I. J. Weinstock played football in high school and describes how it influenced his life:

 

It was on a football field that I learned an important life lesson. During the summer of my sophomore year in high school, I came down with mono. In the fall, I tried out and made the varsity football team.

 

At the time, I didn’t know it would be months before I fully recovered. Though I attended school, I wasn’t feeling well enough to play. After a couple of weeks I had to quit the team.

 

Quitting was unacceptable to the coaches. The next summer, fully recovered, I trained every day in a park in preparation for football tryouts. I vowed I’d be in the starting lineup on opening day. I’ll never forget the day a coach saw me and asked what I was doing. “Getting ready for football season,” I told him. His response—“You’re wasting your time.”

 

I showed up for tryouts, but was shunned. Though a senior, I was given freshman uniforms and ostracized in every possible way. No matter how hard I worked, I was ignored and, at most, assigned to carry equipment for the team.

 

After several weeks of being invisible on the field (not being picked for teams or drills) and being abused like Richard Gere in the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman,” my quest seemed an exercise in futility. I was ready to quit. Again.

 

Dejected, I was sitting alone in the locker room after practice when one of the coaches came over and whispered, “Keep it up.” I did and began to be picked for drills. I was on fire! On opening day I started on the first string varsity football team as a wide receiver and defensive cornerback.

 

To cap off my high school comeback fairy tale, on a crisp Saturday afternoon in October, I won the Homecoming Day game with a 63-yard touchdown.

 

When the town newspaper ran a front-page story with my picture, I began to think I could do anything I set my heart on.