You may know Joe Burrow as the 25-year-old quarterback leading his team, the Cincinnati Bengals, to their first Super Bowl in over 30 years. You may know him as the soft-spoken, polite athlete who plays chess and who cried during his Heisman Trophy acceptance speech (which later launched a half a million dollars in donations).
But before that, he was a high school kid in my town taking college classes, like my friend's English course, where he wrote a paper about his dream to be a football player at The Ohio State University (he accomplished that dream, but when he didn't play, he transferred to LSU). Before that, he was in middle school with a girl I babysat. He grew up in the county where my son was born and where I lived for much of my life: rural Athens County in southeast, Appalachian Ohio.
