Rookie of the Ear 1/
Tamika Catchings enjoys her role as the newest American sports superstar and role model for hearing impaired children around the world. Her hearing aids didn't just help her be the best that she can be. They helped her become the best woman basketball-player in the world.
Tamika Catchings is America's new basketball superstar. A scoring and rebounding machine, equally adept at slashing her way to the basket, shooting three pointers, playing tough defense and raising her game to new levels whenever the chips are down. The Women's National Basketball Association's answer to Kobe Bryant and his airness, Michael Jordan.
In her first professional season, Tamika carried her young WNBA team, the Indianapolis Fever, into the first playoffs in the team's history. She was voted an all-star and Rookie of the Year and regarded by many as the WNBA's most valuable player, as well. And the only rookie (first-year player) selected for the U.S. team in the 2002 World championship tournament in China.
Basketball is in Tamika's blood. Her father is Harvey Catchings, a former NBA star.
She was also born with a hearing impairment. And she readily acknowledges that she owes much of her extraordinary success as a player, as a person and as one of the most admired role models in the sports world to her hearing aids.
She has always needed them. But for years, growing up in Chicago, she did without them. One day, when she was ten years old, and the thought of another day of teasing from the other kids became unbearable, she threw her hearing aids away on her way to school. She was taller than the other kids and jumped higher than any of the boys, but they would get back at her by taunting her for wearing hearing aids and for her difficulty in speaking clearly because of her hearing disorder.
"I knew that I needed them," she says of her hearing aids, "but I just wasn't going to take the teasing one more day. So instead, I found ways to manage without them. I would read a chapter ahead before I went to class because I knew I wasn't going to be able to hear certain things. I sat in the front row and learned to read people's lips."
Tamika disguised her hearing impairment so well, that most of her classmates in her final high school years in a new school in Texas didn't even know that she was hearing impaired when she graduated with honours.
Later, she became one of the greatest basketball players ever in the American college system. But not without her hearing aids. |
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