Charlie Davies: Leading a Life of Integrity is Leading a Life of Love for Others.

At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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If you can get close enough to Charlie Davies and look him in the face, you will see eyes that sparkle with the deep and profound brightness of love and gratitude. You will see a smile that has a slight mischievous quality to it. A smile that crinkles the sides of his soulful eyes. If you are fortunate enough to receive a hug from Charlie, you will not soon forget it. Charlie’s hugs are not a noncommittal experience. He pulls you close. So close that if you are paying just the right amount of attention, you might feel his heartbeat against yours.

If you also get close enough to Charlie, you will see a cranial scar that goes from one ear to the other ear, forming an almost crescent moon at the top of his skull. The telltale vestige of a horrific car accident that almost cost him his career as a professional soccer player. That almost cost him his life. As he says with a quiet intensity, “I put on my seatbelt, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

It is appropriate that Season 1 of “At the Podium” ends with Charlie. His story embodies much of what this first season has striven to highlight: that greatness, creativity, and authentic self-expression begin when you say “yes” to the unexpected turn of events that life constantly serves to us all. His life is a story of overcoming immense setbacks and unforeseen detours on his rise to the top of the professional soccer world. Like growing up without many financial resources. Like managing the complexities of having a father who fought his own demons, while all the while guiding his son to athletic greatness. Like surviving a car wreck that should have ended his career; that should have ended his life. At each juncture, Charlie had to reimagine and reinvent who he was as person in order to survive and to compete as an elite athlete in the Olympics and play as part of a World Cup Team.
As Charlie lay in the hospital with months of painful rehabilitation ahead just to hopefully walk again, the priest who had seen the wreckage of the crashed vehicle would come to him and say, “There’s a reason and a purpose for you being here. There’s a big plan for you because you’re still here.”
In his own beautiful way, Charlie says to us the same thing. Each new day is a gift. Each sunrise is second chance to live. Each interaction we have is an opportunity to put a smile on someone’s face. Beyond his immense philanthropic efforts as the Director of The ‘Quin Impact Fund, and his expertise as a CBS Broadcast Analyst, Charlie’s legacy is that of creating hope from no hope, of creating a brilliant tomorrow, from an uncertain today.
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