you want to stand up and cheer.
Through the pain of uncertainty, there are many reasons for this new Colorado family to feel blessed.
Basketball stars, including Le-
Bron James and Kobe Bryant, will gather in Houston tonight to play a charity game to raise more than $1 million for hurricane victims. “Those people look like us,” said former NBA guard Kenny Smith, organizer of the event.
“Those people dress like us. They are us.”
Peggy Vandeweghe, wife of the Nuggets’ general manager and a Louisiana native, took that charitable idea one big step up.
After a meeting in Denver to discuss ways to assist hurricane evacuees arriving in town, Vandeweghe offered Carter a job.
Uprooted from his friends and with no place to share his innermost feelings other than a journal given him to write his thoughts, Kyle Carter needed someplace to release the pent-up emotion.
Enter the Aurora Spartans, which found a roster spot for Carter.
Not long after strapping on a helmet, a kid has proof that a smile can be as close as the next touchdown run.
There are untold thousands of stories from Katrina praying for a happy ending.
But, with every fresh beginning, there is reason for hope.
Kyle Carter has a mom to hug. There’s a noisy new football huddle to welcome him. And those cleats? They remind a 10-year-old boy where he came from.
Every little victory counts.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
