Choosing Between Death and Football

 This week's Outside the Lines on ESPN presented a sad, yet inspiring story of one man's battle against the culture that his young charges are forced to grow up in.

"Walker is battling a mentality that glorifies death. He's battling a culture that has produced one of the saddest visions possible: Young men being laid to rest in their grandparents' burial plots. He sees poor families spending $500 on airbrushed "RIP" T-shirts for dead teenagers, little kids running around a funeral like it's Disneyland. The bedroom walls of little brothers have shrines to murdered older brothers instead of posters of their favorite players.
"I see people standing over the coffin of a 17-year-old saying, 'Oh, he looks so good,'" Walker says. "I want to say, 'Oh, no he doesn't, not if you saw the back of his head the way I saw it.' They're ignoring reality."

Read the entire story here.