Just a story about somebody doing something nice.

February 11, 2022 10:24 AM

Her dad died. So her favorite NFL star took her to the father-daughter dance. Philadelphia Eagles player Anthony Harris flew across the country to escort his 11-year-old fan to the event. (Washington Post link, archive link here.)
posted by JanetLand (8 comments total)

I know there's a lot wrong with the state of football as a game, but I've known so many pro players who are good guys and this is just a nice thing for him to do.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:16 AM on February 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

What a lovely story!
Their dancing seems to be kicking up a lot of dust in here....
posted by chavenet at 11:20 AM on February 11, 2022

This is a great story. A college friend of mine became pen pals with an NFL owner (!!!) when he was in the armed forces; he was a lifelong fan of the team and wrote him on deployment to express his appreciation of the team and the joy it brought him. The owner wrote back and they started to correspond about football (at first) and then just regular old life (as they got to know each other). When my friend was back from deployment and the team was in town near his base the two met up and had lunch together. The owner has a...not great reputation, but knowing that story made me a fan of their team.

(But as super cool as Anthony Harris seems, I can't bring myself to cheer for the Eagles.)
posted by AgentRocket at 11:34 AM on February 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

This makes me reconsider my instinctive contempt for both football and father-daughter dances. Thanks!,
posted by eotvos at 12:22 PM on February 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

@AgentRocket - That story and your inability to ever root for the Eagles has me concerned that you are telling us Dan Snyder has a redeeming quality.
posted by COD at 6:21 AM on February 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Harris hopes his presence at the dance demonstrated to Audrey and others that “you can one day potentially be a support system to someone else,” he said. “You don’t have to know somebody to help them.”

Oh, I love this.
posted by Recliner of Rage at 8:30 AM on February 12, 2022

As a devoted father of an 11-year-old daughter, I have always felt there's something weird about the archetypically *romantic* ritual of a formal dance being applied to the father-daughter relationship. Something feels creepy about it to me and I won't participate in it. This is probably an unpopular point of view. But I can express my fatherly love in plenty of other ways that don't historically have such loaded connotations of romance in our culture.
posted by TreeHugger at 2:35 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

That story and your inability to ever root for the Eagles has me concerned that you are telling us Dan Snyder has a redeeming quality.

Oh, definitely not. We can all rest assured that Snyder is all-around terrible.
posted by AgentRocket at 2:47 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]