I am 26 and since my childhood I have been playing all kinds of sports. In the beginning I was very interested in soccer, but then I recognized that just girls wanted to play with me. Till today I can not understand why soccer doesn’t have as good a reputation here in the USA as it does in Europe, where soccer players have the same status as Football players here. And you can not believe how great the atmosphere is in soccer stadiums over there. I lived in Germany for a couple years so I know what I am talking about and I don’t exaggerate when I affirm that the experience in German soccer stadium is comparable to a football game in New England. But to defeat our sport understanding I can say that Europeans have no clue about Baseball and Football, the kinds of sports I started after finishing my short but successful ( maybe the reason therefore is just the fact that I nearly just played versus girls) soccer career.

After taking the step to a more masculine world, I was confronted with a huge competition because every guy from 10 to 18 has just one dream: Become a famous and rich baseball or football player. I am realist and so I never had the objective to be a star but at least I wanted to play on the team. And I achieved my little goal after my first training session and the coaches recognized that I was very talented in comparison with the other guys in my age. Both in baseball and in football my skills improved very fast and I was on my way to getting traded to another better team, which was playing for the regional championships. At seventeen I decided to move away from my hometown to play in the suburbs of L.A, where a pretty good football team was interested in my strengths as running back on the one side and as option to throw the ball on the other side. My idol is Tomlinson from San Diego, who is able to throw and catch the ball, so I tried to get both skills too. And after dozens of endless training sessions, I was not far from being perfect in both.

So you can see that I was on my way to a good college and I think if everything continued like this, I would have had a very good chance of achieving this goal. But the using of the if-clause probably shows you that something prevents this…

It was on a Friday when I came home after two weeks at a training center where our team was preparing for the start of the season. I was very exhausted and weak because our coach made us practice and train really hard. But before I was able to relax and just lie in bed and rejuvenate, I had to bring a bit of stuff from my truck to my room like a TV, a small table and couch. My parents were not home and so I had to do it all on my own. But this was a very bad and fateful mistake! Because I didn’t have a ramp for the truck bed, I decided to jump with the TV down from the truck bed and a few seconds later I was lying on the ground with broken knees and ribs. I don’t want to tell you all the details of story because it is still very hard for me to talk about it, but in order to sum it up I had to quit my sports career immediately. The years after this were not easy and it took a long time to continue my normal life. But as I mentioned I am a realist and after some time I remembered that there are so many other and probably better ways to earn money than playing football. Now I am a doctor and try to help people with injuries like mine. But this article has another objective. It has the function to prevent similar accidents and one very easy way is not to overestimate yourself, but use devices that can help you – like a simple truck ramp!