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Legendary Without Permission: The Audacity of Shedeur Sanders
I love sports.
Always have.
I grew up an athlete. Even made it far enough to carve out a brief collegiate track and field career. That’s why I made myself a promise: I would never write about them.
Not for lack of passion.
Not that there wasn’t poetry in the players, or the sweet science behind the games wasn’t worth acknowledging.
But in a world where everything I touched had to be weighed, analyzed, and justified, I needed somewhere I could just watch miracles happen — without being asked to explain it.
That sanctuary ended the night Shedeur Sanders was humiliated on national television. Not because he stumbled. Because he stood.
I watched the 2025 NFL Draft and felt something I hadn’t felt before: The politics of sports, I already knew — but the awe, the audacity almost, at how shamelessly the mask was torn away.
The National Football League and its owners didn’t just demean him. They created a spectacle out of it — a deliberate, public crash landing engineered to remind every Black father and son who still owns the sky.
Shedeur didn’t fall.
They pushed him.
