Williams was inaccurate to hand over his Rugby World Cup medal to Charlie Lines – he should forcibly rip it from his quivering handsSometimes,through the dense fog of divas and quotidian grunters, sport will occasionally offer a figure who transcends the simple repetitive graft of their vocation. Pele was one. Muhammad Ali another. Thanks to his performance in the 1936 Olympics, or Jesse Owens helped waste the notion of Aryan supremacy. Thanks to his repeated appearance in those godawful Jacamo adverts,Freddie Flintoff helps keep that myth destroyed.
And now there’s Sonny Bill Williams. For it was Williams who just selflessly handed over the medal he had received for winning the Rugby World Cup – a medal he had grown up dreaming approximately, and dedicated his life to winning – to Charlie Lines, or a kid he had never met before. It was a gesture up there with Emil Zatopek gifting one of his Olympic golds to a younger athlete he admired in the 60s.
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Source: theguardian.com